Anxiety and Travel? Try Anxiety Travel

I am a master at a thing, I like to call anxiety travel. By nature, I am an introvert. I have Aspergers and after a lifetime of being made to feel other, and wrong for simply existing, severe social anxiety.

My greatest angst is knowing that I don’t know what to do in a given social environment. I analyze the length of my conversations and look for clues as to how to where I messed up, I scour the faces of people I interact with for a cue that tells me to backtrack or make a quick exit so I can mentally disect why it is I commited one imagined grave injustice or another.

I have ways of faking the funk. Existing in social situations with people where it’s hard to tell I miss the beat of social encounters. For the most part, I just associate with people who are such extroverts that they assume I too am a socially confident extrovert, by association. I share this to say that traveling farther than my hometown is my access to being truly who I am.

Anxiety and travel fill my brain and my entire stream of conciousness until the final boarding call. When my feet land on the soil of someplace new, in an instant my anxiety and travel morph into this glorious hybrid of Anxiety Travel. I’m not expected to know the customs of a new place, or be privy to the social nuances of a culture I don’t belong to. This isn’t a free for all, I do do research on a new place and its customs and languages, but I can finally breath easy. There’s a twisted sweet solace in not fitting in a place where you’re not expected to fit in. For however long I’m gone travel and anxiety balance each other out and I’m free to bask in the sublime light of being exactly what THIS exciting different society expects of me.

Some days my other 485684 reasons to be anxious surface and I employ these things to master Anxiety Travel.

SLEEP EARLY | Constant social interactions drain me. I sleep at 7:30 /8:00 most time I’m traveling and prefer to wake up around 5 am to get my day started. There are fewer tourists to interact with this time of day and far more natives. This leads to more beautiful experiences with locals who expect me to be weird since I’m a fish out of water.

PATRONIZE OLD PEOPLE |When I travel I tend to shy away from people my own age and find the ones wizened with time. If there’s one thing I’ve learned its that between the age of 19-29 we’re all the same no matter where you go. We’re cool for school and not above taking advantage of our fellow man, its a sport. Yet when you’ve lived long enough the secrets of the universe begin to unfold in a beautiful way, gray haired honeys have taken me under thier wing in many countries showing me the cutest off the beaten path spots.

TRAVEL WITH KIDS | People are not interested in me, they’re interested in the adorable tiny human who I’m chasing through the streets. I mean I definitely keep my ear to the ground for the going rate of cute children on the black market, but other than that new thing to be anxious about, traveling with my daughter has made me far less socially anxious abroad.

Don’t let the narrative of who you are at home stop you from going abroad. I’ve been a salsa queen in Acapulco, I’ve raced dirt bikes in Perth, I’ve hugged strangers in Monaco and sat in enclosed spaces with people went I just met for extended periods of time, filling the silence as I saw fit, on back roads in Ubud. All of these things are completely outside of my wheelhouse at home in NYC. So go, pack up your anxiety and travel the world with it.