We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
—JOHN STEINBECK
LOVE REVISITED ME LIKE a long-lost friend in 2015. It was the kind of love that makes you question the direction of your life and gives you visions of families, minivans, and white picket fences.
I was in Laung Prabang, Laos. After the bars closed, all the backpackers went to the local bowling alley. Bars in Laos are supposed to close at midnight but, because corruption is rife, the town’s bowling alley paid off the local officials to stay open. Since it was the only place open, it was the one place everyone went to.
I was at the bar ordering a drink when someone stepped up to the bar next to me.
“You’re Nomadic Matt, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I love your blog, man. I’ve used it many times on my trip,” he said to me shaking my hand. “There’s a girl in our group who also likes it, but she’s too shy to say so. She was the one that spotted you, actually. Come say hi if you have a chance!”
I looked over to see a blonde-haired woman in the corner.
“Cool. I might. Thanks,” I said grabbing my drink and heading back to my friends.
Back at my table, everyone around me was in an intense conversation. As I sipped my drink, uninvolved in any of the conversations, I grew bored. They were talking in languages I didn’t understand and I wasn’t motivated to interrupt them and ask them to speak English. I looked back at the guy and his friend, got up and walked over to them.
I said hello again to the guy from the bar and introduced myself to his friend.
“I’m Matt,” I said.
“I know. I’m Charlotte,” she replied.
I laughed. “Yeah, your friend said you knew me. I guess just force of habit, right?”
“Are you American? Where are you from?” I continued.
“Yeah, I’m from Chicago. It’s funny seeing you at the bar in Laos. Small world,” she said dragging out the last two words a bit awkwardly.
About five-foot-seven with long blonde hair and chestnut colored eyes, this girl with freckles and an awkward manner was captivating. I don’t know if love at first sight exists, but the moment I met her came as close as I had ever come to believing in it. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
We spent the night talking to each other, diving deep into our travels, how we ended up in Laos, how she ended up quitting her job, her previous life working and living in New York City, my recent summer living there, our likes and dislikes. The conversation flowed like the bowling alley beer we knocked back.
When the night ended, and everyone headed back to town and said their good-byes at the town square, we lingered awkwardly.
“Let’s go visit some of the temples and wander around the city tomorrow,” I said.
“Sure, that sounds fun,” she replied.
“How about 9:00 AM? That’s not too early, is it?”
“No, it’s fine. I haven’t done much sightseeing yet, so that will be good. You can help me with filming a video.”
“Sure! No problem,” I said with a smile.
There was an awkward silence between us. The kind of silence where you wonder if you are supposed to go in for a kiss or just say goodnight.
Fuck it, I thought. I went in for the kiss.
She kissed me back and then took a step away.
“Wow, that was unexpected,” she said. “But not that bad.”
She smiled.
I kissed her again and we walked back to her guest house.
“I’ll see you in the morning. 9:00 AM, right?”
“Yes, I’ll meet you here!”
I leaned in again and we kissed passionately for what seemed an eternity. Breaking away eventually, Charlotte said goodnight, went into her guesthouse, and I skipped home to bed where, unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get much sleep.
In the middle of the night, I awoke with a sharp pain in my stomach. I looked at the clock. It was 3:00 AM. I bet it was those chicken skewers I had earlier. I knew they tasted funny. As dawn broke, and the crippling certainty of food poisoning worked its way through and out of my exhausted body, all I could think of was that I had no way to contact Charlotte to tell her that I was basically dying from street food. But there was no way I was going to stand her up. Who knows where this could lead, but it would go absolutely nowhere if I didn’t show up and didn’t say why. So I rose from bed and took a shower. Chugging a bottle of water, I combed my hair, shaved, and put on clean clothes, trying to make it appear I was healthy and rested.
It took me some time to find Charlotte’s guesthouse. It was in an alley off the main street that looked very different in daylight. Once I found it, I went inside and looked around. Charlotte wasn’t there. There were a still a few minutes before nine. The check-in lady gave me weird looks as I stood there so I went back outside and waited.
“Sorry I’m late. I’m pretty hungover and I woke up late,” she said coming out the door a few minutes past nine.
“It’s okay. I’m not feeling too well either,” I said as we hugged hello.
