Here’s how I feel about traveling: I hate traveling. I have never, at least as far as I can recall, been really, really excited about going somewhere far from home, or even not very far from home, if it means I can’t actually go home when the need strikes. And it will. I’m what is conventionally designated as a homebody, and that’s okay with me.
I have friends who live for traveling—Costa Rica, New York, Paris, Vienna, you name it, they’re excited to go and loathe to return. I’m happy for them. Honestly, go somewhere, eat gelato, take pictures of weird birds, bring me a keychain. I’ll be at home snuggling my cat and making sure the Canadians don’t invade and steal all your stuff.
That said, all this guilt and insecurity about not liking to travel is really bringing me down. I just returned from four days in Denver, Colorado (I had altitude exhaustion and brain-scramble for most of it) and when I was picked up at the airport my friend remarked on how different we are. She’s one of my traveling friends. She loves going to new and different places because they’re new and different, and because I respect her tremendously and think she makes good decisions and has good opinions I immediately feel less-than for not liking travel. She doesn’t judge me (out loud, anyway) for being a homebody, but I have no doubt it’s very difficult for her to comprehend. Why wouldn’t someone like to go somewhere new and see things they’ve never seen before? I suppose if I (ever) had my wits about me, I’d say why go somewhere new when there are infinite mysteries still to be discovered about the place I live now? And the people I live with? And the ways I feel about all that stuff? But since my wits are so rarely around (I assume they’re usually off getting stoned on the couch, watching The West Wing) I just mumble something about yeah, I totally love being home, and then I feel dumb later and write some stream-of-consciousness nonsense like this to try to explain my position to myself.
When my traveling friends return from their far-flung expeditions they are invariably disappointed with their mundane lives and jobs and houses and friends who talk about television and Facebook and their mundane lives and jobs and houses. These traveling friends return flushed with the glow of far-off places and exciting experiences and strangers and foreign languages and they always have cool-looking money that I always try to filch, not because I’m jealous of their travels or acquaintance with otherness and want to capture some tangible essence of the foreign, but because seriously, that money has holograms on it. I like to hear about their trip to an extent, but my dislike of traveling is so intense even talking about it is distasteful. And besides, how excited should I reasonably be expected to get about hiking through a beautiful rainforest and seeing beautiful things when I didn’t see them and the person who did can’t describe it in a way that really captures the essence of the thing? I don’t mean to imply my friends are bad at describing stuff; many of them are very good at it. But there’s always something missing. For me, it’s the desire to go see those things in the first place, and no amount of breathless description or beautiful photographs can overcome the sinking feeling I get after two nights away, thinking about my cat, and my bedroom, and how much I’d rather be drinking dirty martinis with my friends.
I suppose I’m a creature of habit. Perhaps if all those layers were peeled away, I am fundamentally insecure and anxious, and instead of being invigorated by change and newness, I’m exhausted and distressed. I never know how to behave in new places. For a lot of my traveling friends that’s not an issue—they’re intelligent, gracious, and respectful. They’re also pretty good at not being afraid. I myself am not good at not being afraid. I’m always convinced, be it in New York or a day’s drive from my house, that I’m about to make some monumental gaffe and get my sorry ass hounded out of town. Or worse: nobody will like me and I’ll be left to my own devices, which happens at home, sure, but at least at home I have all my familiar objects and places (and cats) to ground and comfort me. I can’t get my bearings elsewhere. Being comfortable when I’m away from home is not something that comes easily or naturally or really, at all. And I don’t like being uncomfortable. For some it’s a thrill, a way to feel more alive. For others the discombobulation is brief, if it happens at all. I don’t envy those people, since I don’t know how to envy something diametrically opposed to my own basic experience of the world. I don’t envy it, but I do let it make me feel bad about being such a devoted homebody. I feel guilty and insulated and naïve when I hear friends raving about their trip to Luxor, or planning a drinking tour of France. Why can’t I want those things? What’s wrong with me? Am I really so satisfied with my little life in my little town?
Okay, yes I am. I exist in the place between being outgoing and sociable and travel-ready, and being a recluse. Sometimes I feel like I’d get more credit as a recluse, since that’s a label with some mystery and intrigue and sex attached to it. Something makes people reclusive. They’ve got the inverse of whatever it is that drives people to travel. It’s a thing. It’s not just “oh, I’d rather stay home.”
Maybe I’m selling myself short. For one thing, I don’t know if anyone actually cares that I don’t like to travel. Obviously I’ve got some problems with it, if I can feel so easily judged. I’m very sensitive about my love of home, and the security of familiarity. Obviously I feel like there’s something wrong with me for getting homesick after two days away. It seems childish to me when people bring it up. I am ashamed of not wanting to go out into the world and experience it for myself. But I just don’t want to.
