Ever Wanted to Just Pack Up Your Life and Move Far Far FAR Away?
In my younger days, I was not always particularly mentally stable.
In my 20's and 30's I often battled various degrees of depression, although I was never formally diagnosed-- I tended to avoid doctors and people who could poke around inside my head.
Somehow, I managed to keep going, in spite of myself.
Just HOW far away do you want to go?
Winter geranium in bloom
One of the ways I could always get a handle on my state of being was by looking at my pattern of "wanting to get away."
Perhaps we've all experienced that, at one time or another. Life starts to get really hard and dreary... and the idea of simply packing our stuff and moving to some place far away where nobody knows us, and we can just start from scratch again... becomes unusually appealing.
It's a place I'd quite often reach... but I could also tell "how far over the edge" I was going, based on just how far away I wanted to go.
If all I wanted to do was to just move to another city somewhere, it was usually not a big deal. If I wanted to disappear to some small town somewhere... I was probably in more serious trouble. However, the real sign of "deep trouble" was when places like Jan Mayen, Tristan da Cunha or Macquarie Island started to look good to me. These were places so remote most people hadn't even heard of them... often only populated by seals, sea birds and perhaps a small geological station.
Most of my struggles and pains back then had to do with people, and the "weight" it felt like they brought to my life. If I could just go so far there weren't any people anymore... maybe I could find a measure of peace. Or so I thought.
Wherever you go, you bring yourself with you...
Of course, I wasn't really trying to get away from anyone... I was trying to get away from myself.
Beech leaves in the fall
Well... maybe not entirely, but mostly. I was actually pretty content being in complete solitude, most of the time.
The problem with running away-- the the whole notion of giving yourself a fresh start-- is that wherever you go, you "bring yourself with you." Meaning that you might be able to change the geography around you... but soon enough, the same patterns that caused your life to feel so painful in the previous location will start to manifest.
And before you know it, you'll be ready to move far, far, FAR away again... pretty much for the same reasons as the previous time.
My friend Diana-- who also happened to be a therapist for a living-- once pointed out to me that there is nothing wrong with wanting to give yourself a fresh start in new surroundings. You just have to make sure that-- when you DO go-- the "version" of yourself you take along is someone healthy who has worked through the problems that tend to cause their life to break down.
White winter flowers
Although there were many times when I wanted to move away-- and some desolate island looked really attractive-- I never actually did.
And when I finally made a move across the country-- from Texas to Washington state-- I made quite sure that I had thoroughly worked through my issues related to wanting to "run away..." before I made the commitment to move.
As a result, I did actually get a fresh start-- and found a happier life, as a result of moving.
How about YOU? Have you ever wanted to just grab some stuff and move to some other place and start over? Did you act on your feelings? If yes, how did it work out for you? At the time, were you mostly running away from yourself, even if blaming the situation on something else? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created 20170825 23:45 PDT
Yup, "wherever you go, there you are!"
That is, indeed, the root statement right there!
I was rather grateful for my friend's "addendum" to this piece of wisdom, and have remembered it on many occasions... since, indeed, we ARE "wherever we go" it becomes really important to make ourselves someone we really would like to BE "there" with.
Love this post.
I think about my life and how it would be somewhere else all too often. It's not that I dislike the people around me (though sometimes I do) or that I hate the geography. It's that feeling of freshness and unfamiliarity. A start at something so foreign and exciting that has me dreaming of selling my belongings and hitting the road for anywhere else.
I once travelled to Naknek, Alaska all the way from Florida to live at a salmon cannery for a month. I went alone. It was the most liberating and exciting experience of my life. There were people from all over the US, even some from Hawaii.
Even after returning from that venture, I still dream about starting over, alone, in an unfamiliar territory. It might just be a romantic daydream for me though, as my ambitions are contrarily keeping me grounded in my hometown where I grew up. The thoughts of fleeing become extraordinarily strong when my mood is very low, sometimes for weeks. I have learned to cope and stay strong, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a reoccurring thought process in my life.
Thank you for sharing your feelings, dreams, and experiences. These well thought out and terrificly raw posts are my favorite ones.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment @shanequick!
Experience tells me that people have numerous different types of motivations for uprooting and seeking new surroundings. Some are simply adventurous spirits while others-- quite literally-- have "addictions" to newness and challenges. Some are "running away" and some are-- more subtly-- just avoiding parts of their reality and life they'd prefer not to face.
In my own experiences, my desires to leave have always been fueled by a (false) hope that things will somehow be "easier" in some other place... fueled by a pervasive sensation that every time I have "given 100%" to something, it has only been rewarded "at 90%," to the point where even getting up in the morning felt like starting at a deficit.
Of course, the thing that was not working was my expectations of "how MUCH life" I could actually manage. Sometimes, the answer to a shortfall isn't increasing your "income," but reducing your "expenses."
I like that... reducing your expenses. Thanks for the advice :)
If you tasted the liberation of being on the road, (Florida to Alaska ! cool!)and didn't get hooked, I would say you know it's not really for you-the dream maybe?
(I'm only talking from my own experience of spending years on the road, and talking to 1000's travelers. - It's not so much of an option, as a necessity-for a 1000 different reasons, and personal to each individual)
It is one of my biggest dreams/goals to travel all over. The things that hold me back are:
I know one can travel without being loaded, and I have done so, but I want to have a substantial way of generating income before I drop everything I've known my entire life and hit the road. I do have a game plan, I'm just closer to the beginning of it than the end so it'll be awhile before I am able to travel like I wish to.
