Backpacking Diaries: How I feel after 2.5 months of travel

I look back at photos of me from a few months ago and there’s something in me that I don’t recognise anymore. I’m not sure if it’s an uncertainty that’s now certain, a smallness that’s now big or a mindset that’s now changed, but I can say it is definitely a confinement that’s now free.

I’ve always been the one who resists the rules – who, at the very mention of a rule, feels like it must be broken. Teachers commented that I was ready to leave high-school before my time (I did finish a year early) so that I could go out into the world and not be told by adults what to do anymore.

And then 10 years later (literally and accidentally almost to the day that I graduated high-school), I packed up and left everything for 6 months for a bit of a hiatus from “real life”. In  the process of this hiatus, I‘ve lost some things that I thought my life revolved around. But those things were my sacrificial offering to the Travel Gods in order to be granted this state of freedom that feels so naturally mine that I cannot imagine how I was even whole before it was mine.

I feel so detached from everything that was my entire world a few months ago – my stress, my home, my career and the contents of my apartment and my closet (and Medellin has so many monstera plants that I don’t even miss my house plants).

I’ve come to realise that these things were never PARTS of me because I am WHOLE without them.

These things - How good our career is, how much money we make, how hard we work, how well we live, the contents that make up our home, how wisely we spend and save, how many people know who we are and accept us – none of these things are part of our spiritual being. They are external to it. They hang off us, attached by either fishing wire or rope – depending on our attachment to them. They weigh us down, they keep our feet on the ground and they manifest a hazy, cluttered brain.

It feels like these things that were hanging off me – the expectations and routine, were weighing me down, digging roots into the ground. And now they’re gone. And now I am drifting, floating, my feet always levitating a little off the ground. I’ve got no roots to hold me anywhere. And I’m being guided by nothing. Not my brain, not my heart, not my travel plan document, not time nor money nor opportunity.

I’m wandering, rootless, and there is absolutely no pilot. And this feels biologically so aligned with what I’ve sought to embody since my high-school days. And now it’s mine; this wandering, rootless expedition, and maybe someday I will have to give it up, but I am hoping that I can lock this feeling in a mental capsule and embody this feeling forever.