It’s always a struggle for me when I go away on an adventure. Anytime I travel, I know that it's inevitable that I will return changed in someway; but truthfully, every person changes each minute of the day, every second, through every conversation and interaction, through every breath and blink. I can't imagine not coming back different in some way. My perception and understanding of things shift, and my traumas and issues that I'm dealing with seem to not dull, but to lessen.

Either way, Bali and the Unsettled experience proved to help shape me, and change certain parts of myself. Unfortunately it did open up a whole new set of questions and issues that I still have to delve deep into: where am I going? who do I want to be? where should I put my efforts, and where shouldn't I?

I'm still shifting back into regular life, but finding it exceedingly difficult to remember that at one point, I was away, in a beautiful place, learning and growing myself. It's made me realise the importance or having an environment (working and living) that really is positive and not-toxic. A place with bad morale and unhappiness breeds it; will poison even the most even and balanced mind.

As I push through, I'm trying things like meditation and mindfulness (something I started to cultivate while abroad) and work on keeping balanced. While I keep a constant dialogue going within myself and the struggles I'm experiencing, I find it hard to articulate and share the things I'm feeling with others and how this change and transition has affected me. I hope that in short order, things will go back to normal, or I find a normalcy that fits me. Ultimately, when I came back from France last year (I actually flew off yesterday, a year ago) I felt a sense of loneliness and malaise that came with reintegration into my normal life, but that tapered off once I started to identify a new, self-directed normalcy.

Has anyone else felt this way? And what tactics do you use to ensure that this is as painless as possible?

Anita xo