Ten Years a Nomad

by Matthew Kepnes

  Everyone leaves the party and there’s nothing more to look forward to. No more adventures. No more new friends. New food. New flights. You’re home now. This entire existence and way of life just ceases in a flick of the fingers.

  Your friends don’t want to hear about that time you were sailing the Pacific while they were sitting in traffic. They don’t want to hear another story set in a place they’ve never been to and featuring people they’ll never meet. They can’t understand why you are so uncomfortable being back.

  “How was your trip?” they ask.

  And as you explain your life their eyes glaze over, and you begin to wish you were back at the hostel bar—any hostel bar—talking with a circle of other travelers, people who have dedicated their lives to adventure, people who share your same restlessness and wanderlust.

  Going back to the same old routine I had fought so hard to leave felt like dying. I had made a life for myself in Bangkok. I had learned Thai. I had camped in the Outback, explored cities in Europe, and spent a month barefoot on an island in Thailand. I had changed. I had become more confident, more outgoing, more adventurous. I had outgrown my old life—and now I found myself suddenly back in it again. Home was supposed to be the happiest place in the world. And yet, here I was, feeling like I’d left home for nothing, feeling as if I didn’t fit but was still condemned to spend the rest of my life here. And, what made it worse, was that no one around me understood why I felt sad or depressed. I was without support.

  One night, I was out with my friends and grappling with thoughts like these. Across the bar, I saw a guy wearing a red shirt with a golden star in the front. It’s the Vietnam flag shirt, and nearly every backpacker in Southeast Asia has it. It’s up there with the Laos beer singlet or the “same same but different” shirt. It’s worn as a badge of honor. A symbol that you’re a member of the travel tribe.

  Here was a traveler. Someone I could speak to. Someone to take back to those days on the road, even if just for a moment. I decided to strike up a conversation and walked over to him.

  “Hey man! Nice shirt. Did you get that backpacking in Southeast Asia?”

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “I got that same shirt in Vietnam, too. I just came back from my trip a few weeks ago.”

  “Where did you go?” he said ecstatically.

  “Everywhere! I was there for nearly a year.”

  Like two soldiers who find each other amid a sea of “civilians” who will never understand what we’ve been through, we swapped war stories from the road, trying to see where our trips overlapped, what bars we remembered, and which places we each knew the other didn’t. We were playing that immortal game of “I’m a better traveler because.…” We traded stories about “hidden gems” the other one missed, and off-the-beaten-path highlights. But though games like these might look competitive, they’re really friendly, full of the mutual recognition of kindred spirits who share the same priorities in life. When I explained my feelings about being back home, he understood just what I was going through—he’d been through the same thing when he returned.

  After about ten minutes of conversation, I wished him well and went back to my friends, happy to have met someone who shared my experience and understood how I was feeling.

  “Who was that guy?” my friends asked.

  I explained the meaning of the shirt and about travel in Southeast Asia. Their confused reaction—why was I talking to a stranger about a shirt?—cemented the sadness I was feeling inside about not being understood.

  Do you remember the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? There’s a line from that movie that has always stuck with me: “It’s a funny thing about coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You’ll realize what’s changed is you.”

  The road had changed me more deeply than I originally thought.

  I had this fire in me now, and even if I had burned out on travel, the fire was still smoldering enough in me to make home uncomfortable. Travel had made me better. My time meeting people and living overseas had given me the confidence to talk to strangers in bars even back home—something the old Matt would never have done.

  Being back home made me realize that I hadn’t gotten travel out of my system—no, in fact, I wanted even more. I wanted to keep going, just differently than before.

  I had broken out of the American Dream bubble and seen that there was a big world out there filled with possibility and adventure. Like an addict, I wanted it all the time and I couldn’t understand why no one else did. I couldn’t understand why no one wanted to go beyond the same bars and restaurants each week. Why no one wanted to go on a road trip or take an adventure.

  I was right back where I’d started but now I was a different person, one who could tolerate middle-class America even less. I had plenty of time to think those thoughts in front of my computer at the temp job I had gotten with the help of a cousin. (It didn’t help that it was another cubicle job in the health care field—literally back where I had started.) I bashed my head against the keyboard. I refused to let my life fall back to where it was before.

  “Why the fuck did I come home? Why was I so rash?”

  I could have kicked myself. I should have kept going. I should have just stopped in Australia for a bit. I hadn’t even bothered to try to repair my relationship with travel. I just ran away from it, and now I was regretting that decision.

  I didn’t take this year-long trip around the world just to end up right back where I started. I took it to become a new, more confident person with interesting stories to share with people.

  Now that I had become that person, how was I right back where I started? Life had remained frozen in time waiting for me, and I didn’t want any part of it. The new me couldn’t fit into my old life. There was nothing wrong with Boston, my friends, work, or this life. But it was no longer what I wanted.

