When the Travel High Wears Off

I learned the hard way that you can't run from your problems

The moon over the Jordanian desert.

Hello, I’m Sam, and I’m a recovering travel addict.

I was fourteen the first time I got well and truly high—in the backseat of a car with my parents, of all places, driving south through the verdant countryside of Bavaria toward Tyrol. The June sun and the smooth motion of the car on the autobahn had lulled me to sleep somewhere outside Frankfurt, and when I woke, it was as though I had tumbled into the pages of a story book. Medieval villages rolled past my window, cluster after cluster of timbered buildings in shades of pastel, steepled churches casting long shadows in the evening light. I rubbed my tired, bloodshot eyes—perhaps I was tripping, or was it a mirage? When I opened them again, blinking, it was all still there. “Wow,” I breathed, barely above a whisper. “It’s sooooooooo beautiful.”

How trite that sounds now. But the old world was new to me then, and I had longed to see it since I was a toddler. When I was barely three feet tall, I started living my life in character as Madeline—the little Parisian redhead from the children’s book of the same name—and greeting friends and neighbors with an exaggeratedly accented “bonjour!” At twelve I tried to convince my parents to send me to boarding school in Switzerland; I don’t recall what my argument was, or if I even had one. What I do recall is my dad saying that would happen over his dead body and getting so angry with him that I refused to hug him when he asked to end the fight. (No one ever accused me of being reasonable where travel was concerned.)

When I finally got to Europe two years later, I was giddy as I sat in the naves of Italian churches, breathing in dank, earthy air under painted icons of the Virgin Mary. I watched, transfixed, as puffs of early morning haze curled up from the stagnant canals of Venice. I inhaled a bowl of the freshest green pesto at a clifftop bistro in Cinque Terre and believed nothing had ever tasted so good. I was meant for this—for a place with gravitas, with rich history to get lost in and elegant people to emulate, where I could move from park to piazza with my own two feet instead of begging for rides to and from the mall. This was how I was meant to live. I had never felt so much goodness, so much lightness in my soul.

Then again—was it really lightness I was feeling, or was it a missing heaviness, the sudden absence of the mysterious sadness that had dogged me my whole life? (It would be many years before I’d come to understand that the presence of happiness and the lack of sadness are not the same thing.) Whatever it was, it was clear that travel was my drug of choice, and I wanted to ride that high for as long as I could, as many times as I could.

But every high comes at a price. What goes up must eventually come down.

Like a junkie in withdrawal, I was listless when my family and I returned home to California, to the land of fences and garage doors and drywall. I had heard the sound of old church bells and seen the colors of the paint strokes in the Sistine Chapel, and now I knew exactly what I was missing. A queasy feeling rolls through me when I think of that summer, the kind you get in a warm car with the ignition off, heat waves rippling like water across the leather seats and melting the backs of your thighs. That summer was infinite, every day the same. There was neither past nor future, only this one moment stretching out for eternity, and I’d be stuck in the hot car until I suffocated.

I want to say this was an overwrought case of teenage angst. The reality is I’d felt the Queasiness—which existed somewhere between grief, wistfulness, and existential dread—for as long as I could remember, and as a result, I’d always been desperate to leave California. There, I said it. Those words would have been fingernails on a chalkboard to my dad, a fourth generation Californian himself. But he’s not here to read them anymore, and it is long past time I told the truth.

I could never quite pinpoint the cause of the Queasiness, but I knew it made me odd, especially because nothing all that bad had ever happened to me. All the explanations I could think of sounded unworthy and silly, even to me. Maybe you’re sad because your uncle died? Could it be because the weather is the same every day? Maybe you made it all up in some perverse bid to seem more interesting?

I eventually decided it must be some combination of all of the above—that it was simply everything. I had lived in California all my life and I had been sad all my life, ergo living in California must be the problem. And boy, if our trip hadn’t proved me right. I became convinced that if I could just be somewhere, anywhere else, the Queasiness would go away and life would be wonderful.

I would be wonderful.

The solution to was clear, its execution less so; I wasn’t old enough to up and leave home. At seventeen, after a night of sobbing until I dry heaved—don’t ask me why, your guess is as good as mine—I worked up the courage to crawl onto my mother’s bed and tell her about the Queasiness. I promptly found myself in the office of shrink.

I’ve long since forgotten the shrink’s name. You’d think it would be seared in my brain like a cattle brand, given she was the one who validated all my darkest thoughts and deepest hurts by telling me I had something called childhood depression. (Is it strange that hearing those words meant everything to me, and yet still to this day I struggle to believe her?) I do remember the shrink’s golden retriever, Emma, who was silky as a seal and would gently steal snot-soaked tissues from my hand, carrying them away like shot ducks. During one session, as Emma rested her head on my knee, the shrink asked me to close my eyes.

“I want you to picture a favorite place, somewhere you’ve felt happy and safe,” she said.

My lashes wet my eyelids as I squeezed them shut. Bits of an image started falling together: sunshine on a river. Sidewalk cafés with red scalloped awnings and ornate metal balustrades bordering the streets. Five-story buildings whose dormer windows peered out from the rooftops like eyes. A sense of calm.

“Where are you thinking of?” The shrink asked.

Paris, I told her. I had chased the high there two summers before, and maybe, just maybe I could conjure it again.

“That’s good,” she said. “Next time you feel sad or anxious, close your eyes and go to Paris.”

I promised to try. She offered me real drugs, too; I said no to those, because plane tickets had my name on them just the same as prescription bottles and frankly, it seemed a little romantic to be depressed. Instead I went away to college (the red-brick townhomes of Georgetown felt European enough) and took a semester in France. The old world soon got old, and I spent an icy winter in Lyon wrapped in blankets in my room, gorging on strawberry sour belts and chocolate chews while watching T.V. on my laptop as everything around me drained of color.

What use was escaping to France in my mind if I was already there? My old tricks were becoming worthless. I was beginning to recognize that the problem wasn’t the setting, it was me. And if the problem was me, there was no way to run.

Of course, it was easier to look for another hit than to admit that simple truth. But like any long-time user, I now needed more to get the same high. So I tried upping the ante—I wove through the souks of Marrakech, climbed Machu Picchu, went on safari in South Africa. I eventually landed in the part of the story you all know: Egypt, where I discovered that life as an expat was nearly always as ordinary and unsatisfying as life at home, only with more frustrations.

I had been on the lam for so many years, and I’d finally run out of ground. I have now been depressed on three continents, and I can tell you that the old axiom is true: everywhere you go, there you are. If you close your eyes and go to Paris, you will still be stuck in your own head.

So, friends—where does that leave me? In more or less the same place I always was. I still don’t take antidepressants, though my high school therapist wasn’t the last person to suggest I should. Perhaps one day I’ll ditch my clichéd notions of the tortured writer, put on my big girl pants, and try them.

For now, I’ve made peace with my extreme highs and lows. I don’t go to Paris in my head anymore. I go to real places—not to run from life, but to experience it in its most concentrated distillate. I do this as an act of self-love, of self-acceptance. I no longer care that a change in scenery will not make me someone else, and I think that is the best I can hope for. And most interestingly of all, I pine for my home in California, Indian summers and hot cars and fences and all. I suppose we always want what we don’t have.

Maybe it was always just that simple.

In case you missed it…

In the past few weeks, I did a very fun interview with

Tom Fish

of Not That You Asked, and paid subscribers received a lyric essay about how living abroad messes with my perception of time.

Reader, I’m curious…

Are you also a recovering travel addict? Is there anything that’s helped you radically accept the way you are, even the inconvenient and painful bits?