When we met up in Bali for the new year, it was like we had never been apart. Our days filled up with magical dinners, sailing trips, time on the beach, and nights in each other’s arms. On our last night, as we ate room service and listened to jazz in bathrobes at our hotel, we looked into each other’s eyes in bed.
“I love you, Charlotte.”
“I love you, too, Matt.”
For the first time in years, I had said those fateful words, meant every one of them, and someone said them back.
* * *
“DON’T COME HERE,” Charlotte said. “It’s super boring. You’d hate it. Go to South America and then we will meet up after.” Charlotte would tell me this repeatedly while I was back home, preparing to leave for South America but thinking of just going straight to Australia to see her instead.
“I want to see you but all I do is work and you’ll be bored.” She was right. She was still working in the same small town in Australia whose only attraction, as far as I was concerned, was her.
Plus, I’d always wanted to visit Argentina. It was a land of food, wine, and stunning lakes, glaciers, and mountains. It was the birthplace of Evita. A mix of European and South American culture. Buenos Aires was supposed to be the Paris of South America. Everyone raved about it, and somehow, in eight years of travel, I’d never managed to get myself down there. I couldn’t pass this trip up, so I relented in my romanticism, and got on a plane headed south southeast instead west southwest.
Buenos Aires was everything everyone said it would be … for exactly two days. Then my brain broke.
Here’s the thing about trying to escape: Your feelings come with you. They sew themselves into the nooks and crannies of your backpack and hang there like dead weight, digging into your shoulders as you carry them from one beautiful place to the next. On this trip, I wasn’t just dogged by the sadness of being without Charlotte, I was under immense pressure from all the work that had accumulated as NomadicMatt.com grew into a site with a million monthly visitors. There were the simple demands for more content and user experience improvements, but as I began to monetize the site with a branded store and courses on how to travel, there was also a massive amount of busy, technical work that was about as far from traveling—or even writing about travel—as the owner of a travel website could get. No matter what I did, everything else suffered and I fell deeper into a hole.
Over the preceding year, and with growing rapidity, I had begun to suffer from anxiety from constantly overworking myself. I felt that I could no longer balance my twin desires to settle down and travel. My eye began to twitch, I became restless when I sat down to work, and I needed to take Ambien to fall sleep.
In Buenos Aires, I was writing speeches for a few talks I had agreed to give, finishing a set of ebooks, talking to Charlotte at odd times since I was fourteen hours ahead, writing my blog posts. But the whole time I felt extremely guilty (or maybe it was shame?) about locking myself up in a hostel and working while in a destination I had so longed to just explore.
This wasn’t why I wanted to travel. The threads of the two lives I had been leading started to pull away from each other. No matter which one I chose any given day—sightseeing or work—I felt guilty about not choosing the other.
I snapped. I started taking Xanax to calm down. I sank into a depression.
Something had to give.
I needed a place where I could see nothing and do work. I wanted to clear my plate so I could start fresh. I figured if I could just sit in one place, go through my to-do list, cancel some projects, and hit the reset button, I could solve my problem and get rid of my anxiety.
I decided to go to Mendoza. It seemed like the perfect place to relax. There wasn’t much to do and, with a friend coming to visit before we went to Patagonia, I couldn’t visit anything as I had to wait for her. I rented an Airbnb, locked myself in, and dove into my work. I caught up on all outstanding issues, nuked my unread email, and just said “enough.”
But I was putting a Band-Aid over a deep wound.
On my third night there, I had my first panic attack. Sitting at my computer in my Airbnb, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. My arm went numb. My chest hurt. It felt like a heart attack combined with an unending sense of doom.
I called my mom. She was a nurse.
“Was I having a heart attack?”
“If you were, you’d be dead already. But you need to call a doctor. I told you I was worried about you. You work too much. Why don’t you come home?”
“No, no, I can’t. I just need to do this. I’ll call a doctor.”
“Please be careful. Stop working! See a doctor. Relax. Call me soon!”
“I have some Xanax. I’ll take that.”
The Xanax calmed me down, if only temporarily. A panic attack is like drowning. It feels like you are suffocating but don’t know why. There’s a feeling of hopelessness that comes with it. And despair. Unending despair. The weight of the world is pushing on your chest, collapsing your lungs. It breaks not just your body but your spirit. Everything begins to feel like it’s too much to handle.
Your heart and chest tighten, you feel light headed and scared. At least I did. I felt scared. Like nothing was enough and I was never going to be enough.
As I thought about the causes of my anxiety, I kept coming back to the word have. I have to do this, I have to write this thing, I have to visit this place, I have to attend this event, I have to go to this meeting, I have to say yes to this.
I fell into “the busy trap” where we say yes to everything. Suddenly, we get caught up in a cycle and we’re going nonstop. We’re overcommitted, burnt out, and drinking energy drinks or coffee just to stay awake. But we can’t see a way out. I always thought this was something that happened to other people. People with a routine and office jobs. Now, I realized I was wrong. I was overcommitted and trapped in my own way.
