I would like to share why I’ve chosen to create this blog and why I took the solo trip to Europe that inspired it.
From 2013 through 2015, I had some of the hardest struggles that I’ve experienced in my life thus far. We all have silent (or not so silent) difficulties and sometimes our friends and family know and sometimes they don’t. Mine came from a terrible breakup, which was complicated and messy and affected me deeply.
I am not a stranger to depression. I experienced it in my late-teens to early-twenties, but this was far different. I reached a depth of darkness that I had only felt a glimpse of in previous experiences with depression. In spring 2014, I had been through a lot and felt life couldn’t get much harder for me so I wanted to give myself a challenge. I asked myself what I’m afraid of. Open water swimming was the answer! So I worked toward doing a sprint triathlon that September and did it!
I had been feeling better for many months but for some reason in the spring of 2015 I started getting waves of deep depression again and had no idea why. The things that gave me those feelings the previous year felt different now, so why were they affecting me this way? Did my brain create new pathways while I was in the depths of my depression that could be making me feel terrible even though I was in a good place again?
By early summer 2015, I was exhausted from constantly “putting myself out there” for work and dating. I was sad that I was thirty-three and childless and didn’t have the family I had wanted for so many years, frustrated with dating, and just burnt out emotionally. I have always lived cautiously and I wanted to take a chance. I didn’t exactly have the money to take a four-week trip to Europe, but I did have a $1,000 voucher from Delta that I could use and the rest would hopefully figure itself out. I was sick of waiting for a partner to do things with; it was time to stop putting my life on hold and find a way to embrace my childfree reality, which was so difficult to accept. So what does one do when they want to stop being so cautious, start living (even if it means travelling alone), and embrace being childfree instead of deeply saddened by it? You plan a trip to Europe! I considered this challenge my “sprint triathlon” of 2015.
I had a rough idea of where I’d like to go and a week after deciding this is what I’d do, I was in Boston, visiting for my mom’s seventy-fifth birthday party. I talked a lot with my mom and stepdad about where I should go. I decided on this route: Edinburgh (two and a half days); Dublin (two days); Galway, Ireland (two and a half days); Oslo, Norway (three days); Bergen, Norway (two days); Kiel, Germany (one and a half days); Amsterdam (two and a half days); Antwerp, Belgium (one night); Vienna, Austria (two days); Salzburg, Austria (one and a half days); and, finally, Budapest, Hungary (one day). While looking up something about Edinburgh, I discovered that the Fringe Festival was taking place when I would visit, which was very exciting.
Talking with friends before the trip, I joked that I should blog the photos I would take because the apps Snapchat and Instagram would not do this adventure justice. Then the idea simmered in my brain and I wondered, maybe, if I were to blog, how honest would I be with the reasons why I went on this trip? Maybe there is a place for a blog about this: overcoming an extremely difficult personal life situation and what comes out of that. I think we need more of this in our world. I also think that in the age of Facebook and social media, we need more vulnerability and honesty. That is what I hope to share and portray here: my truth.
After completing the trip, I realized the blog idea needed to shift. It’s not only about strength, life, what’s meaningful to someone, and overcoming difficulty, but also about travel and what that can do for oneself and the experiences that traveling brings. For me, I felt a little different once I got into the second week of the trip but I couldn’t tell any big difference, nor did I expect to feel different. I was doing the trip to get a break from the reality that I felt was weighing me down. What I found was that returning to Seattle was a version of myself that was more open, happier, joyful, confident, and resilient. None of these feelings have gone away; they are in me, I earned them, and I will always feel so grateful for that trip giving me the opportunity to find these qualities within myself again.
I hope you get something out of reading the posts on here—that’s the goal.