Everyone talks about leaving. Nobody talks about coming back. On the road you change in ways only other travelers understand. Your worries shrink, your mind opens, every day asks something new of you. Travel has its own rhythm: busy with the moment all day, looking back with satisfaction in the evening, looking ahead to what comes next. The worries from back home simply stop existing, because rent, taxes and what other people think of you do not survive long in that lifestyle.
There are hard parts on the road too. Finding work, stretching money, staying safe, getting sick in places where you do not speak the language. But the lows are forgotten almost instantly, because the highs change you as a person. They teach you that experiences matter more than things, and they keep your mind limber by forcing it to rearrange everything it thought it knew.
Then you come home, and for two weeks you are the tropical surprise everyone wants to hear from. You tell the stories, show the photos, make up for lost time. And then it fades. Everything is exactly as you left it, and part of you is quietly screaming, do you not see how much I have changed? Not my hair or my clothes. What is going on in my head. Topics you used to love feel small. The daily conversations bore you. You wonder if you are the strange one in the group.
It is like learning a language no one around you speaks. Not English, Dutch or Spanish, but the language of people who know what it is to leave, change, grow and then come home to a place where you feel more foreign than in most countries you have visited. They call it the travel bug, but that is not what it is. This is the hardest part of travel, and it is why we all leave again.
We do not travel to go anywhere. We travel to leave again.