Jetlag Friday

Travel

Sep 8

Good morning my dear friends!

Or, well, afternoon, as it is currently 12:37pm and I’ve barely had my first coffee.

I’ve been back in the States for five whole days now. Coming off the biggest trip of my life, three weeks dotting across Australia, I don’t really know what’s real anymore. I’m here, schlepping around work and picking up dog shit in the backyard like I wasn’t chasing down emus and cuddling koalas just a week ago. If I didn’t have an entire hard drive full of pictures to prove it, I’d say it never happened. I haven’t fully processed the trip, and I’m sad to say I’m already forgetting so much about the place, the culture, and all the weird little intricacies that make Oz so special, like that fact that they put “sauce” on everything, they use inflections at all the wrong times, and half the country doesn’t believe in appropriate footwear. It really is a weird and wonderful place, and I’d only just scratched the surface.

It is definitely an odd feeling returning back to your regular life after you’ve been out in the world for a period of time. These trips take so long, so much preparation and money put in, then you immerse yourself into the experiences, running on empty like a frat boy on rush weekend, sleeping in spurts here and there, and everything is sensory overload, until your mind thinks that’s the new normal. You come to the end of the experience and try to rectify that you’ll be returning to your “real” life, most likely never standing in that spot again, but it never really sinks in until you’re finally home but it feels like you never left. And as I grapple with the realization that this trip was my trip of a lifetime, my one BIG big one, I’m immediately faced with the new question of what to do with the rest of my life. Australia was supposed to be the trip that determined where I want to be and what I want to do. Am I just going to post those pictures for the Gram, get my measly 15 likes, and continue at my sub par part-time job until I die of discontent? Or am I going to use this time to heavily reflect, come up with a real plan, and get my shit together so I can get the fuck out and see the rest of the world?

Only time will tell <3