We walked to the main town square and had smoothies from the stands that were a staple of every traveler’s diet here. They were cheap, healthy, delicious. Everything you needed.
We sat at one of the plastic tables in front of the stalls, and got lost once again in conversation. Before we knew it, over an hour had passed. Realizing the time, we got up to sightsee and walked to a nearby temple, Wat Mai. Located on the main street, it was a multitiered temple with a fire-red roof accented in gold, dating back to 1780.
We were walking around the temple’s large courtyard when it happened.
“Uhhhh, Charlotte, I think I am going to be sick. Hold this,” I said handing her the rest of my smoothie. “I’m really sorry … just … just … I’ll be right back,” I said, trying to run out of the temple grounds.
I didn’t make it ten feet before I keeled over and vomited my smoothie onto the temple courtyard. I’m pretty sure this was not the kind of sacrificial offering a Laotian Buddhist temple is built to accept, so I scurried out to the street and continued to throw up. I took out a napkin from my bag, cleaned off, and then went to a nearby bathroom to wash up. Composing myself, I walked back to Charlotte who stood there dumbfounded.
“Sooooo sorry about that. I think I ate something bad last night,” I said as my cheeks flushed red. “I am really sorry. This is the most embarrassing thing ever.”
She handed me back my smoothie.
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, it’s okay. I feel a lot better now. I just shouldn’t have forced this heavy smoothie into my stomach,” I said. “I thought it would help. I was up all night sick. I think it was dinner, ’cause it wasn’t the ‘I drank too much’ kind of sick.”
“Why did you come out if you weren’t feeling well?”
“Well, I had no way to reach you. I didn’t want you to think I was some sleaze who cancelled because we didn’t hook up last night. And I didn’t want you to think I just made plans so I could hook up with you either. I actually really wanted to hang out with you today.”
She laughed.
“I probably would have thought that.”
“Should we get out of here before anyone notices I just threw up? It’s probably super sacrilegious.”
“Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.”
We smiled at each other and walked out of the temple. I grabbed some water from a vendor to rinse the taste of sick from my mouth and begin to replenish my fluids so I could make it through the rest of our stops: first, the palace, which was now a memorial and history museum about the days when the country had a king; then climbing Mount Phousi, a large hill in the center of town, to the temple, Wat Chom Si, on top where you got sweeping views of the city, the river, and the far-off jungle.
After Wat Chom Si, we ate a simple lunch of soup—that was about all my stomach could handle at that point—and headed to my guesthouse, where I brushed my teeth and grabbed my bags. I was transferring to a hotel by the river, because the current place I was in was fully booked. The new hotel was a beautiful building with teak rooms, a balcony, a bathroom, air-conditioning, and TV. It might not have been much to anyone else but, to a backpacker who spends most of their time in $5 a night dorms, this opulent $20 a night hotel was a palace. Stepping into my room, I could see Charlotte’s eyes widen and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: I could get used to this!
The following day we went to see the Buddha caves. Getting in a long-tail boat near town, we took a tour up the Mekong River to Pak Ou, where over four thousand Buddha statues are located in a series of caves on the river. These caves are important shrines to the local people and we saw many locals burnings incense and offer prayers. With the two hours upstream from Luang Prabang, it was a relaxing day taking pictures on the river and enjoying the sounds of the jungle as we came back.
“Why don’t you come stay with me? It will save you some money on your room.” I asked as we drank beers and watched the sun set over the river.
“I dunno,” she said.
It had only been two full days and nights but travel speeds relationships up and with no plans to stop seeing her, it made sense to me. However, Charlotte told me she was still hurting from her previous relationship—one that helped spur this trip—and wasn’t quite ready to make that kind of emotional leap yet. They had been together for a decade—her one serious boyfriend—and he had cheated on her.
“Well, it’s up to you. I already booked the place.”
The next morning as we laid in my bed, Charlotte looked at me with an awkward, coy smile and said, “Shit, I forgot to extend my last place. I’ll have to move in with you, I guess. Hopefully it won’t be weird!”
“Charlotte,” I said with a laugh, “we’re always weird together. That’s why we get along!”
She laughed in agreement.
