Homesickin' it up

A navelgaze as I pass the halfway mark of this summer's grand voyage! After the jump: homesickness, travel-guilt, and thoughts of the future.

THIS DOOR LEADS TO... THE FUTURE??? Or somebody's house outside of Bled, Slovenia, it is hard to say for sure.

There's a weird thing about long-term travel, which is that you tend to feel a little guilty when you have a bad day or feel gloomy or mopey. For all that this trip involves a lot of work, I'm keenly aware of the privilege that I enjoy in traveling like this, in having this last glimmer of geographic freedom before I lock back into whatever the next gig is, and I'm aware that for friends day-jobbing back in the states, there's a limit to how much I can grouse before the eyerolling commences. (Though I hasten to add that I'm lucky to be surrounded by empathetic and wonderful friends whose compassion allows me more room to process my feelings than is perhaps reasonable!)

In any event, it remains odd - as I told friends after last summer's trip, it felt weird to have moments of thinking "I'm being sad in Rome!" but obviously humans gonna human, and it's struck me lately that the quickest way to ruin any kind of travel, any kind of vacation or working trip, is to impose the expectation of fun and perfection. There's a reason I talked about my recent weekend in Vienna as being "ideal" and not "perfect." Perfection is as illusory on the road as it is at home, and while there may be plenty of perfect moments, every trip of any length is going to have rough patches and downturns.

For me, right now, that's about homesickness.

THIS lady knows where her home is cos she's SITTING on it! (It's at the market in Ljubljana, now you know how to find this lady's home, don't be a creeper about it)

Last summer I accidentally ended up on a schedule in which every two or three weeks I'd run into a friend, which I described to friends back home as a kind of emotional strength training: "go feel your feelings and process by yourself, then see people you love and let them help you bolster your sense of self and remind you that you're loved." It was a great tempo, allowing me lots of space but keeping that sense of connection alive. This summer, while I've had a couple of friends join for stretches (Cinque Terre/Milan and a run of the Balkans), I'm now in the middle of a months-long stretch without pals, and it's coinciding with the midpoint of the trip.

I miss my friends and routines - knowing that I'm going back to Chicago is tremendously hope-granting and exciting, but also means I've got some tantalizing memories that I long for, of people and places and habits that always serve me well there. Add in the job search - some strong leads but nothing definitive yet - and there's a growing sense of "when are we gonna get to the fireworks factory" to it all.

A reminder from the streets of Ljubljana

Anyhow, it's all odd. It's odd to see friends post on Instagram from a park in Lincoln Square and immediately think "aw, I'm jealous!" while on a stopover in Salzburg. It's odd to finish a twenty-mile hike in Lake Bled and find yourself looking at Craigslist apartments in Chicago. It's odd finding that balance between a present-tense, here-and-now awareness/openness and looking to the future.

But as I say, and remind myself: it's okay to feel the grit along the way. I am blessed in my friends, blessed in this journey, and earnestly, unhashtaggedly, blessed to be aware of what specifically I miss and am longing for in this moment of "what comes next." That's more than enough, and enough to keep me trekking on.