Random Knowledge Syndrome

The trip came up a few years ago. My friend, who I shall dub Molly for the purposes of writing about a real person publicly without alienating them forever, was approaching a milestone birthday that she wanted to celebrate with a trip to Spain. She had always dreamed of traveling to Spain, which is a good dream to have. Her husband is a very fine man with many fantastic qualities but wanting to travel anywhere for any reason is not one of them. So a few years ago Molly put out the call to her female friends to join her in Spain in 2023, offering us plenty of lead time for planning and saving.

I said no at first. I like to travel, but I had recently gotten married when Molly sent out the invite, and we were trying to plan a honeymoon of some sort. It felt like a big enough trip that it might become an either/or situation; either I go with husband to Ireland, or I go with Molly to Spain. I didn't even mention it to Pat. I just said no. I didn't look inside too closely. I dubbed it the practical decision and moved on.

When I was younger I traveled a lot. I always thought of myself as someone who enjoyed traveling and who was good at it. It was a point of pride with me. I lived abroad twice. I visited a handful of countries. I backpacked through Europe and parts of Mexico when I was young enough to enjoy myself despite privation. Back at home, I was an intrepid visitor and business traveler.

But as I got older something else was starting to become true. Traveling was becoming harder. Some of that was external it's true. Traveling just IS harder than it used to be. Security is more of a pain. Everything takes longer. But some of it was me. I needed more stuff now. I had my cpap machine I couldn't sleep without. I had meds without which I couldn't function. I started to get anxiety with trips, even short weekend trips with Pat, or trips to visit family that I've made hundreds of times.

The days and weeks leading up to trips became suffused with anxiety. An obsessive loop of questions plagued me. What do I need? What if I forget something? What if things go wrong? With each trip, it seemed, my anxiety was getting worse. Packing threw me into full blown panic attacks. In the days leading up to trips I started to have nightmares of missed planes, missed plans, suitcases exploding their contents in the most publicly inconvenient ways possible. Or dreams about phone calls from home that my dog got lost or my cats got sick and I would be thousands of miles away unable to do anything about it.

So it's true I told Molly no initially for very practical, unassailable reasons. However it's also true that I felt a relief in saying no that might have signaled that perhaps I had Other Reasons that I didn't want to examine.

The years passed and Molly's Spain group assembled. Some mutual friends of Molly and I had eagerly signed up, so I was often around when they discussed it, or group chatted about it. Then the world went off the fucking rails and everything was shut down, but Molly kept her eyes on the prize and kept on planning and believing.

I am not alone in having the recent plague years challenge me to do some serious self-reflection. I've struggled with mental illness for a lot of my life, and I've also struggled with physical pain and ailments for a lot of my life. The time of enforced isolation slowly revealed to me how much I'd been using both of those facts to draw smaller and smaller circles around my world. My dreams were becoming smaller as I suffocated them with a blanket of “practical reasons” they would not work. It's easier to stay home. It's easier not to risk.

But the plague years brought something else, too, for which I am extraordinarily grateful. Both my husband and I were fully employed during the shutdown, and I was able to sock away quite a bit of savings just by lower gas consumption, less eating out and fewer random expenses of daily living. My savings account grew fatter with very little effort on my part. It was luck that had not much to do with skill or worthiness, but it was a good thing that I really appreciated.

My infusion of capital took away one of my primary practical excuses I was using to excuse myself from Molly’s trip. I could now afford a trip to Spain and still visit Ireland with my husband one of these years when our schedules and vacation times align. It began to occur to me that I could go, if I wanted to, and the plans being made by my friends started to seem more and more tempting.

One evening offhand I mentioned to Pat what I had not stated aloud before. I explained the trip and added “But I said no, because it feels weird to go off to Europe for two weeks without you, when we’re still trying to plan our own Europe trip.” Pat immediately said “You should go,” which I think I knew he would. I had the vacation time, which he did not, and I had the money. I’d never been to Spain before and he had. So, I should go.

I continued to go back and forth, trying to unravel that tangle of “I SHOULD do something” vs “I actually WANT to do something”. I’ve been trying to break the “should” habit, choosing to do something because I feel that I SHOULD want to do something has often left me doing things I hate motivated by guilt that I don’t enjoy it more. Did I WANT to go to Spain? I mean, yes, in a perfect world where I’m in excellent health and don’t need to travel with an apothecary and a cpap machine and all the accoutrements of middle-aged living. In a world where plane seats don’t pinch my generous ass and bite my large hips and make me feel like a bad person for Flying while Fat.

I talked myself out of the trip several times. It wasn’t practical. But I kept thinking about those increasingly shrinking circles I kept drawing around my life. I didn’t want to let the crazy, anxious hamster stuck in my head make this choice for me. I wanted to go to Spain with my friends and drink wine and see old things and remember there are other ways to live.

There was no perfect moment of clarity. I still think I bought the ticket as much motivated by the SHOULD in my soul as the WANT in my soul. But I bought the ticket and told the gang I was joining them. I bought the ticket in April for a trip that wouldn’t start until late December, confident in the knowledge that I had plenty of time to get in shape and save money and show that worrying hamster that I was still more than capable of flying halfway around the world for fun.

Stay tuned for Part 2