I was struggling a lot to find the roots of me not being interested in traveling. It took lots of energy and self-discovery, and you know that it is torturing to dig into your emotional wounds when you are close to 40 years old! Actually, you may not know unless you are around 40, and you have done it. Well, believe me then! It is torturing.
I realized the reasons could be that: I do not consider the world outside safe; I get stressed out in stations, airports, and any other kind of places you have to go there to reach from A to B; I still has the fear of being outside in dark; I feel frightened imagining missing a train or plane; and I think spending money on traveling is luxurious.
Now what are the reasons of those reasons?
Family, society, and environment I grew up in, indeed. Society-wise, well, outside was never safe for girls, especially in the evenings. Familywise, to us, home was the safest place in the world, and you needed to go back there asap. You just go outside, do the necessary things you have to do, and run back home. We did not used to travel, and when we did in very rare occasions, it was a complete mental disaster as my dad was not a family man. Also, we did not have fancy money to invest in traveling! Life was not normal at all. There was no deep happy family time, again because of my dad attitude. Oh, I must not go into that right now as it will trigger some messed up emotions again. Then I will close laptop and never come back to writing, which I have already struggled a lot to do it 🙁
The point is, I am fucked up as anyone else guys (I just decided to not use * in fuck word anymore; is it against the law or something? I mean, * kills the word, this beautiful word); really, who can admit that he is not? Let’s accept that and then build up from there, shall we? Ok. I am fucked up. Nice to meet you. But now that I am an independent girl, I want to try to stop being fucked up, a bit maybe. Just a little. As much as I can, you know.
Having said that, I decided to just go somewhere. Anywhere. Just dive into the scary airport, train stations, darkness at night. Moneywise, I was still hesitant as making money and saving it was not an easy job for a girl in Iran, IF, she was not going to take some shortcuts, you know what I mean? I am sure you do. However, I forced myself to ignore this feeling of wasting money on traveling, and just spend without even thinking. So, the plan was: “if you are doing this, do it as if you have millions of euros, and ENJOY!”.
I did not have any idea of where to go; I did not have any bucket list, any “want to visit” wish list, any desire to go somewhere and take pictures and show it off in social media; nothing. I just knew that I had more than two weeks of vacation left and was receiving HR emails to take them before the year ends (I still get shocked here in Germany BTW, after almost 2 years; In Iran, I was not allowed to even talk about taking days off; my supervisor was like a big bully burying me under loads of tasks. That is another beautiful history though that you need to hear :|).
To be continued…