When we started this podcast I also envisioned regularly writing on our website, but for three months now I haven’t. I have started a few times and not finished, and other times I want to start writing something, but keep finding reasons not to. I get hung up because I’m not sure of what I should be writing about, or that I want to write things that don’t belong on a travel blog. All sorts of thoughts have run through my head that have lead me down paths that take me away from doing what I actually want to do, leading me away from actually writing something and sharing it. I started writing a post about relationships, and how travelling has helped mine, but then I just let it sit. I have all these self limiting thoughts, like I can’t write on the computer because I will get distracted, and that I don’t have the credibility to write and give people advice about relationships.
The thing that is stopping me from writing is fear. I have been sitting in front of my computer now for 3 hours, going all over the internet looking at things that add no value to my life to distract myself from what I actually want to be doing. Part of me wants to write something and share myself with people, but another part of me is too afraid of getting hurt by exposing myself, too afraid of failure. I grew up in a family where my emotional needs were never met, so I tried to pretend that emotions didn’t exist, that I couldn’t be hurt, and to do this I stopped taking emotional risks. I played it safe in social situations, staying near the outside of a group, sitting in the back of the class. I wasn’t assertive; I never asked people I liked if they wanted to hang out, because I was to afraid of rejection; I thought I was worthless, and I was petrified of having this thought confirmed with evidence from the outside world. To put my thoughts, feelings, and opinions out into the world is a risk; people may not like it, people may think less of me because of it, but I can’t let that stop me. I can’t give into the fear.
Throughout my life, I have heard many times to not let fear of failure stop you from doing what you want to do. It seems so simple when people say it, but the reality is that fear is much more complex than something you can simply decide not to feel. It disguises itself in many ways, so you can easily pretend that you are not afraid, but rather that you are simply uninterested. And fear isn’t something that can be conquered through one act. It doesn’t go away when you force yourself through an uncomfortable situation. My fear of really being myself won’t go away in one action. It is like a weight that sits on my shoulder. Some days I carry it with ease, noticing its presence and moving through it, but some days I feel like I am being crushed by the weight. Slowly, over the past few years of my life I have chipped away at that weight, and learned to carry it better. Moving through fear is not an action you take one time, but a fundamental change in perspective you must make. In other words you will never get rid of fear, but you will change the relationship you have with it. For me that relationship really started to change when I started to travel.
Its funny to think that travelling has helped me improve my relationship with fear because in many ways the reason I went travelling was that I was afraid. I took off for 6 months of travel in June of 2011, two months after graduating university. Finishing university was a frightening time for me because it meant going out into the world and getting a job, or at least that was the view that I accepted. I was petrified of going to job interviews and was really afraid of not getting a good job. I wanted to rest on my accomplishments. I had done well in high school, because learning had come easy to me. I got into a business school that was fairly well thought of, and I had made it through a degree program with pretty good grades. I wanted the world to just give me the life I wanted; I didn’t want to go out and earn it. I felt entitled to it, because I was afraid that if I had to earn it I wouldn’t get it.
At that time I had a weird split in my mind. On one hand I thought I sucked, and had low self-esteem. I constantly had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t good enough, that I was a waste of potential, that I was ugly, and that I wasn’t worthy of peoples affection; but on the other hand, I built up a false sense of confidence that completely contradicted all these things I actually thought about myself. Psychologist Nathaniel Branden calls it pseudo self-esteem, a false sense of self-esteem. Instead of feeling an internal sense of self worth, you look for your value externally, in comparison to others. So I was always thinking of ways that I was better than others. This wasn’t something that I was consciously doing, and I only did it when I really felt threatened. Unconsciously, in my head, I thought I was better than everyone around me because in reality I thought I was worthless. I was afraid to confront this feeling of worthlessness and the feelings that would come along with it, so I hid from it and pretended that I was better than the people around me.
