The Comedown
I originally wrote the bulk of this piece amidst leaving Albania after living there for five months. Now that I’m about to leave Bosnia after three, it’s only become more relevant. I finally got the courage to finish this before I head off to Serbia.
Travel brings about experiences that have a certain intensity to them.
Mostly and especially positive travel moments deliver a high more potent than any drug, and once you get that hit, it's hard to stop chasing it. Each new experience, relationship, or something as simple as an incredible meal you could never find back home can lead you to a state of bliss that's hard to even comprehend as a real thing that happened once it's over.
I don't think the Comedown is really talked about that much. It's an extremely privileged problem to have, but one characterized by some unique symptoms that range from the bittersweet to a downright agony of longing.
We all have our little strategies to weaken the withdrawals — taking photos, journaling, acquiring souvenirs. For some moments though, these might do as well as a 0.0% beer to steady a shaky hand. You have the memory, but the pure emotion that enveloped you at the time is chained to the past, so unique in circumstance that even a new experience won't bring it back.
But it may temporarily fill that pit in your stomach, effectively keeping the high going for as long as you’re able to sustain the cycle.
“The dreamlike quality of it all can ironically make it easier to slip through the cracks if you don't take time to pause and process it.”
The Comedown is different for everyone. For me, the deepest holes I find myself in are after goodbyes. It could be a romance that gets cut short due to differing travel plans or a tight local community that you finally have to leave behind after moving on. Disconnected from your friends and family back home save for FaceTime calls and exchanging memes, they become your new stand-in family for as long as you’re there. After about 15 years of long-term travel, I've said goodbye many times. It really, really sucks. It hurts.
Embrace the Comedown.
You'd think you'd know what to expect and be better able to brace yourself after a while of doing this, but it's all kind of pointless and honestly not healthy to suppress and avoid those feelings. They're also part of the experience, as unpleasant as they are. They're evidence you can't photograph or buy in a kitschy stall of something that changed you just a little bit, or maybe a lot.
I'm not done writing about Albania — I still have many more experiences to write about from my time here. But that time has come to an end, so here I am again in Sarajevo staring at that crevasse that you never quite manage to traverse. I know I'll end up at the bottom of it for a little bit before I can start climbing out of it again and move on to the next thing.
I didn't plan to write this really, but I was thinking (dreading is probably a better word) about the Comedown and just opened a note and started going. It’s better to just toss it all out into the void where I know the right people might happen across it at some point and instantly recognize what I’m talking about. It’s my little way of embracing the Comedown this time around in a more substantive way than editing my photos and thinking out loud “well that was a nice memory, wasn’t it”.
The intensity of the Comedown reveals a lot about your travel goals.
In terms of my goal for this trip, I feel that I certainly found what I was looking for. I wanted to recapture that feeling I've had during long stints abroad before. That slow transition from feeling utterly lost in a new city to navigating shortcuts down alleyways back to my place at night. Of slowly feeling like you belong after starting out as a stranger. The deeper the Comedown cuts, the greater chance there is that you probably achieved your travel goals, whether you were aware of them or not.
Covid robbed me of a lot of goodbyes from my time in China. It wasn’t even a cliffhanger — it felt like a chapter that didn’t end with several blank pages before the next one. And I was a bit paralyzed with writer’s block as how to finish them. I hadn’t really moved past it, and I knew the only way I could was by taking another big trip.
The more time I’ve spent in the Balkans, the closer I’ve gotten to closing the book on that chapter in a healthy way. Now that I’ve moved on to Bosnia, I spend more time thinking about Albania than an adventure that’s almost half a decade old now. I’ve already been able to connect with one good friend from the China days with the opportunity to meet up with more before I go home for good. That also helps put a pin an experience that ended with a cold shutdown rather than a celebration.
Thankfully, I did get to have that celebration before leaving Albania. And the Comedown from departing, as relentlessly brutal as they usually tend to be, replaced the brutal and extended Comedown from leaving China that a little jaunt to Costa Rica or a Western Caribbean cruise could only temporarily sooth.
Returning from the extraordinary to the mundane
The Comedown also rears its head when returning from the extraordinary to the mundane.
A week ago (months ago now at the time of publishing) I was brushing my teeth outside a guesthouse in Valbona Valley National Park, watching the very first ray of sun pass over the jagged teeth of one of several peaks that surrounded us on all sides. I told myself:
"Look at where you are. Just look at it. One day you'll be commuting, or in an office, or something else that's painfully average. Remember you did this."
Experiences like that one are so incredible, existing amidst such breathtaking scenery after a minibus and a river ferry and another bus, that they can be mind-bending. Is this really happening? Am I really here? Once you're rammed back into a more familiar setting — my apartment in Tirana — it's hard to conceive of that actually being a thing you did. They are two completely different head spaces.
The only cure for the Comedown is to fill the pit in your stomach with new experiences.
The dreamlike hallucinogenic quality of it all can ironically make it easier to slip through the cracks if you don't take time to pause and process it. If you go right back to normality, you could doubt that it even happened if you didn’t have the photos to prove it. Journaling helps, as does telling the stories to anyone who can bear listening to them, in person, or here, where I essentially use my site as an outlet for the same thing.
But eventually, the crispness of even these incredible experiences fade as your mental and emotional bandwidth is consumed by new ones, like overwriting a cassette tape with new songs. Confronting the inevitability of that is also part of the Comedown. It's a good problem to have, a wealth of experiences so vast that the glimmer of new treasures casts a shadow over the old ones, but it's also kind of sad and eventually exhausting to repeat this process over and over again, especially when people and relationships are involved.
I remember when I first got my taste of extended travel, I told myself that I would do everything I could to game the system and keep it going for as long as I could. I'm finally at a point where I've achieved a setup that has made this possible — it is my current reality. I could keep going for as long as like. But like a dog that caught the car, I wonder if "perpetual travel" is really what I want.
Leaving Albania definitely taught me something about myself: I have a finite number of Comedowns within me. I can't keep becoming a part of a community, getting invested in a place for several months, and then ditching it forever. As much as each of these experiences adds, ending them kills a little piece of me each time.
That said, I'm not done with my current trip in the Balkans, and I'm even considering expanding it a bit further into Central and Eastern Europe. But this little venting session is getting out some things I've learned after getting back out here again. I feel like other travelers might be able to relate, so here it all is.
We're very lucky, we're doing things not many people get a chance to do, and I try to be mindful of that when examining some of the pitfalls. But they do exist. Planning to do some slow travel for weeks and months? Be excited. Be super excited. Just know that there’s a sting in the tail: the Comedown. But don’t be fearful of it — it’s impossible to avoid anyway.
The sting adds significance to what you’ve done and experienced and, with time, will make that memory all the sweeter. ༄
Written by Seth Barham
