By Olivia Rutherford 3rd year history
Olivia Rutherford discusses her experience of balancing travelling with her mental health, a story not often touched on in your average 'gap yah' anecdote.
With Instagram photos of sunset smiles, postcards arriving from exciting far flung destinations and messages home to family and friends giving no indication of anything being other than wonderful, mental health is not something we discuss in connection with travelling. Moments of anxiety are mentioned at times, the panic when the passport was forgotten, the missed train connection, the feeling of loneliness in a hostel bunk if travelling alone. But discussion of struggles with mental health, which play a role in our daily lives, seem to be simply left out as we tell our stories and share them on social media platforms.
For me, travelling I thought was a fresh new start, a break from struggles with poor mental health which seemed to be increasingly difficult towards the end of 6th form and I’d kept hidden. My first trip was the Camino de Santiago in Summer 2017, a 500 mile walk across Spain which took me 5 weeks. Light shone in my eyes as my routine was broken and my anxious thinking seemed to be knocked off course. Strangely, I found stability in the whirlwind of instability.
Returning from a summer spent fresh faced and with shining memories, university at first disenchanted me as I leapt from the outdoors to drunken student nights out- not finding my feet in the whirlwind of first term. I was confused and infuriated at how anxiety which had seemed so vacant from my trip in Spain had now come back. Travelling had put me in situations which were physically and emotionally challenging, and yet I found myself in a university set up finding the day to day tasks extremely difficult.
Image: Olivia Rutherford
After my first year at university and a host of part time jobs throughout the year, I travelled again. The journey was beautiful and I was lucky to experience it. From trekking in the Pyrenees to sunset guitar sessions in rural Spain, from close encounters with brown bears in the Polish Tatras to meeting locals on couch surfing and hitch hiking across Romania, it was incredible. However, this time anxiety was not absent from my trip, it was very much present. I’ll not remove it from the story and frame it as an all-rosy trip removed from struggles with mental health, as it was on this trip that I came head on with what I was dealing with. My body reacted in a different way, tension in my neck and upper back meaning that I had to take some days out. My anxiety did become heightened in the context of travelling.
However, as a result I began to understand my mental health in a way which I was not able to through my life in Bristol. I connected with people stronger and places because of anxiety which gave me a vulnerability which I learnt to share and connections and friendships I formed became so much stronger. We jokingly ask ‘did you find yourself?’ whilst travelling, but in some respects this was true. It was through struggling with my mental health whilst travelling that I broke down barriers to my feelings surrounding it, and through these journeys I became able to understand it so much better.
Featured image: Olivia Rutherford
Has your mental health been something you have had to consider when travelling? Let us know!