So during the time period of graduation, all the people around me were out searching for jobs. My parents had a very materialistic view of success. The impression that I got from them was that a people’s value could be traced to the amount of money they are making and from the prestige of their job. So when everyone around me was getting jobs it made me scared, because, in my mind, our values are going to be defined and clear for everyone to see, and I didn’t really have the experience and credentials to get a good job. It was a tumultuous time because a lot of the assumptions I had made about why I was better than other people were being challenged. But I had an escape route. I could postpone this reckoning by leaving and going travelling.
It was a socially acceptable thing to do and it gave me a lot of ammunition of ways to feel better than other people. I could run away from the fear of actually going out into the world and producing value. My fear pushed me into travelling, and it was travelling that allowed me to move past my fear.
So how has travelling helped me overcome fear?
Like I said before, fear takes on different disguises, and to make things worse in our culture, we accept the idea that fears of different things are actually different phenomena, not seeing that the root of all fear is the same. There are phobias for everything, even one of being afraid. My belief is that all fear comes from the same place, and that place is a lack of faith in yourself, a lack of confidence in your ability to meet any challenge that you might face. Almost all of the fear people experience on a daily basis doesn’t serve them well, and it almost always comes from things that aren’t really worth being afraid of. Fear is self-reinforcing because if you let it scare you from doing things, you will never realize that there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place. Travelling puts you in a place where you have the time, freedom, and opportunity to challenge yourself over and over again and build confidence in your ability to meet whatever may come your way.
For me, the first thing to be challenged was a fear of social situations and meeting new people. I was, and still am to some degree really afraid of not being accepted by people. I would censor myself in order to feel more secure in my place in groups. In one-on-one conversations with people I could read their facial expressions and the things they were saying to try and adjust who I was in relation to what I perceived that they wanted. I was especially good at doing this with people I knew. But the fear went up to levels I really couldn’t manage when I was in group situations or meeting new people. So I avoided those situations as much as I could, or I would use alcohol as a crutch to get by in those situations. The alcohol would make me feel less stressed and afraid and allow me to operate more naturally.
When you are travelling you are meeting and interacting with people all the time. The nature of staying at in dorm rooms in hostels means that you will have conversations with people you have never met before every day. Over six months of staying mostly in hostels I talked to hundreds of people and I slowly chipped away at the fear of social situations. I practiced and developed my social skills.
The next fear to be challenged was a more all-encompassing fear, a fear of physical harm. Going to South East Asia was something I didn’t really want to do. I was really just going along for the ride because Amanda wanted to go. Going around Europe was within my comfort zone, we had occasional experiences that were sketchy, but there were always places to return to and feel comfortable. South East Asia was way outside of my comfort zone. The first two or three days after we landed in Bangkok, we barely left our hotel and Khao San Road (the main backpacker area in Bangkok). Just physically being in Thailand was challenging my fears. Everyday I was stepping outside of my comfort zone, and gaining more confidence in myself to meet any challenge that I might face along the way. Did I ever get really comfortable in Asia? No, not really. I stuck to a lot of the really touristy places, and took the path well travelled, and for me that was enough to push my boundaries.
When Amanda and I were recording the episodes about Bangkok, Laos, and Cambodia, I felt kind of embarrassed about what we had done there because I was nervous about even being there in the first place. I felt like it was somehow not cool of me to talk about how we stuck to the tourist places. I felt kind of isolated in my fear, as if I was the only person to ever feel uncomfortable being in Cambodia. This is one of the reasons fear and anxieties are tough to get over, because we feel isolated in them. People don’t talk about things they are afraid of, and then we somehow feel like there is something wrong with us because we feel these things that no one around us seems to be feeling. Travelling around Cambodia allowed me to get comfortable with pushing my boundaries, so now as I sit here writing I am more comfortable with the way it makes me feel. It is different fear in a way, but it is similar, and by learning not to act on fear, you make it easier for yourself the next time you get into a situation where you are afraid.
Spending 12 months travelling around the world, experiencing different cultures and being pushed out of my comfort zone has helped me learn to trust myself. It has given me challenges that I have overcome and through those challenges my faith in myself has grown. I still have a lot of fear; writing this has been a massive struggle, but I know that I will be better off for going through it. Travelling has taught me that, and it can for you too.
-Ryan