What was supposed to be a few days in Luang Prabang became a week. There isn’t much to do in the area once you’ve seen all the temples and gone up river, but with the cafés, beautiful sunsets, and sleep-inducing hangovers, it’s easy to find yourself stuck there for longer than anticipated.
And, as Charlotte and I both had online jobs, we had plenty to do during the day to occupy our time. We would wake up, eat a delicious breakfast, head to a funky café to work, wander the city, take a nap, and relax. We revisited temples, waterfalls, and bars.
But, eventually, we had to say good-bye. She was going toward Chiang Mai for Loi Krathong, where Thais celebrate the lunar new year and send thousands of lanterns into the air for good luck. I was going to keep exploring Laos with some friends who had come to visit me.
After she left, we stayed in constant contact. Every day was bookended with a call or FB chat. We made plans to meet back up in Bangkok. I rented an Airbnb and met Charlotte at the airport. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it. She was here in real life. She hadn’t found a reason to leave. I hadn’t found a reason to run. For the first time in a long time, someone liked me as much as I liked them, and I hadn’t screwed it up by either being too needy or too rooted to my work.
Charlotte was everything I wanted in a woman. I’d found pieces of her in the other women I dated or hooked up with, but the fact that they were never all in one package was one of the ways I explained to myself why I’d been single for such a long time.
The truth, though, was that I never really wanted a girlfriend. I loved the idea of a girlfriend—someone to explore with, someone to love me, someone to love back, someone to be a constant in a lifestyle that always fostered change—but in reality, Samantha rightly guessed I wasn’t ready to commit to a long-term relationship. Travel was my first love. I wasn’t ready to get tied down. I wasn’t ready to commit to something serious and long term. Travel made it easy to avoid commitment. It let me never get too close or emotionally vulnerable.
But, now in Bangkok, with Charlotte sitting next to me, I felt ready to finally take the leap.
LOVE ALWAYS SEEMS TO HAPPEN when you least expect it. I wasn’t looking for love on this trip. I simply wanted to come to peace with myself and what I wanted out of my life.
I found that peace in Charlotte. She showed me that I wanted to settle down. That I was finally ready. In her eyes, I saw a future.
We stayed together for the remainder of her time in Thailand before she flew to Australia. She was doing a working holiday and joining the ranks of the thousands of backpackers who go to Australia each year to work and earn money for travel.
When she left that fateful December morning, I was as depressed as I had even been over a girl. Though I didn’t tell her then for fear of pushing her away, I knew I was in love. I couldn’t remember ever having really loved someone like this, and seeing her walk away crushed me.
After she left, I needed to get my mind off of her, so I headed to a destination that had long been on my list: Isaan. I had never been able to get to there, despite over a decade of coming to Thailand. My original plans fell through as I became a teacher and, every subsequent visit to Thailand always seemed to pull me elsewhere.
Thailand’s Isaan region was still one of the most under-visited parts of the country. Travelers simply pass through it on their way to Laos, or skip it altogether in favor of places like Pai, Chiang Mai, or the islands of the south.
All of which was fine by me.
Isaan—a land of mostly farms and villages, architecturally uninspiring cities, and spicy and delicious food (some of the best in Thailand)—is one of those places where you can get off the trail and see what life, unspoiled by tourists, is really like in Thailand.
I took scenic bike rides through the rice fields, farms, and small towns, and down dirt roads. I visited ancient Khmer temples where I was the only Westerner, with groups of Thai kids giving me funny looks. I visited national parks and dusty villages with incredible local markets, and was taken to play badminton by local teachers I met while eating in Ubon Ratchathani.
It was marvelous, but it wasn’t the same without Charlotte. I wanted to share the fun and joy with her and I counted down the days until I’d see her again.
We continued to talk every day. I would retreat back to my hostel to work and talk to her. We’d talk about our days, laugh at each other’s jokes, discuss the news, and spend hours just daydreaming about life. It always felt as if she was in the bed next to me.
I had our whole future mapped out. I’d meet her for New Year’s in Bali, go back home to speak at the New York Times travel show, then visit South America before heading to Australia and New Zealand with her. In June, when her brother got married, she’d come back and we’d hang out in the States, she’d be my date to my roommate’s wedding, and then we’d just keep traveling and live happily ever after.
