A Traveler without travel

A year ago I woke up in a cold bed, my muse having left me.

My muse wasn’t a person, to be clear, but a possibility. Travel.

Is this absurdly dramatic? Yes. Is it also personally crippling? Also, yes.

The year has aged (like milk), yet I keep waking up to the same split second of grief. Logically I realize my reaction is overblown; people wake up every day to myriad forms of grief far worse than this. How can I compare this loss of a privelege to things like someone else’s loss of a loved one, or a lost sense of sight, or a lost life path? Emotionally, though, there is no yardstick for suffering. One person’s pain can’t be compared to or calibrated against another’s. I hurt, therefore I am human.

Still, it’s a difficult feeling to accept and to explain. Travel ranks very low on the hierarchy of needs and is something that billions of people have lived their whole lives without. Who am I to feel broken without it? Boil that question down and this stock remains: who am I? A decent chunk of my identity is Traveler, but for the past year that part of me has been locked in the basement, climbing the walls and screaming to be let out. The rest of me is reeling, trying to regain my balance in a world that has itself been knocked off-kilter.

The trouble is, the loss bleeds into everything else. Traveling is both a source and outlet for my creativity, all part of an internal perpetual-energy machine that science says can’t exist but magic has no such rules about. Travel brings me closer to fresh ideas and fuels my spirit. It keeps me curious about the world and spurs my career. It keeps me tied to the bigger picture of reality, rooting my introverted self to actual humanity rather than some abstract concept that I view from a distance. I can still physically write, I still own a camera, but like millions of other creative types who awake one day to find that their muse has left the building, my flame to create has dimmed.

Where some people have hoarded toilet paper for comfort, I have hoarded unspent travel dreams. I jealously guard my pile like a furious dragon, all the while doom-scrolling through my own writing and photograph archives in an effort to wring out a few more drops of creative inspiration. The well, as they say, is running dry.

I’m doing my best with the tools I have: wandering new streets of Marburg I never knew about, rambling alone down new bicycle paths to little countryside towns. There’s a bubble, though. Whenever I get too close to anyone these days, I literally hold my breath until they are at a safe distance, which has twisted into the idea that I can no longer breathe around other people. An enormous joy of traveling has always been the intense and ephemeral connections I find with fellow travelers, but for now even my impulse to connect has been replaced by fear.

Like the rest of us, every day I wake up and must grapple with my brand of pain. I grieve for the briefest of moments as I remember everything the world is these days and everything it is not. And then I get up, and I carry on.