My panic attack was a wakeup call.
I didn’t need to say yes to everything or everyone. We are the masters of our ship, and if we don’t want to do something, we don’t have to! It wasn’t until my eye started twitching and my chest tightened that I began to really understand this view.
By the time my friend came to visit, I felt more in control. The Xanax was helping and focusing solely on one thing helped focus my mind. I worked, read, worked some more. I cooked dinner, and then worked. The less work there was, the calmer I felt.
On one of our first excursions, we went to a little town south of Mendoza called San Rafael where you can take wine tours and follow bike trails on trips though the valley. We hiked all over and stayed up talking to the travelers in our hostel. It felt like what I remembered the nomad’s life could be. The next day we moved to a hostel in a different town.
That night as I typed away on my computer, three Argentinian guys on vacation from Buenos Aires invited us to drink wine with some of the other hostel guests and staff in the backyard. My friend said yes but I declined because I wanted to finish some work.
“Did you come to Argentina to work or did you come here to drink wine and have fun?” they said, prodding me the way only people who, as Scott Dinsmore put it, prioritized enjoyment over money could.
I politely declined again but I couldn’t stop thinking about their question.
It hit me like a punch in the gut. It was like someone had thrown a medicine ball at me while I wasn’t looking.
They were undeniably right. I didn’t travel to work. I didn’t travel to sit behind a computer. I could do that from home. I had fallen into the same trap that kept me from sailing the San Blas Islands with Heidi all those years before. I wasn’t leading a balanced life and it was because of that that I had developed such bad anxiety.
Here I was in a place I had dreamed of visiting for years, only to have spent most of my time working behind a computer in a vain attempt to finish a never-ending to-do list. Moreover, being in a new place and not enjoying it only added to my anxiety and disappointment. If I was going
to travel to only work, what was the point of traveling in the first place?
I was a failure. I had let a workaholic tendency take control of my life. Those guys were right. In a moment of clarity, I closed my computer, put it in my room, and went outside to join them. There, we drank endless bottles of wine, ordered late-night pizza, and discussed the cultures and customs of our countries until the wee hours of the night. We laughed, we cried, we became friends.
Work was not why I had left my home all those years ago. My goal was not to work from anywhere. My goal was this. To get to know new people in new places. To peel back the onion and see how the world ticked. I went to sleep that night happier and more content than I had been in a long time.
With a killer hangover and a large cup of coffee, I sat down in the common area, opened my computer, and a pang of guilt swept over me. The pain in my chest resurfaced as I looked at my email and realized all the work I had left to do.
“I should have worked last night. I could have gotten a few more hours in. When I am in Patagonia, I won’t have any internet access. I need to do this,” I said to myself. I was mad at myself for having fun.
I began to redo my to-do list.
Then their question came back to me like a bad dream.
“Did I come here to work or did I come here to drink wine?”
Being in Mendoza didn’t fix my anxiety, because I never fixed the underlying causes of it. I was working through the symptoms—my to-do list—but that would just get replaced by another list when it was done and the cycle would repeat itself.
Sometimes the best way to defeat an enemy is to deny it battle. I was fighting against the never-ending tide of my to-do list. I could work until the end of time but that wouldn’t have changed anything.
My priorities were out of whack. I couldn’t work and travel any longer. I saw that.
The world would not end if I didn’t publish a blog post.
I was not going to let work win.
That would have just made everything for naught. To travel to escape the nine to five only to shackle myself virtually to a desk and end up in the same place.
I had lost my freedom and it was time to get it back.
I cancelled the talks I was supposed to give. I deleted all my emails, and put up an out of office message that explained my anxiety, how I was taking a break, and that no email would be responded to. I gave my assistant instructions to ignore emails, focus on a few projects while I was away, and not to bother me unless something major happened. I decided to continue to write, because it was cathartic for me, but all other projects would stop.
I would not find Argentina from behind a computer screen.
I had hit rock bottom.
It was time to take control of the situation and make radical changes.
* * *
ANXIETY DOESN’T VANISH at the flick of your fingers. It was a miracle that I made it to Patagonia with my friend, and I was proud of myself for making the right choice and getting down there instead of down to the bottom of my to-do list, but I was still struggling with my anxiety and what to do about it. It takes time to undo bad habits. It takes time to heal. And it’s not always clear where the best place is to spend that time.
Was it Patagonia? We’d been there on an organized hiking tour for a week already, our last nights, in legendary Torres del Paine, were coming up, and I still wasn’t sure.
Argentina’s most popular park, Torres del Paine was founded in 1959. It is home to tons of glaciers, glacial lakes, deep valleys, famous granite mountains, and beautiful pine forests. More than 100,000 people visit each year, making it one of the top destinations in South America.
As we approached the park, giant gray mountains rose high above us and a cloudless blue sky stretched to infinity. Everyone on the bus gave a collective gasp. While our guides stopped to get our camping and hiking permits, we piled out for photographs. The crisp air, grass waving in the wind, and sheer mountainsides made me excited to get connected to nature again.
