One Woman Quit Her Job to Travel the World, But it Wasn't What She Thought
I’ve always had fantasies about living abroad. I pictured myself in dreamy scenarios-drinking my morning coffee on houseboats, buying exotic groceries at open-air markets, discussing philosophy with painfully stylish French friends at Parisian bistros. (Never mind that I don’t speak French and have zero hot takes related to existentialism.)
After years of dreaming about leaving my full-time magazine job behind for a life of red wine andRomance languages, I decided to do it. I knew it would never be easier: I had no kids, no mortgage, and an already-freelance husband.
So last April, we packed everything we owned into a 10-by 15-foot storage unit in New York and hopped on a flight toBuenos Aires, land of Malbec, dulce de leche, and asado. The plan: stay for three months, return to the U.S. for a wedding, then hightail it to southeast Asia for the next leg of our trip. Then, who knows?! Maybe Sweden. Maybe Africa. Maybe I’d become the kind of person who wistfully refers to herself as a citizen of the world!
At first, I loved my new life. We rented an airy apartment in the bustling neighborhood of Palermo and ate gelato till our stomachs ached, and I wrote articles in a cozy wine bar. I traveled all around Argentina and Chile, most memorably visiting an adobe eco-lodge nestled in the hills of the desert, where I jogged through rock formations that towered hundreds of feet above me. And like the other two million people posting #DigitalNomad pics on Instagram, my photos were gorge. I know this because every time I posted, my friends back home would comment things like “heaven” and “take me with youuu.”
But the truth is, it wasn’t all good enough for the ’gram. Every time I passed people laughing at a bar, I missed my friends. It was harder to make new ones than I anticipated, since I spent most of my time writing stories in English on my laptop instead of sharpening my Spanish in the real world. Oh, and that eco-lodge in the des-rt? Kind of stressful, thanks to unreliable Wi-Fi and spotty service, which made it super hard to have functioning work calls.And it turns out that deserts get really cold at night! We tried to light a stove for warmth, but we burned a nearby wire in the process, which made the entire place smell like aluminum.
When we returned to the U.S. after our first three months, I was excited (family! inside jokes!), but I didn’t really have a home: no closet to store my new alpaca sweater, no place to hang my flea-market-discovered handmade hoop earrings. Even seeing friends was tricky because I was crashing with family on an air mattress two hours away from my usual hangouts. I woke up each morning feeling like my bed: deflated. What I really wanted to do-more than move on to the next part of our trip-was veg on my couch and watch The Handmaid’s Tale with my cat.
Experts say this feeling can weigh on you. “There’s comfort in having a steady space in the world and knowing your place on the map,” says Beth Cabrera, PhD, author of Beyond Happy: Women, Work, and Well-Being. People crave both excitement and safety, she says, and while there’s a trade-off between the two, having a home rather than a storage unit satisfies the safety part. “It’s easier to deal with the uncertainties of travel when you have a nice, warm bed to comeback to, even if it’s 5,000 miles away,” she says.
It turned out that this "nice, warm bed" concept was more important to me than I realized. Between the layovers, the language barriers, and the logistical hiccups, I was so very tired with nowhere to lie down.
So instead of continuing our year around the world, my husband and I made an offer
on a house five days after arriving on American soil. On the surface, our motive was purely an investment, but deep down, I knew I wanted a permanent address, a safe place that was ours, and community. Sure, we’ll travel again, but those trips will be way less anxiety inducing knowing we’ve got something waiting for us back home.
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