By the time I was a teenager, two seemingly contradicting things had become fundamental parts of my identity: I was deeply anxious, and I desperately wanted to see the world.
As a kid, I worried about trivial matters, like whether doors were locked and faucets weren’t running before bed, to the heat death of the universe in trillions of years. At the same time, I was deeply fascinated by geography and history.
At 14, I’d already decided that I would visit every country in Europe before I died. When I got the chance to travel to Greece, Italy, and France later that year, my obsession deepened.
Provided by Macie Strum
The stakes grew bigger with adulthood
As I got older, my anxiety didn’t disappear. Worries about locked doors and running faucets gave way to obsessing over relationships, careers, failure, success, and what my life was supposed to look like.
During difficult periods, I would create hypothetical futures in my head and react as if they were already my reality. Therapy and medication helped, but I felt like I was simply going through the motions. As soon as times got tough, I would abandon any healthy coping mechanism I’d learned.
Travel always helped calm that anxiety. I began going away on every college break, and eventually moved to Rome to work as an au pair in my early 20s.
During that year in Italy, I felt so much better that I wondered if my anxiety was miraculously cured.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. I just wouldn’t realize that until I returned to the United States.
When I got back, I traded in aperitivo hour and a slow life for what was expected of me: a job in corporate travel at a non-profit in New York City and a mundane, predictable life. On paper, I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to do.
But an unexpected breakup, a layoff, and the stagnation I felt in my everyday life sent my anxiety spiraling. Somewhere between a grueling commute and sitting at a desk all day, I lost myself to constant catastrophizing.
When I got laid off from that second job at the end of 2023, it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. And four months later, after finding someone to take over my apartment lease and selling my furniture, I boarded a one-way flight to South Korea.
The baggage I carried wasn’t just physical
Leaving the country and traveling to Asia didn’t cure my anxiety. It did, however, interrupt the way I’d been thinking. I began to accept that while anxiety might always be a constant in my life, it didn’t have to define the way I lived it.
One year of travel turned into two, and then three. As I moved across the globe, I didn’t necessarily become less anxious. Instead, the cultures, people, and ways of life I experienced taught me how to put my anxiety into perspective and finally use the coping mechanisms I had struggled to put into practice for years.
Provided by Macie Strum
New ways to combat spiraling thoughts
In Bali, where I spent an entire month, a local explained that Balinese doesn’t use grammatical tenses as English does. She described her culture’s relationship with time as more cyclical than the straight line toward an unknown future I had always imagined.
This made me question why I spent so much time living in a future that didn’t exist yet.
A trip to Kyrgyzstan continued to challenge my relationship with anxiety. As I trekked through the countryside on horseback and stayed in nomadic yurt camps under a sky full of stars, I began to appreciate this slow, nomadic way of life.
The families I met had their own worries, but seeing people build meaningful lives around priorities so different from mine made me question why I’d been so afraid of building my life the wrong way.
Spending time in both Vietnam and Bosnia and Herzegovina taught me how little control we have over what the future will hold. While both countries are known for their devastating recent histories, it wasn’t those tragic pasts that left a lasting impression on me. Instead, it was the humor, ambition, community, and hope that I encountered in places that had rebuilt themselves after facing unfathomable circumstances.
I began to accept that while I couldn’t control everything my future would hold, I could stop acting as if every setback would singlehandedly determine the rest of my life.
Anxiety no longer dictates how I live
I still catch myself overthinking and obsessing over a future that hasn’t happened. But I’ve become much better at distinguishing between my reality and a fleeting anxious thought.
Whenever I begin to feel myself spiraling, I anchor myself in the present moment, shake off my outdated views of success, and accept that I may not always be able to predict the future.
At 14, I dreamed of seeing the world simply because I was enamored by it. At that age, I would have never expected that seeing so much of it would eventually change how I saw my own life.
Travel didn’t cure my anxiety, nor replace the tools I learned through years of therapy. Instead, it gave them a foundation I struggled to lay before — and taught me that I don’t have to know exactly what the future holds to enjoy the life I’m living now.
