Long-term travel insights applied back in ‘normal life’- blog series

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So I’m having a lot of time writing these days which, I cannot say is a bad thing.

I finally get the chance to do something that’s been on my mind for a while.

Finishing my 14-month trip through South-America, I had struggled to understand who I was, now that I finished my journey.

In the first two months of this year, I saw myself as a failure and deception. I saw myself, who had spent over a decade realizing the lifestyle of her dreams – living abroad permanently and then suddenly found herself in her home country with no idea where to go. I had planned to move elsewhere in Europe, but I suddenly felt uninspired to do so. I didn’t feel inspired to live the life I had lived. I did not recognize the person I impersonated in Germany. I could not believe that the self-knowledge I had aquired through so much personal work during those 14 months seemed to have stayed behind in South-America. Everyday life seemed to have caught up with me and Germany seemed to bring back the me I had tried leaving behind over a decade ago. I started to think that the way I felt about life and myself while traveling was only because I was set in the backpacking scene, among free-spirited people and little responsiblity. I wondered, whether I would be able to incorporate anything that I had learned into my new and somewhat ‘normal life’ or whether I should dump all of those new beliefs as they felt as if they belonged into a different lifestyle.

It took me a while to overcome my frustration and confusion. Eventually, I decided that I should not ignore these experiences and find out how to reconcile them with my life now.

So, I decided to look at each of my ‘long and reflective’ Facebook posts (that I had published at the time on my private profile) and analyze how I think about those thoughts now and whether I can, will or do apply them to my current life. In a way I want to prove to myself and others that though the backpacker lifestyle might have something of an ‘escape from the real world’, there are ways to reconcile the two.

I’m not sure totally sure what I’m going to find out along this journey, but I hope you will enjoy going on it with me!

Part one will be my reflection on not wearing make-up anymore. I stopped with it about 1.5 weeks into my trip. I had started in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and then moved on to volunteer on a farm.

You can read it here – Accepting myself without make-up