When we met up in Bali for the new year, it was like we had never been apart. Our days filled up with magical dinners, sailing trips, time on the beach, and nights in each other’s arms. On our last night, as we ate room service and listened to jazz in bathrobes at our hotel, we looked into each other’s eyes in bed.
“I love you, Charlotte.”
“I love you, too, Matt.”
For the first time in years, I had said those fateful words, meant every one of them, and someone said them back.
“DON’T COME HERE,” Charlotte said. “It’s super boring. You’d hate it. Go to South America and then we will meet up after.” Charlotte would tell me this repeatedly while I was back home, preparing to leave for South America but thinking of just going straight to Australia to see her instead.
“I want to see you but all I do is work and you’ll be bored.” She was right. She was still working in the same small town in Australia whose only attraction, as far as I was concerned, was her.
Plus, I’d always wanted to visit Argentina. It was a land of food, wine, and stunning lakes, glaciers, and mountains. It was the birthplace of Evita. A mix of European and South American culture. Buenos Aires was supposed to be the Paris of South America. Everyone raved about it, and somehow, in eight years of travel, I’d never managed to get myself down there. I couldn’t pass this trip up, so I relented in my romanticism, and got on a plane headed south southeast instead west southwest.
Buenos Aires was everything everyone said it would be … for exactly two days. Then my brain broke.
Here’s the thing about trying to escape: Your feelings come with you. They sew themselves into the nooks and crannies of your backpack and hang there like dead weight, digging into your shoulders as you carry them from one beautiful place to the next. On this trip, I wasn’t just dogged by the sadness of being without Charlotte, I was under immense pressure from all the work that had accumulated as NomadicMatt.com grew into a site with a million monthly visitors. There were the simple demands for more content and user experience improvements, but as I began to monetize the site with a branded store and courses on how to travel, there was also a massive amount of busy, technical work that was about as far from traveling—or even writing about travel—as the owner of a travel website could get. No matter what I did, everything else suffered and I fell deeper into a hole.
Over the preceding year, and with growing rapidity, I had begun to suffer from anxiety from constantly overworking myself. I felt that I could no longer balance my twin desires to settle down and travel. My eye began to twitch, I became restless when I sat down to work, and I needed to take Ambien to fall sleep.
In Buenos Aires, I was writing speeches for a few talks I had agreed to give, finishing a set of ebooks, talking to Charlotte at odd times since I was fourteen hours ahead, writing my blog posts. But the whole time I felt extremely guilty (or maybe it was shame?) about locking myself up in a hostel and working while in a destination I had so longed to just explore.
This wasn’t why I wanted to travel. The threads of the two lives I had been leading started to pull away from each other. No matter which one I chose any given day—sightseeing or work—I felt guilty about not choosing the other.
I snapped. I started taking Xanax to calm down. I sank into a depression.
Something had to give.
I needed a place where I could see nothing and do work. I wanted to clear my plate so I could start fresh. I figured if I could just sit in one place, go through my to-do list, cancel some projects, and hit the reset button, I could solve my problem and get rid of my anxiety.
I decided to go to Mendoza. It seemed like the perfect place to relax. There wasn’t much to do and, with a friend coming to visit before we went to Patagonia, I couldn’t visit anything as I had to wait for her. I rented an Airbnb, locked myself in, and dove into my work. I caught up on all outstanding issues, nuked my unread email, and just said “enough.”
But I was putting a Band-Aid over a deep wound.
On my third night there, I had my first panic attack. Sitting at my computer in my Airbnb, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. My arm went numb. My chest hurt. It felt like a heart attack combined with an unending sense of doom.
I called my mom. She was a nurse.
“Was I having a heart attack?”
“If you were, you’d be dead already. But you need to call a doctor. I told you I was worried about you. You work too much. Why don’t you come home?”
“No, no, I can’t. I just need to do this. I’ll call a doctor.”
“Please be careful. Stop working! See a doctor. Relax. Call me soon!”
“I have some Xanax. I’ll take that.”
The Xanax calmed me down, if only temporarily. A panic attack is like drowning. It feels like you are suffocating but don’t know why. There’s a feeling of hopelessness that comes with it. And despair. Unending despair. The weight of the world is pushing on your chest, collapsing your lungs. It breaks not just your body but your spirit. Everything begins to feel like it’s too much to handle.