  My website and the online community I found through it became my outlet. It allowed me to pretend that I was just on a break from traveling to get my bearings. I was just on a break that would soon end, and then, shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, I booked a one-way flight to Europe, called up my boss in Bangkok to see if I could teach again, and prepared to leave in August.

  It was time to get back to where I belonged.

  * * *

  HERE’S THE THING ABOUT travel burnout. It happens over and over again. You will always hit a wall.

  Burnout isn’t a problem you can solve, but a condition you must learn to deal with, because the conditions that caused you to burn out in the first place never go away.

  In fact, the longer you travel, the more often this will happen. Anyone who travels long term will get burned out at some point. But what happens if your trip doesn’t have a start and stop date? As I became a permanent nomad, traveling was just what I did. The world was my office. It became my routine.

  And sometimes it sucked.

  Because while you keep getting older, to borrow a phrase from Matthew McConaughey, new travelers stay the same age. Actually, that’s not true, they get younger. They have the same wide eyes and ask the same questions you’ve been asked a thousand times before. They want to party. They want to make new friends with everyone. Individual backpackers may come and go, but as a group they never change.

  They don’t change the way you’re changing. You began to change how you travel: seeking fewer but deeper relationships; trying to drink less; wanting to avoid the same conversation you’ve had a thousand times over. You’re just tired of restarting all the time.

  As one year rolled into two, two became five, five became seven, I grew out of dorm rooms, pub crawls, and knocking off a to-do list of the top attractions in a city. I got tired of living out of a suitcase. I wanted to go deeper and began to see fewer destinations and spend more time in the ones I did. I began to seek out friends I made on my earlier trips more than I tried to make new ones.

  I grew to understand th
at burnouts were a natural part of travel. I didn’t need to fight them. I didn’t need to make the rash decision to run home, only to regret it and then go away again.

  No, I learned that like everything in life, there will be ups and downs. One doesn’t need to travel all the time to live a life of adventure. The purpose of travel was also the purpose of flexibility: to create a life of your own desire.

  When you feel burned out from travel, you don’t have to run away, you just need to stop, relax, and stay still. Because desire is not an unlimited wellspring, but a battery that needs to be recharged. Constant travel drains that battery. So if it happens to you—and it will—listen to your heart. Stop and relax. Take stock and take care of yourself. Because if you don’t, if you make my mistake, you’ll end up sitting at a desk wondering if you’ll ever get back out there again, and that is the worst feeling in the world for a nomad.

  10

  Going Back Out

  No man ever steps in the same river twice.

  —HERACLITUS

  YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD those words from Heraclitus before, even if you didn’t know who said them. They’re true for two reasons: the river is always changing, and you’re always changing. To imagine that you can freeze the world around you at any given moment is as foolish as imagining you can stop the flow of a river. And to imagine that you can stop yourself from changing is a recipe for unhappiness. True happiness, and true wisdom, lies in embracing change as a fact—the fact—of life.

  I’d tried to internalize this wisdom. In fact, it’s part of the nomad’s code, in a sense—always on the move, meeting new friends in new places, never content to settle down. You can’t be a nomad for as long as I was without some willingness to embrace change as a basic expectation of your life. I thought I’d learned at least that lesson by the time I came back home.

  And yet, the change I observed in myself still almost shocked me. Boston, as I’ve mentioned, hadn’t seemed to change that much on the outside. My friends and family hadn’t changed in any remarkable way. But I felt, in these familiar surroundings, like an entirely new person.

  It almost felt like that scene in the movie Cast Away, when Tom Hanks has finally escaped off the desert island and is at a reception in his honor. The abundance of food, the luxurious setting … all of it feels foreign to him. There’s a similar scene in The Hurt Locker. Jeremy Renner’s character has come home from a tour of duty in Iraq and we see him at a big box store, looking up bewildered at the fluorescent lights and the towering stacks of stuff.

  He has only one response. He reenlists. He misses the adrenaline. He’d rather risk death than deal with the mundanity of life.

  That’s what it was like being home. It was bigger than just the stuff that surrounded me. When I first left, I had a vague sense that there was more to life than what I had experienced in Boston. Now I knew for certain. I had tasted it. Every time I felt overwhelmed, I’d think to myself “you know life is better than this … so why are you still here?”

  To make matters worse, the people close to me couldn’t understand the person I’d become. They still thought I’d just gone through a phase, a bit of rebellion, an extended vacation before settling down into the Matt I was supposed to be. They couldn’t see that I was a new person.

  And, when I started talking about leaving again, the reactions seemed to be the same.

  I’d returned in one piece, but no one ever said to me, “Well, I guess you were right. The world isn’t so dangerous, after all.” Instead, they thought I dodged a bullet or got lucky.

  My old coworkers still thought I was nuts. My friends were still indifferent, and my parents were still determined to convince me to stay home. Whenever I came down to breakfast in the morning, I’d find that my father had left job postings circled in red ink on the table. Everyone in my life was pushing me to stay put and go back to the way things always were, and always would be as far as they were concerned.

