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I've been travelling as a vagabond for a while. Someone asked me to write out my reason why, and I figured I'd share it here because why not.
It's a bit tl;dr
Why I travel
It was the middle of summer the year 2016 when I realized there was something severely wrong with my life.
The day before, I'd been to the doctor to have a mole looked at. It was the first time in years that I'd been to the doctor, and while he conclude the mole was benign, he sensed that there was something else wrong with me. Guess you can't hide your symptoms from an old, trained eye. I refused that there was anything wrong, but he still ran some tests on me, and the simple fact that he asked made me introspective.
I'd been smoking weed every day for years. My relationship with my family was hanging on to a thread. I was about to enter university but had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I'd taken on responsibilities at my dorm as the head of the resident council to at least have something to engage myself in, but that was just adding on to the growing pile of stress and pressure that would eventually culminate in a personal breakdown.
The day before my realization I'd cried myself to sleep. I didn't know why, but it was the first time in a long while that I actually felt anything except the usual numbness towards any situation. So when I went back to the doctor to get the results, and I was diagnosed with stress and high blood pressure, it became clear that something had to change.
I was given the choice to go on antidepressants and blood pressure medicine, both which I refused. The doctor told me that nothing was wrong with me physically, so everything had to be psychological. Having grown up with a mother who's a clinical psychologist (and who screwed me up really good), I knew that psychological problems for the most part could be changed through a lifestyle change.
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>>38842307
But the idea to go travel didn't come to me right away. A lot of self loathing came first; all those years wasted trying to figure out what I wanted without any results had left me literally depressed and with a severe drug habit. I could have done so many things instead, and the realization that I'd wasted a good decade of my life and most of my youth on nothing made it tough for me to see any positive solution to my problems. So I ended up in the shower with a knife in my hand. For an hour I contemplated ending it right there so I wouldn't have to suffer any further disappointment, but I could shake the notion that since I'm ready to give everything up, I might as well do something totally crazy. I had nothing to lose anyway.
I'd realized that for the most part, my situation could be blamed on the way my mother raised me. She'd been incredibly controlling every since my older siblings moved out and it was just me and her living alone in an apartment together. She'd forced me to get a job at the age of 13, but collected all the money I earned. My life from 13 to 18 basically consisted of going to school, getting home and going straight to work, then come home around 8 or 9 at night and force some dinner down my throat before collapsing. And I'd never see any of my salaries, my mom would collect it to pay off some imaginary debt that for some reason kept growing bigger and bigger.
So with no chance to explore myself as a teenager, I was flung into depression. Weed was the easy way out, it simulated the happiness that I craved so much. But even after moving out and getting my own life with my own money, the weed abuse continued. It simply didn't occur to me that life might actually be enjoyable without fake happiness, as I couldn't remember how the real deal felt.
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sorry I forgot to fix the spacing in that post
>>38842327
And since weed was cheap and easy to get in my city, it was the logical choice for a chronically depressed young man to simply smoke his days away. So for years I'd experience no personal development and just take one day after the other, building upon the pile of stress and pressure that loomed ever taller over me.
All this dawned on me in that one hour shower session, and the idea of travelling luckily hit me. I'd been a scout for some years and still had all my outdoor equipment, so living on the road as a vagabond would prove no problem. I didn't have a house with a mortgage, I had no debt, no girlfriend, no job responsibilities, and no idea what I wanted to study anyway. So I threw the idea past my friends, and they all found it to be a brilliant solution to my problems; go explore the world, and at the same time, yourself.
At the time I worked as a hotel receptionist, a job I'd had for 4 years. I let my boss know of my plans to go travel, and set a date half a year in the future where I would leave. Ticket bought for Japan, the first destination out of hopefully many. My boss gave me all the work he could offer me, and even fired a coworker who'd been slacking in order to give me even more shifts. I ended up working an average of 7.2 hours a day, every day, for half a year, and scraped together quite a bit of money. Getting a visa for Japan was also straight forward, since Denmark and Japan have a working holiday visa agreement; one year abroad for free, and I could get a job there if I wanted.
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>>38842363
So half a year passed. Working so much was tough, but with a clear goal in mind for the first time in a decade, it was easy peasy. I sold everything I could, gave away the rest, packed my bags, quit my dorm room lease, and left for the airport.
Was it the right choice? The whole point is to figure myself out, which I have yet to do. But the alternative was to go on medication and become a zombie, studying some degree that I might end up hating, and kill myself at some point in the future. For now, my future is open. I have no plans. I just go where the wind and the people I meet take me. And I'm actually feeling a sort of happiness, a happiness that comes naturally from within myself instead of through a paper filter.
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>>38842307
I have nothing of much value to add, but good for you anonfriend. I've been doing the same thing for a while, driving all around burger and working odd jobs in whatever city I feel like being in, sleeping in my car from time to time. It's really liberating, and makes me see the world differently.
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>>38842307
Thanks for writing this out OP
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>>38842307
I want to do this to leave my small town and go to a big city and not have to live in the suburbs but actually live in the city shit
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>>38842380
wow so deep this aint yer blog gtfo normie faggot REEEEEEE
hahahahahah yeah fucking right
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>>38842779
You'd neck yourself, you are weaker than OP and that scares you
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