Between 2016 and 2019 I think I might have lied many times in official documents about my address.
The actual place where I spent most of my waking hours was not one of the many tiny apartments I rented around West London/Hertfordshire/Maidenhead.
In fact, it was a glorious place of gloom and misery called Luton airport.
During that time, my life was torn between the career aspirations that I could really only realise in the UK, and my heart, which was still in Poland. My ex-partner lived for most of that time in Poznan, Poland and my family in Lower Silesia.
All of that since then has been absolutely obliterated and there is at least one good thing about it.
I don’t have to travel so much anymore. I don’t have to fly 4 times a month and find every possible excuse to have a half-life in two places, not a full one in either of them.
It is a big relief and also quite a lot of responsibility to take over my life, which is never comfortable.
I want to state here that travelling so much for several years didn’t make me a better person in any way. I wasn’t only travelling to Poland all the time, I would also travel for business and questionable pleasure. And the only thing I achieved this way was constant busyness and thrill, and if you have a personality with a high tendency to seek novelty in life, that can be very addictive.
Also, economically, I come from a very modest background and I didn’t travel almost at all until my early twenties, so I could easily explain this to myself as compensation for all those years I couldn’t afford it.
The only thing I learned thanks to this experience is that running away from your life, if you have certain resources and freedom, can be too easy.
Since 2020, the only time I travelled internationally for fun was to Portugal in May 2021, and even then, I was working from a hotel. Also, I have to admit that I was actually trying to run away from something then that I had to face in my personal life in the UK.
I am sure that each of you reading this could give me an example of a time when a certain trip was life-changing for them. But was it really about the place or the people you had a chance to be with at the time? Or about the fact that your life was becoming stagnant, and it was the easiest to change something just by changing the surroundings?
Your environment absolutely has a lot of power over your well-being and it was even shown that changing it can help overcome an addiction.
But if you go to a place and come back to the old you, has anything really been transformed? Has your mindset shifted in any way? Do you feel like you’re yearning for another trip, just to escape your mundane life?
I used to run away to Poland to feel loved, but the truth is that I should carry love with me wherever I choose to be.
I am sure, that if you travel intentionally, to experience different cultures and feed your soul with precious memories, it might enrich you.
But please, do not think that your friend who goes to South Asia every 5 months is in any way a more interesting person than you are. They have just seen more elephants than you, who probably didn’t enjoy seeing them so much in return.