  But the voice in my head—the one that said, You know life can be better than this—was still there. It told me, in a voice I knew was unmistakably the truth, that stopping my travels had been a mistake, and that the way to live a full life was to get back out there. No one could stop me. The more people told me “No,” in fact, the more that voice screamed Yes!

  Fortunately, I also learned a lot about what it takes to stick to a plan for your life in the face of skeptics, to pursue a dream even as the people around you incessantly question it—to constantly tell yourself Yes when the whole world is insisting on “No.”

  But, more importantly, having been through this once before, I knew what to do.

  First, I found it helpful to transform all the negativity into positive energy—motivation to get out there and to prove them wrong. I’d tell myself: “I know they’re wrong. I won’t let them get me down. I’ll only let them inspire me to do better.” I’ve learned to enjoy proving people wrong. When someone tells me I can’t do something, it pushes me to show them I can. That doesn’t mean fixating on all of the “haters” in your life, making your travel plans to spite them. That’s an ugly way to live, and it also means that you’ll be going on someone else’s trip—not your own. There’s a difference between taking pleasure in spiting someone, and taking pleasure in exceeding expectations about yourself. The former is fixated on negativity, the latter is all about well-earned pride.

  Second, I became proactive in finding encouragement. Just as before my first major trip, I devoured books, guides, and, now, blogs about destinations I’d daydream of visiting. I connected with fellow travelers and turned them into my support network. I asked a lot of questions. I did my homework. By reaching out to people who understood my wanderlust—even if it was just people I “knew” online, who had traveled and come back fine—I was able to overcome the negativity from those around me.

  Like many people in a niche community, like many people who feel like outsiders or oddballs at home, the online community was a lifesaver. I didn’t have to grow up in the same city, or even the same country, as people in the travel community to feel a deep connection with them. For all that we didn’t share, the thing we did share—the passion for the open road—was the most important thing of all. Reaching out to them helped me feel less alone. They knew how I felt.

  Third, I took refuge again in planning. I made a list of everything I needed to do for my next trip and I broke it down, step by step. By focusing on each small milestone, I could tune out the noise and stay focused on my goal. Getting to each next step on my personal plan was all that mattered to me. I’d learned a bit about planning since my earlier days as a nomad. I realized that plans themselves can and should change at a moment’s notice—but more than ever, I knew that the planning process, a time when all the fantasies of your perfect trip come to life before your eyes, is something to be savored, not something to procrastinate or rush past.

  No one I knew back home in Boston understood the pull of constant travel. No one understood why staying still made me so bored, why it made everything feel so stale.

  To most people, I had “done” my trip. Now it was time to stop being a weirdo and get with the system. It was time to start being smart and following the rules.

  I don’t blame them for that. They didn’t have a frame of reference for that. To me, they were still stuck in The Matrix and, while that worked for them, it no longer worked for me.

  They were genuinely worried because they couldn’t fathom why the very clear risks—to career, stability, and my future—were worth more time on the road. They weren’t aching to travel the way I was. All their reasons why I shouldn’t go were all my reasons I should.

  On the road, I felt as if I was living my life—my real life, the life I was meant to lead.

  Many people travel the world to get the bug out of their system, or to check things off a list to say they’ve been there and done that. But the thing I have discovered about myself and other nomads like me: the more we travel, the more we want to keep traveling.
You don’t get the bug out of your system. Traveling only makes it grow. It’s a disease with no cure.

  Back home, I realized that there was still more to see of the world and more life to live. Being at home felt like I was dying—like a cage I’d claw my way out of if I could.

  I’ll admit that I’m the kind of person who, when faced with a tough situation, tends to retreat to his comfort zone. That was true in my awkward, nerdy youth, and it’s still true now that I’ve become a nomad. What’s changed—because everything changes—is my comfort zone. Now, travel itself is my comfort, the place I yearn to be when life is hard.

  And, as I planned to go, I heard the same words from people over and over again: I was running away. I heard it from my parents: I was running away from my home and my roots.

  I heard it from my coworkers: I wasn’t settling down and getting a conventional job, I was trying to run away from my problems.

  It came from all quarters: When would I “settle down”? When would I “join the real world”? When would I “get serious”?

  Commenters on my blog even joined in. One told me to stop running away and to get with the real world. If you ever spend time as a serious traveler, I guarantee that you’ll hear some variation of this, too. I’m not sure why, but it seems to be conventional wisdom that anyone who travels long term, and isn’t interested in settling down or getting a conventional job, must be running away from something. They are just trying to “escape life.” Travel is fine, within limits—a short vacation, even a gap year before college or a backpacking and Eurail stint after. But talk seriously about a nomadic lifestyle, or linger just a bit too long, and you’ll be sure to hear it: what are you running away from? Travel, the message goes, but not for too long and not too seriously.