I suppose part of the reason is that I don’t really have anyone to travel with. I am the type of person (as it may be assumed from the whole intense need for security and familiarity thing) who feels a million times better, about myself and the world I’m in, if I feel like I’ve got someone on my team. I am not good at being alone. I’ll go one farther and say I am possibly the absolute worst at being alone. I have an intense need to be solitary sometimes, but not for very long, and if I can’t have contact with people I care about I start panicking and feeling sick. Like, physically sick. It’s lame, and I should probably figure out why that is—aside from the standard psychological tropes of abandonment and self-worth, if there’s anything aside from those—so I can knock it off. But I will defend this position by arguing that the people who are significant to me are just as integral a part of my definition of home as the place I live (and my cat). I need them around because I feel lost without them. I don’t mean to say my perception of myself is defined solely by my interactions and relationships, but there’s no denying that’s a huge part of it. I figure a person can be judged by the company they keep, and if my company is a thousand miles away, what does that make me? Lonesome and bored and anxious.
My friends who live for traveling are some of my very best friends, but this relationship to relationships is another thing we don’t really have the same perspective on. The biggest travelers I know are the people I would describe as being the worst at maintaining close friendships. Maybe I expect too much, but I communicate with my close friends regularly, several times a day. Text messages, online, in person: I like to be connected to them. I live in a house with three roommates, but I definitely live alone, and spend a lot of time by myself, and while I absolutely need solitude sometimes I need contact more. My traveling friends don’t have this same need, or they don’t seem to, and just as I don’t understand how they can be so gaga over going away for three weeks, they don’t understand why I want to talk to them every day. Or that’s how it seems. One friend struggles with this especially; they don’t quite know why it’s so hard to develop close friendships with other people, but if I point out how it’s been three days since they’ve said hello there’s an inevitable furrowed brow and a declaration of why they don’t think that should matter so much. I have always wanted to jump on the table and demand to know if they’re shitting me, that contact with friends is the only thing that matters. Of course I don’t, since I am the sort of person who is eager to defer, and if that means feeling bad about liking to be home, well, that’s what I’ll do. Then, like I said before, I will write this sort of thing as an apologia.
Here’s how I feel about my own relationship to home: it is more important to have a deep knowledge of and connection to what defines home for oneself than it is to have a broad and shallow connection to the larger world. I don’t mean for that to sound judgmental, since obviously our opinions probably differ. But putting down deep psychological and social and creative roots in a place, and nurturing those roots for the lovely tree of blah blah blah to flourish is infinitely more valuable to me than walking through a pretty garden of strange plants that I might not see again. Certainly the experience of seeing them and smelling their exotic fragrance is valuable, but I will always want to be sitting under my big ol’ poetic oak tree, taking in the view I’ve seen a thousand times before. I think finding tiny differences in the familiar is so much more interesting than being surrounded by difference in the unfamiliar. I suppose I have drawn a direct analogy for myself about my life: I want a life that is rich and well-tended and deeply connected that covers a very small territory. I want to learn everything about my town, and friends, and weave my own history from the threads they make. I want to be defined by an incredibly detailed experience of the world, to give myself limits to push against in a way that makes what I do more intimate. I love intimacy. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I dislike travel because it’s the opposite of intimate.
I want to live on a farm in rural England. BUT THAT WOULD TOTALLY REQUIRE TRAVEL, you say. This is a fact, indisputable. However, I don’t want to go hang out in London, or see the white cliffs of Dover, or send you a postcard I got in a tube station or whatever it is they have. I want to live on a farm in rural England because I want to live on a farm in rural anywhere, and England because America and I are involved in a long, drawn-out, messy breakup, and I don’t want the total alienation of not speaking the language of the place I live. I could certainly learn a foreign language, but because of my chosen field I would have to attain absolute mastery of another tongue before I could even begin to feel comfortable. Language is essential to my identity, and playing tricks with English is an integral part of who I am (there’s a reason I am hesitant to even imagine actually visiting a foreign country, even though I have a strange compulsion to go to Spain). I want to live on a farm because that’s a part of my heritage, because I can’t imagine anything more intimate in every sense (except there will be no sheep-fucking on my farm, take it somewhere else).
Sometimes I wish I could really get into traveling. I mentioned to this friend who picked me up that when we get transporters all these problems will be solved. I need to be able to escape from escapes. The possibility of escaping back to my house is pretty distant if I’m half the world away. But when the day comes that I can get into a little phone booth and zap my molecules across an ocean, that’s the day I’ll hassle pigeons at the Trevi Fountain or climb a bunch of ancient stone steps carved into some beautiful misty, mystical mountainside in China. See, these are things I’d like to do, honest. I’d really like to go to Marrakech, and Kerala, and St. Petersburg. Maybe if I were fabulously wealthy I’d have homes dotting the globe to retreat to, which would probably help keep me from feeling totally adrift. Of course, if I were fabulously wealthy . . .
Anyway, I feel the compulsion to justify my love of home. Maybe I need to get out more. Maybe I need to learn to love travel, to let coming home be a cause for celebration, not a constant yearning. Maybe I need to get comfortable in my own skin first. Yeah, that’s probably it.
Tags: histrionics, nonfiction
