I’m sure you heard this often , the hardest part of traveling is coming back home.

It’s been two months and a half since I arrived back to Romania and not a single day passed without having to deal with the post traveling depression. I’ve been overthinking everything last months, been searching for reasons to feel like I feel, I’ve been blaming bad decisions and bad luck, friends and family, my vulnerability and not having a plan for when I come home. I haven’t been able to focus on anything, I’m unhappy with the way I look and the things I do.

And I just realized tonight. It’s normal. It won’t pass soon. I just have to live with it. And luckily I won’t stay long in one place. Feet are itchy. I’m sure most of the travelers, if not all of them, have to deal with post traveling depression when coming home. It’s only natural to feel lost coming home after experiencing more than a year of different cultures, countries, climates, stories and interactions with people from everywhere.

Life of my friends and family went on , without me. I feel there’s some kind of wall between us, and I don’t know how to break it. There’s not much here I can relate to anymore. I don’t feel like me anymore.

Coming home with all this baggage full of experiences and growth, understanding myself much better and having much wider perspective over the world, I see that here nothing fundamentally changed, most of the things and people are the same.

And besides the feeling of being lost and misunderstood there’s actually no drama, it’s just a fact. I grew. I changed. And I should be actually very happy for it. For the new me. For the experiences I lived. For the people I met. For the perspective I have now.

Life here didn’t changed its rhythm, I just synchronized with another one. With the vibe of other places of our beautiful world.

I’m actually very happy several times a day, between the episodes of sadness. It’s like having double personality. One moment I’m daydreaming of past or future travels, the other  I feel so tired and sad. One moment I feel optimistic and grateful, the other I feel chained and unlucky. When I’m with people I look forward to be alone and when I’m alone I feel lonely.

At the end of the day I go to bed and I feel I haven’t done anything significant. Only very small steps, baby steps in the direction I want.

But luckily I have some things to look forward to: the visit of a wonderful man, setting an online business and flying to Germany (and later to Iceland).

“Life is seasonal” he said

“And this is my winter” I agreed.

Life it’s about ups and downs, I would get bored if it would be constant.

I think that speaking with other travelers who passed through similar experiences would help.

Do you have a similar experience to share?