The very best of luck, mate !
Thanks friend!
I have had this feeling all my life, but I never saw it as running away. Rather as not really belonging. As a child we moved a lot. I have lived in both Norway and Sweden and talks the languages quite well, but I think that it also made me rootless. So in my youth I travelled a lot and lived in other countries. But then I meet the woman of my life and we had children, so for practical reasons we have lived in Copenhagen for many years now. My daughters are Copenhagen girls, talks the local accent and are slightly vilified by the countryside. The are not afraid of Muslims, but of slugs and flies.
I still do dream of a small windblown house on the westcoast of Scotland, and some day I might buy it (cheaply when Brexit has broken the UK) but until now I have to respect my two 'hjemfødinge' girls.
Interesting story... appreciate the share @katharsisdrill. I grew up pretty "rootless," as well-- my parents were what you might call "global nomads." Although my passport says "DANMARK" on the front, I maybe spent a cumulative 8 of my first 18 years actually in Denmark... otherwise it was six months here, a year there, eight months somewhere else.
Circumstances... after University, I anchored myself with a US citizen wife and a business, but it didn't do much for the sense of rootlessness on the inside.
That made me laugh... thanks!
I found peace with my move from Texas to Washington state... came to realize that some of my sense of "not belonging" was related to putting someone from the cold north in a place where 35-40 degrees (C) in the summer was a daily occurrence. Haven't had any desire to move since then... although we still do go back to Denmark for vacation once every 2-3 years.
You've got skills to envy.
When I was twenty I took an expense paid trip to the other side of the world and staid for a year....I met interesting people...and some of them tried to kill me.
When I was forty I became a Trucker and for the next couple of decades I rarely went to sleep in the same state that I woke up in.
Does that qualify?
I suppose it depends on your reasons.
I wanted to go because the reality of where I was felt MUCH worse than the promise of "there."
These days, I much prefer to hang out in one place.
This article struck a lot of chords! I have made big moves and have had similar feelings. Thanks for the insightful self reflection and analysis!
Thanks for the visit @kus-knee!
We're both in our 50's now and feel pretty "settled" here in western Washington state. Oddly enough, once I settled here (2006), I very much felt a sense of "home."
I wish it was that easy to do.
I will just keep dreaming... at least for now :)
Thanks for posting!
I'm not sure whether it's easy or hard... I put a lot of time and effort into understanding myself so at least I understood why I wanted to keep moving.
I still want to pack up my stuff and run away to some far away, beautiful country. Not really to get away from anything here though, besides the fast paced life of the west...
I would just love to see other places and I think my main problem is that I haven't been on a real, far away vacation for too long...
Interesting you would say that... most of the time I have had a desire to go somewhere else has been because I wanted life to be "slower" and "less." I am really not one of those ambitious *"something must be happening all the time!" types-- quite the opposite. A new location always held the promise of a "slower" life...
Yes, exactly. I'm not really a big fan of the hasty life of the west. On the other hand, I do quite like the facilities that come with it. Clean, running water, proper food in shops, good health care, etc.
It's just that this life of the west comes with quite a bit of stress if you're not super careful. Sometimes, it's really out of your hands if you want to be able to afford a good enough life.
I sometimes wish I could get myself a little house on the edge of a forest, with my own little garden where I can grow my own fruits and veggies and partially live off the land. I'd still need money to provide for the other part of the food and other stuff though, so it's a nice dream, but no reality.
Oh well, we need to have dreams, right?
I can only remember one time in my life where I wanted to run away and that was as a teenager. I had visions of living in my car and using the gas station bathroom and recreation center showers. After giving it some more thought, I decided surviving Winter would be kind of tough without heat (I didn't want to have to run the engine for heat and possibly kill myself with carbon monoxide poisoning). Yup, I gave that idea up pretty quick. Anyway, that was the only time I can think of.
Seems we often end up with different reasons; different desires. In retrospect, I think quite a few of my desires to "get away" had their roots in not having great coping skills when it came to stress and difficulties... I'd get easily overwhelmed, and then the task ahead of me would seem insurmountable.
Oddly enough, the idea of having to survive on the streets, or living "in digs" in a strange town caused me far less anxiety than the thought of having to deal with bully bosses in dead-end jobs that earned me less than I need to pay my rent on some swank apartment.
It is quite interesting to look back and think about how we rationalized things. Many times we can obviously feel the pain of our current situation and look to the unknown with dreams of something better. In your last move, you actually found something better, but not necessarily in the 'place' but because of what you did to your mind. More often than not, people move towards a dream and then find it just as difficult or worse because they now need to start all over from scratch without having resolved the real issues.
This is actually a great topic because there is so much one can learn through these kinds of discussions. The mind is kind of a strange place because one can never really tell if it is real or simply a manifestation of our imaginations that we are contemplating about. For example, a dream is real to us until we wake up and are subjected to new sensory input that questions the validity of the dream. In the same way, we can daydream or even deliberately fool ourselves because that is what we want to believe as truth.
If we wish to take it a step farther, what about the idea of believing in something and then MAKING it happen? There has been much said about creating your own reality. Are we really living in a matrix-like world where we do actually dream our lives into existence?
Remote island sounds nice at times but over the many years I figured it was not so much me but the toxic people around me, once I made that connection and got them out of my life I have been good since. Learning to not be a magnet for toxic people is a key to a happier life.
That, right there, is a super important insight! It was a variation of that-- along with fully coming to terms with, and embracing, that I am basically happy as a loner-- that helped me settle down and become pretty happy with life.