What do I mean?
Back in 2005 when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, a good friend of mine from my study abroad days in Scotland sent me some DVDs (remember those?) of “Long Way Round” – a 2004 show about Ewan McGregor and his good friend Charley Boorman riding their motorcycles around the world from London to New York “the long way round” through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Russia, and over to the US.
My friend knew I loved travel dearly and since they rode through Central Asia where I was at that time, he thought it would be fun for me to watch those DVDs.
He was right; not only did I love that show hugely, but I loved the next one they filmed a few years later in 2007. “Long Way Down”– where they again rode their motorcycles but this time from the top of Scotland down to South Africa.
The ardent traveler in me was always so nourished and inspired by watching those documented adventures!
BUT… it was also around 2007 that my own unresolved relational trauma history finally “caught up with me”. The next decade or so was spent doing really important adventuring on the interior plane versus out in the external world.
I forgot about those DVDs. I couldn’t even let myself contemplate adventures like that. Things felt so painful inside of me, so barely held together.
Efforting towards feeling enlivened is a critical part of trauma recovery.
When I resurfaced briefly from my years of intensive trauma recovery and personal growth both through therapy and my years at Esalen, followed immediately by my super-busy-and-without-any-disposable-income-years of graduate school and clinical licensure, I made time for a few wonderful trips with my husband abroad (including eloping in New Zealand and babymooning across the Balkans) before my daughter was born with severe colic (which made traveling beyond a 5-minute radius of my house nearly impossible for the first year of her life) and just when that cleared up, COVID struck and grounded my little family until Summer 2022 when vaccines for the 5 and under crowd rolled out.
All of us had our version of hard during the pandemic. And, like so many others, the COVID years took a toll on me in many, depleting, trying ways. One of those “smaller” ways was divorcing me from an activity that helped me in trauma recovery and filled me with so much vitality and excitement: traveling.
But I didn’t know just how much of a toll that one aspect of the experience had taken on me.
