5 Things I Might Buy To Quell My Travel Anxiety
Bags, other bags, AND MORE.
For most of my life, I thought I conveniently didn’t have anxiety. I didn’t relate to the ways most people I knew talked about the feeling: nervous energy, butterflies in your stomach, worry, your heart beating too fast. I didn’t realize anxiety could also feel like gnawing dread, like endlessly obsessing over which amalgamation of motion sickness devices and/or medicine would keep me from barfing on the plane.
Anxiety often comes up for me around travel. Since childhood I have been prone to intense motion sickness in cars, busses, boats, trains, and airplanes. And now, as a fat adult, travel is where I come most harshly into contact with one of the ways the world does not accommodate me—seats. The anticipation of having to throw up into a paper bag while jammed shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of strangers inside a metal tube hurtling through space… I am breaking out in a cold sweat just typing that.
I often avoid the whole nauseating mess by just driving myself across the country. I spend 4 days driving 9 hours a day to avoid getting on a plane (and also so that I can bring my dog and stay for longer.)
Anyways! I am about to do that whole thing again, and despite having dodged airplanes, it turns out that driving comes with its own set of anxieties! Will my tire blow in the middle of 4 lanes of 75 MPH traffic? Will a tornado crash through Oklahoma while I’m staying at Motel 6 (did anyone else see Twisters last week)? Will my dog vomit all over my center console? (Only the tornado hasn’t happened before.)
This is all to say that often my anxiety around travel takes the form of SHOPPING, of trying to find THE THING or combination of things that will create a sense of ease that I just don’t have. I’m not actually leaving for a week. But until then, you can find me stressing over my shopping cart, trying to decide which if any of these things will expedite my journey home.
I would love to know how anxiety and shopping show up in your life!
Five Things I Might Buy To Quell My Travel Anxiety
