Examining How I Travel

I've been lucky and privileged enough to be able to seize an opportunity of complete autonomy and freedom, and I've been traveling the world for the past 8 months. However the immediate question became: "what should I do?" In this post I'll discuss my new found outlook on life, and how I've learned to acknowledge and separate my internal and external motivations.

For most of my adult life, my internal and external motivations were very aligned. My career and my romantic relationships were the two major pillars of what I developed, received external validation for, and eventually became how I valued myself as core parts of my identity. However, as a single unemployed nomad, basing my self worth on my career and my relationship status led to me eventually becoming ungrounded, with symptoms of high sensitivity to perceived and real rejection from all sources, feeling lost and unmotivated, and increased masking to fit in with others. This wasn't pleasant. I didn't feel like my usual confident, friendly self, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was wrong or how to fix it.

One major step for my self improvement was seeking therapy and being diagnosed with ADHD. While I haven't changed my behavior since my diagnosis, it had been a massive emotional shield against my internalized guilt on my various ADHD faults, including messiness in space and mind, intense procrastination, chronic lack of motivation, etc. I finally had a nonjudgmental answer to the question "why can't I just do it?" and "why am I so bad at basic things?"

After watching many videos from How to ADHD (which I highly recommend to newly diagnosed ADHD people), I started to better understand the need to align my life to my internal motivations, or else I would rapidly lose interest and need to spend emotional energy to force myself to push through my life. I now know that the my sudden loss of motivation at Airbnb is almost entirely linked to my loss of engagement with my work, even though I was objectively at a good job and paid well. Some fellow travelers thought I was burned out, but I never thought that phrase fit with how I felt. Rather I just became bored instead of challenged; stagnant instead of learning, all of which led to disinterest and reliance on fear motivation.

I also started to apply this new ADHD motivation lens to all other aspects of my life. I briefly had a crisis of belief of the reasons why I was traveling, and I've recently resolved to ensure I continually am spending the mental effort on clearly traveling for internal motivations rather than external ones. Some specific changes I've made are not feeling pressured to make travel blog updates based on location, not seeking out fancy restaurants and cocktail bars for clout, not taking pictures of places I didn't feel connected to, among others. Rather, I'm choosing travel destinations based significantly more on passions, enjoying solo gaming when I don't feel like going outside, and just generally allowing me to be myself without masking and bowing to expectations.

Coincidentally since my efforts to reorient my life, I've been logging the various validations I've been receiving in all of my interests and passions. Rather than just listing them all here, I intend to continue my blog not cataloging the food and culture of locations I've been to, but instead telling stories of how my travels intersect with my interests, including scuba diving, surfing, board games, cocktails, music (both performed and festivals), Spanish, and hopefully more! I'm feeling significantly more aligned with this style of updates on my life, and now I get an avenue to shill and rant about what I'm passionate about. Look forward to my future posts!

Oh, and I try to put a picture in every update, so here's me with the rarest fish: