Wandermust

I don't particularly enjoy dwelling on negative thoughts. However, there are times when I feel like I may explode if I don't get something off my chest and the terrible thing is that more often than not I just don't say anything. I am a 5 foot something quietly bubbling volcano. So I'm trying something new. Let's talk about something that bothers me and has bothered me for a long time now.

Travel. While I understand that a great deal of the internet's population, primarily females, have gone ahead and slapped a giant 'wanderlust' sticker on their foreheads, that hasn't at all made me exempt from expressing similar desires. I want to travel. I think I was first properly bitten by the travel bug in the depths of the HSC last year, where about 80% of my waking being thought about where or when I could go traveling. That was slowly stamped out by an assortment of plans that kept falling through, a dismal selection of reliable travel companions, and restrictive parenting. All in all, it was fairly depressing and really discouraging - perhaps more upsetting than I really allowed for myself to process because writing that out made me feel like crying. That's also probably attributable to pent up, unsaid frustrations and disappointment. 

I think I've realised particular things that I hold the dearest to my heart when I don't want to really express them in their entirety to anyone else. To stifle bouts of anxiety during the year, I would journal away about all my plans for travelling the world and really seeing places. I would plan short films and photography I would embark upon during my trips. I bought a giant world map several years ago (infant stages of wanting to travel) and I had such big plans and hopes and visions and it makes my heart crumble into so many pieces that I have done so little when I dreamt so big. Travel is a lot like my desire to be in the film industry; sometimes it scares me how much I want to do something so I just talk about it in general, light-hearted terms when in actuality, it's all kind of gut-wrenching. That's a good way to put it, I think. I'm having trouble with conveying how strongly I feel about all of this and how it makes my insides feel but that's a pretty good way to put it.

This post mainly came to being because I felt like I had been pushed into a corner, or to the edge of a cliff, from no active sources at all. Aside from myself. I have been dwelling a lot on all the times I have been let down or I let myself down with endeavouring to fulfil my plans, possibly provoked by a bit too much hope and a bit too much inaction of late. But maybe this time. I'm not going to give up. I just want to be out of Sydney and away for a while. Uni, the internet, people around me are all incredible blessings but just right now I feel so claustrophobic I am desperate to get away, even for a little while. Just for a few breaths. I completely recognise that travel, in the sense that I have regarded it, is quite strongly a 'white privilege' that can be viewed as hedonistic and exploitative but I am careful with my research and purpose. Sometimes mental health is a much stronger, more tangible and affecting entity than people credit it for. 

I don't want to say that this is the time that I will be able to fulfil this desire because I have said it before and things fail to happen and I'm tired of disappointing myself. But here's hoping, right? Watch this space.