Thinking about travel and anxiety

As illustrator Gemma Correll says, “Traveling is one of my biggest anxiety triggers. It’s also one of the things I love to do most.”

Jeff and I were in the airport, headed to DC on Thursday, when I saw a comic by Gemma Correll, a great illustrator I follow on Instagram. She was detailing her own struggles with traveling and anxiety. Check the whole strip out here, but the first panel says, “Traveling is one of my biggest anxiety triggers. It’s also one of the things I love to do most.” Which exactly sums up my own feelings.

I don’t remember feeling anxious about travel when I was younger, but that was probably because most of the traveling I did was planned and executed by someone else. In our family, I am the instigator, planner and executor of almost all our travel. This is okay most of the time, since I also have the tiniest bit of a control issue. I am quite happy to be the one who picks the hotel.

But because traveling also makes me anxious, I have a tendency to spontaneously fling myself into trips, as if not spending too much time thinking ahead will trick me out of my anxiety. Like the time we watched a few episodes of a not-so-good Netflix show about the 1916 Easter Rebellion and booked a trip to Dublin the next day.¹ Or when after years of saying we’d go to Paris when we learned French, I said screw it and just bought the tickets.

One way to deal with travel anxiety is to go back to the same place over and over again. When you’ve already been to a place once, you know what to expect and it takes the edge off all that uncertainty. For about four years in a row, we went to Key West every February. We had a place we liked to stay. A bartender we felt like we sort of knew. Our favorite places and often little routines we followed. This is what Hemingway did, too, after all—go back to the same places over and over again. It worked for him, so why not for us?

Going to the same place again and again has an added bonus for someone who is a great lover of places. When you go back over and over, you’re able to explore a particular location and community in more depth. Going to Key West again and again isn’t exactly like living in Key West, but given how expensive that is, it’s probably as close as we’ll get. And the deep-dive into the depth of a community is part of what I love about living in Madison. It’s not surprising I pack that up and take it with me when I travel.

But sometimes you also have to try something new, too. Especially after a year and a half when, yes, there were many new things in our lives (masks, social distancing, and lockdowns), but all the news things were also terrifying. Then even those new things stopped being terrifying and became soul-crushing in their sameness. After a year and a half like that, you have to see new views and new faces. You especially have to eat new food and look at new art. You have to open yourself up to the scariness that is new experiences in strange places where you are not in complete control of what happens. You have to make a list of all the worst case scenarios and face them down.²

I’ve been to DC before, but not for a long time, so there were a lot of new things for me on this trip. I got to see the White House again and know there was a sane person inside. We stopped to use the public restrooms in the National Sculpture Garden and stumbled on a mural by Chagall, tucked away among the trees like something secret and magical. I learned about Alice Pike Barney, a woman artist who was born in Cincinnati, took up art in her 40s, studied with Whistler, started a salon in Paris, pissed off her husband when she “accidentally” illustrated a collection of lesbian poems written by her daughter, at 53, married her second husband, who was 23, and then 9 years later, divorced him. Now, that’s a life. I saw an amazing exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery by an artist I’d never heard of (Hung Liu), but whose images I will never forget. We ate amazing food and drank some amazing cocktails.³ And because we are old and city living is exhausting, we bought snacks at a CVS and ate them in our very nice hotel room while we watched the Braves in the playoffs.

Chinese Profile II, by Hung Liu

All the trips I’ve taken, even the ones with bumps in the road, were also full of wonderful memories. Even in the middle of my anxiety, I know that I’ll be so happy to have gone. And I’ll be so happy to be back home. As Gemma Correll says at the end of her comic, one of the best parts of traveling is getting home with “…pride in the knowledge that I didn’t let anxiety stop me from doing something I love.” Yes, just that.

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1. Which was, of course, an amazing trip and very cool to see the post office that became the uprising headquarters, including the bullet holes still in the pillars outside. I’m a big fan of traveling with context, whether that’s books you’ve read or shows you’ve watched.

2. I have a lot of worst case scenarios, most of which revolve around not being able to get home in some form of another. I worry that I’ll get sick when I’m away and get stuck in a hospital far from home. That Jeff will get sick and then we’ll both be stuck. That our flight home will be delayed. That we’ll miss our flight home (who cares about missing the flight to get to the place, because that anxious part of me would be so happy to stay home, anyway). My biggest worst case scenario is that I die far from home. I wrote a whole story about it. I’m kind of obsessed.

3. For the foodies, the best meal and drinks by far were at Karma Modern Indian, where Jeff had a Temple of Salt cocktail (Elijah Craig Small Batch Bourbon + Green Chartreuse + Lime + Honey + House Kashmiri Chilli Bitters + Himalayan Salt + Egg White) and I had a Diaspora (Lebelon + Allspice Dram + Fresh Blood Orange) and Grace’s alcohol-free Tiger’s Tail was also delicious (Fresh Blood Orange + Fresh Lime + Turmeric + Ginger + Chili Water), but the best by far was the sauce that came with the Saffron Paneer—stuffed paneer with a saffron and fennel sauce. I would go back to DC just for that sauce.