The paved road became dirt, and the bus—lacking any shocks—jostled us like a carnival ride. Over two days, we hiked the famous W trek, first to Glacier Grey, so named for the coloring produced by dirt as it collects in the glacier, then through the French Valley, where we ascended through burned forest, rivers, and along a valley, before arriving at Francés Glacier. There, melting ice came crashing off cliffs like intense thunder. We stood in the glacier’s shadow, eating lunch and waiting for the cracking ice.
On the last day, we set out to tackle the park’s most famous hike: the twenty-two-kilometer round-trip to the Torres Towers, one of the most difficult I’d done since the twenty-kilometer Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. But these three towers set on a glacial lake are picture perfect, with their granite, ice-covered spires set above an aquamarine lake, and worth any hike. I could swear it was a photo used as computer wallpaper.
After my group ascended to the top, ate lunch, and started back, I opted to stay behind. I wasn’t ready to leave. I found the area too peaceful. Staring at the Torres peaks, the energy of the area calmed me down and for the first time in a long time, I was content to just be. To just enjoy where I was without worry of what work was waiting for me at the bottom of the mountain.
Over the previous few days, I had thought about work a lot. It loomed in the back of my mind as the days ticked by and I wondered what was going on in the outside world. Was everything okay? But I realized, if something had gone wrong, there was nothing I could do anyway, so why freak out? Here in front of this natural wonder, worry faded from my mind.
I couldn’t change the things I had no control over. I had to learn to let go. The cause of my anxiety was that I had overextended myself. If I wanted to get rid of my anxiety, I would have to change my life.
Patagonia is one of those locations on earth that makes you realize how small you are and just how grand and significant nature is. When I came back to civilization, I found that nothing had changed. My website didn’t go down. The sky never fell. No one cared that I wasn’t answering emails. In fact, the opposite was true. Most people were happy I was taking a mental health break and encouraged me to not get so wrapped up in work.
It felt odd. Here I was exposing a life of freedom and flexibility to millions of hopeful nomads, while I was slowing wrapping myself up in chains and doing the opposite.
As I boarded a flight to Australia at the end of February 2016, the month I had spent offline flooded back to me in a rush of reflection. I had found the cause of my anxiety and I had learned that being offline wasn’t the end of the world. There were still flashes of worry. Flashes of panic. Something that takes control of you for so long doesn’t go away so easily, but the month-long detox had at least put me on the road to recovery.
I found the cause of my discontent.
Now it was time to find that solution.
It was a solution that would teach me my most valuable lesson yet—and forever change my relationship with Charlotte.
13
Home
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT
TEN YEARS. That’s how long I spent on the road. To say that travel consumed my identity would be fair. To millions, I wasn’t Matthew Kepnes—I was Nomadic Matt. To them, I am the guy without a home (or a last name), the blogger, the professional traveler. I don’t recoil from that. I love it.
My original plan to travel the world, get traveling out of my system, and find a real job never panned out. One day bled into the next until, in the blink of an eye, a decade passed.
The Southern writer John Graves wrote only two books: One, Goodbye to a River, is a classic travel memoir about a trip to see the Brazos River before it disappeared behind modern dams and lakes—it was an ode to man’s refusal to settle down or be in one place. Later in life, he wrote Har
d Scrabble, which was in almost every way the opposite book—about his journey to carve out a home in the Texas Hill Country. It’s about what he calls “The Syndrome”: our need to own a piece of earth and our refusal to leave it once we do. He has a quote that I think encapsulates the tension and uneasy balance between these parts of ourselves:
The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of
becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his away and denies
that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.
I looked back on the last ten years of my life—the wanderlust, the burnout, the oscillation between the urge to leave and the pull to stay—and realized that the tension, the anxiety, wasn’t inside me, rather it was me. It was the result of a life lived out of hundreds of thousands of miles and countless nights in cities I don’t fully remember.
I had fallen into travel writing. It seemed like a good way to keep traveling and, as my website grew, I continued to work on it without any real plan. I enjoyed it, and it kept me traveling, so it wasn’t all bad.
But, as time wore on, I struggled with a secret, one I kept inside for fear of losing what had become my identity. The thing I craved most of all—more than anything in the world, no matter where I was at any point during that decade—was a garden. I had stood on mountaintops with soaring views, been awed by ancient temples, seen oceans that stretched to the furthest horizons, and traded stories in seven different languages before the day was out—but the thing I wanted to do most of all was come home to a fucking garden.
That garden became my next version of the guidebook I bought all those years back in 2005. It was the manifestation of desires for a next step.
A garden requires constant attention. Attention that can’t be given when one leaves every few days. To have a garden would require me to settle down. A garden would be an act of commitment. A hobby that required myself to be rooted next to my rooted plants. To take them inside and turn them into a meal. In my own kitchen with all the tools never found in a hostel kitchen.
Ten Years a Nomad Page 17