Your heart and chest tighten, you feel light headed and scared. At least I did. I felt scared. Like nothing was enough and I was never going to be enough.
As I thought about the causes of my anxiety, I kept coming back to the word have. I have to do this, I have to write this thing, I have to visit this place, I have to attend this event, I have to go to this meeting, I have to say yes to this.
I fell into “the busy trap” where we say yes to everything. Suddenly, we get caught up in a cycle and we’re going nonstop. We’re overcommitted, burnt out, and drinking energy drinks or coffee just to stay awake. But we can’t see a way out. I always thought this was something that happened to other people. People with a routine and office jobs. Now, I realized I was wrong. I was overcommitted and trapped in my own way.
My panic attack was a wakeup call.
I didn’t need to say yes to everything or everyone. We are the masters of our ship, and if we don’t want to do something, we don’t have to! It wasn’t until my eye started twitching and my chest tightened that I began to really understand this view.
By the time my friend came to visit, I felt more in control. The Xanax was helping and focusing solely on one thing helped focus my mind. I worked, read, worked some more. I cooked dinner, and then worked. The less work there was, the calmer I felt.
On one of our first excursions, we went to a little town south of Mendoza called San Rafael where you can take wine tours and follow bike trails on trips though the valley. We hiked all over and stayed up talking to the travelers in our hostel. It felt like what I remembered the nomad’s life could be. The next day we moved to a hostel in a different town.
That night as I typed away on my computer, three Argentinian guys on vacation from Buenos Aires invited us to drink wine with some of the other hostel guests and staff in the backyard. My friend said yes but I declined because I wanted to finish some work.
“Did you come to Argentina to work or did you come here to drink wine and have fun?” they said, prodding me the way only people who, as Scott Dinsmore put it, prioritized enjoyment over money could.
I politely declined again but I couldn’t stop thinking about their question.
It hit me like a punch in the gut. It was like someone had thrown a medicine ball at me while I wasn’t looking.
They were undeniably right. I didn’t travel to work. I didn’t travel to sit behind a computer. I could do that from home. I had fallen into the same trap that kept me from sailing the San Blas Islands with Heidi all those years before. I wasn’t leading a balanced life and it was because of that that I had developed such bad anxiety.
Here I was in a place I had dreamed of visiting for years, only to have spent most of my time working behind a computer in a vain attempt to finish a never-ending to-do list. Moreover, being in a new place and not enjoying it only added to my anxiety and disappointment. If I was going to travel to only work, what was the point of traveling in the first place?
I was a failure. I had let a workaholic tendency take control of my life. Those guys were right. In a moment of clarity, I closed my computer, put it in my room, and went outside to join them. There, we drank endless bottles of wine, ordered late-night pizza, and discussed the cultures and customs of our countries until the wee hours of the night. We laughed, we cried, we became friends.
Work was not why I had left my home all those years ago. My goal was not to work from anywhere. My goal was this. To get to know new people in new places. To peel back the onion and see how the world ticked. I went to sleep that night happier and more content than I had been in a long time.
With a killer hangover and a large cup of coffee, I sat down in the common area, opened my computer, and a pang of guilt swept over me. The pain in my chest resurfaced as I looked at my email and realized all the work I had left to do.
“I should have worked last night. I could have gotten a few more hours in. When I am in Patagonia, I won’t have any internet access. I need to do this,” I said to myself. I was mad at myself for having fun.
I began to redo my to-do list.
Then their question came back to me like a bad dream.
“Did I come here to work or did I come here to drink wine?”
Being in Mendoza didn’t fix my anxiety, because I never fixed the underlying causes of it. I was working through the symptoms—my to-do list—but that would just get replaced by another list when it was done and the cycle would repeat itself.
Sometimes the best way to defeat an enemy is to deny it battle. I was fighting against the never-ending tide of my to-do list. I could work until the end of time but that wouldn’t have changed anything.
My priorities were out of whack. I couldn’t work and travel any longer. I saw that.
The world would not end if I didn’t publish a blog post.
I was not going to let work win.
