Quest: drastically change your life

Whenever I’m traveling I get this urge to change my life completely. What if I were to actually act on it this time?

I didn’t grow up in a rich family, but my parents managed to take me and my sister on a three-week summer vacation every year. We always went camping in France, Spain or Italy and the like as that was usually a 2-day drive from The Netherlands. My mother craved the sun and wanted to see quaint villages. I only wanted to read books and swim. As a child, I didn’t realize that going on 3 week vacations isn’t normal in most places around the world.

I’m currently on a six-week journey in Japan and I just realized that I’m experiencing something that I also experienced when I was a girl going on vacation in Europe: I drastically want to change my life back home. Why?

Thirteen-year-old me desperately wanted to be cool and liked, of course. On the top of the list of things to change back then were my looks, my clothes, my hairstyle and how I acted. I really wanted to go for that “I do not give a shit what you say to me”-vibe while also being cool. It was never going to work as I had glasses and braces and was very insecure, but those were my deepest desires. Ah, puberty.

Thirty-six-year-old me wants partly different things. Hilariously, I still want to change my clothing style and hairstyle, but not because I feel insecure. I guess it’s more out of boredom or the good old never feeling satisfied with yourself kind of thing.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash<

The other things I want to change currently are really more drastic.

• I want to move out of my current house. Yeah, this one is going to be hard to immediately act upon, but I don’t feel at home in my current home. I’m child free, and I live in a very child-friendly neighborhood and I feel so out of place there. I think I will feel more at home in either a city centre apartment or somewhere less urban entirely. Discussed this one with my husband, and he agrees, which is a relief. No concrete plan as to how to change this yet, but it was good to get this out there.
• I want to get back into writing, I completely stopped doing it even though I always enjoyed it! I used to write purely for pleasure, but as a software tester I started blogging solely about testing topics. My new writings will focus on what I think is sensible living. This is still a broad topic, but almost everything that interests me can be captured under that category. The word sensibly really is key. Most things you see on the internet are so extreme, clickbait, rage bait. I want to focus on making it sensible again. Expect topics like: healthy living, philosophizing about living well, challenges of living on a planet that’s going to shit, being a good human. There are a couple of topics I don’t have a nuanced (or sensible) view on, and I will warn you here. I will at some point in the future absolutely rant about cars and how much I hate car-centric design. I also hate the extreme capitalist times we are living in. There’s probably more, but I can’t think of anything now.
• I want to change a lot of habits that I think are “bad”. I spend too much time on the slot machine that is my iPhone. I really need to delete Reddit, the thought of doing that almost makes me panic, crazy. I want to waste less time. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that newly “won” time yet, but I feel that I should use it to learn new skills instead of browsing the latest memes. I have a denim jacket that I bought patches for to turn it into a battle jacket but I don’t know how to sew. Well, that’s a solvable problem innit? Stuff like that. I don’t want to become more productive, but I do want to do more productive things with my time if you get my drift. I guess you can put most things in the habit-bucket under “seeking more fulfillment in my life”.
• I want to travel more. Because of the big C-word, I have been really local for three years. And by local I mean really local: staying in my own city mostly. Being local is cool, it’s good for the planet! But this current travel in Japan has set loose feelings I thought I had lost. Wanderlust is back. I do want to travel more in Europe and avoid air travel for the time being. Feeling a bit conflicted about this one, as our climate seems to truly go to shit.

Overall, when the pandemic forced me to stay at home a lot I was sort of lulled into sleep it seems. I formed some bad habits (browsing my phone for hours on end) and made my world very small by only: working from home, staying mostly home, going to the gym, sleeping. I rarely went out anymore, didn’t venture far from home. I feel like this has made me a worse human being, less tolerant, less open to trying new things.

I will write about this (futile?) quest to change myself for real this time. Can you really drastically change your life? Plenty of people have done it so the answer would be: yes, of course you can. But, I’m not alone in this decision. There’s my husband, who I love very much and whom I have to take into account on my crazy quests. So I cannot and will not run away from home, so to say.

I’m afraid I will fail to change myself because it’s always easy to think about changing your life when you are a large distance away. The fresh perspective is nice, but because I don’t immediately get to implement my desired changes it feels like a trap. The trap is: feeling accomplished just by thinking about the changes I want to make, but when I’m home I will behave exactly the same as before. It’s like deciding to go on a diet when you are in a comfy chair with a full stomach. The plan feels good, you feel good, but you won’t know what you’re made off until your hungry. It’s going to get uncomfortable.

The obvious solution to this possible trap is of course: plan ahead. Don’t change everything at once, pick something and stick to it. My first pick is to change my morning routine: no phone, get out of bed and start writing at once.

That leaves the question: why do I want to do this? Why does travel alone awaken this desire to change almost everything in my life? I don’t know. I only know that I recognize this feeling from when I was a child so maybe it’s time to put it to the test.

Anyway, follow if you are interested in this journey. And please share your (un)successful stories of how you did or didn’t mange to change important aspects of your life!