Last Updated: 6/6/22 | June 6th, 2022

Before my first trip virtually the world, I was driving through Boston with my friend Mike. I was talking well-nigh how excited I was well-nigh my upcoming travel and how I was looking forward to seeing all the changes that would happen in Boston while I was away.

Where would my friends be in life? How would they have changed? What jobs would they have? New hobbies? New relationships? What would the municipality be like?

The possibilities seemed endless.

“Matt, everything will be exactly how you left it,” he said. “Look, when I studied abroad, I thought the same thing. But in truth, nothing will be variegated when you come home. Everything and everyone will be the same.”

“A lot can happen in a year, Mike.”

“I’m telling you, Matt,” he continued, “life will be just the way you left it. You’ll see.”

When I came when home eighteen months later, I realized that he had been right. While I had changed, home hadn’t. My friends, now heading into their late twenties, still had the same jobs, were going to the same bars, and were mostly doing the same things. They were still the same people I had left before. Moreover, Boston itself just felt the same. It had the same vibe as it had had before. There was still construction everywhere, and the restaurants were still the same.

Mike had been right. While I had grown, home had remained frozen in time.

And while I still loved my friends, family, and city, I realized I didn’t fit into Boston anymore. It felt small to me. I had outgrown living there.

However, the worst part was I now had this fire in me that I couldn’t express to anyone I knew. I yearned to try new things, go new places, and meet new people. But my friends couldn’t understand why I was so depressed well-nigh stuff back. They didn’t want to hear well-nigh my trip or all the tomfool things I did while they had commuted to and from work.

To my parents, it was like I was equivocating on my place of birth. To my friends, it felt as if I was now “too cool” for them.

But it wasn’t that.

As Benjamin Button said, “It’s a funny thing well-nigh comin’ home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You’ll realize what’s reverted is you.”

After the initial excitement of stuff home wore off, I had wilt restless. I had post-travel depression.

Returning home is nonflexible and few people write the reality that it’s often an anticlimactic end to a life-changing experience.

After a year of mind-blowing adventures, you‘re when where you started — sitting on a couch, when in your suite or your old bedroom, bored, anxious, and jittery. Your friends don’t understand the new you, don’t want to hear your stories, or don’t get why you finger so uncomfortable.

“What? You don’t like it here anymore?” they’ll ask.

But it’s not that you don’t like it.

It’s just that you went from 100 to 0 faster than you can process.

You finger as if you came when to the word-for-word spot you left. You’ve gone from backpacking the world and trekking in jungles to sitting in a cubicle. One minute you’re your dream you, the next you’re the old one when in an office that yearned to be free. And you finger like you never really escaped your old life without all.

And that’s depressing.

Anyone who has overly traveled the world has felt this.

After you come home, when the initial hugs are hugged out, the stories told (to those who will listen), and the reunions over, many of us find that our true home is stuff surrounded by the unknown.

Every time a friend comes home from traveling, their first question to me is always, “How do you cope with post-travel depression?”

There is no real cure for the post-trip blues. The only real way to get over post-trip depressions is to stay busy. You talk people online, go to meet-ups, or plan your next trip. Keep that energy you had on the road going. Go out, sightsee in your own town, take road trips, find a hobby… do something. Considering the increasingly you stay still, the worse your peepers will be.

But it only overly fades as increasingly time passes. There’s no cure other than time. It’s like getting over a relationship. Sure, you can stay rented but it’s only as time progresses that you slowly uncork to move on.

When you were traveling, you viewed every moment as an adventure. View your life when home as one too. Stay busy. Stay active. Try new things. Keep that can do attitude.

When you do that, home will finger a little less suffocating.

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