That would have just made everything for naught. To travel to escape the nine to five only to shackle myself virtually to a desk and end up in the same place.
I had lost my freedom and it was time to get it back.
I cancelled the talks I was supposed to give. I deleted all my emails, and put up an out of office message that explained my anxiety, how I was taking a break, and that no email would be responded to. I gave my assistant instructions to ignore emails, focus on a few projects while I was away, and not to bother me unless something major happened. I decided to continue to write, because it was cathartic for me, but all other projects would stop.
I would not find Argentina from behind a computer screen.
I had hit rock bottom.
It was time to take control of the situation and make radical changes.
ANXIETY DOESN’T VANISH at the flick of your fingers. It was a miracle that I made it to Patagonia with my friend, and I was proud of myself for making the right choice and getting down there instead of down to the bottom of my to-do list, but I was still struggling with my anxiety and what to do about it. It takes time to undo bad habits. It takes time to heal. And it’s not always clear where the best place is to spend that time.
Was it Patagonia? We’d been there on an organized hiking tour for a week already, our last nights, in legendary Torres del Paine, were coming up, and I still wasn’t sure.
Argentina’s most popular park, Torres del Paine was founded in 1959. It is home to tons of glaciers, glacial lakes, deep valleys, famous granite mountains, and beautiful pine forests. More than 100,000 people visit each year, making it one of the top destinations in South America.
As we approached the park, giant gray mountains rose high above us and a cloudless blue sky stretched to infinity. Everyone on the bus gave a collective gasp. While our guides stopped to get our camping and hiking permits, we piled out for photographs. The crisp air, grass waving in the wind, and sheer mountainsides made me excited to get connected to nature again.
The paved road became dirt, and the bus—lacking any shocks—jostled us like a carnival ride. Over two days, we hiked the famous W trek, first to Glacier Grey, so named for the coloring produced by dirt as it collects in the glacier, then through the French Valley, where we ascended through burned forest, rivers, and along a valley, before arriving at Francés Glacier. There, melting ice came crashing off cliffs like intense thunder. We stood in the glacier’s shadow, eating lunch and waiting for the cracking ice.
On the last day, we set out to tackle the park’s most famous hike: the twenty-two-kilometer round-trip to the Torres Towers, one of the most difficult I’d done since the twenty-kilometer Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. But these three towers set on a glacial lake are picture perfect, with their granite, ice-covered spires set above an aquamarine lake, and worth any hike. I could swear it was a photo used as computer wallpaper.
After my group ascended to the top, ate lunch, and started back, I opted to stay behind. I wasn’t ready to leave. I found the area too peaceful. Staring at the Torres peaks, the energy of the area calmed me down and for the first time in a long time, I was content to just be. To just enjoy where I was without worry of what work was waiting for me at the bottom of the mountain.
Over the previous few days, I had thought about work a lot. It loomed in the back of my mind as the days ticked by and I wondered what was going on in the outside world. Was everything okay? But I realized, if something had gone wrong, there was nothing I could do anyway, so why freak out? Here in front of this natural wonder, worry faded from my mind.
I couldn’t change the things I had no control over. I had to learn to let go. The cause of my anxiety was that I had overextended myself. If I wanted to get rid of my anxiety, I would have to change my life.
Patagonia is one of those locations on earth that makes you realize how small you are and just how grand and significant nature is. When I came back to civilization, I found that nothing had changed. My website didn’t go down. The sky never fell. No one cared that I wasn’t answering emails. In fact, the opposite was true. Most people were happy I was taking a mental health break and encouraged me to not get so wrapped up in work.
It felt odd. Here I was exposing a life of freedom and flexibility to millions of hopeful nomads, while I was slowing wrapping myself up in chains and doing the opposite.
As I boarded a flight to Australia at the end of February 2016, the month I had spent offline flooded back to me in a rush of reflection. I had found the cause of my anxiety and I had learned that being offline wasn’t the end of the world. There were still flashes of worry. Flashes of panic. Something that takes control of you for so long doesn’t go away so easily, but the month-long detox had at least put me on the road to recovery.
I found the cause of my discontent.
Now it was time to find that solution.
It was a solution that would teach me my most valuable lesson yet—and forever change my relationship with Charlotte.