The chaos of a nomadic head

(Or is it just me?)

And then TGIF, and Camila, who loves to write the letter of the week, sat down to write and....remembered that everything had changed and that I had the new idea of writing only about travel tips.

Nooooo lol

While I'm going through this new madness of choosing what to write about, I want to share the life of the nomad who is "at home" - but doesn't feel at home.

In fact, it's been a long time since I've felt so alien to a place. The places and people are familiar, of course, but it's not my life, you know?

I love come here, and see everyone and then go back to my life - which isn't here.

When you go on a big trip and come back, all your friends want to see you, ask you how it was. On a second date, the conversation is over and you're back to talking about more "normal" things. Even if the frenzy of the trip hasn't worn off for you yet.

When traveling is your normal life and you get back, of course your friends want to see you, but usually they don't ask you about the trip anymore.

Everyone has Instagram.

After that week when you arrive, people have normal lives, which you don't know much about, people have their routines.

You quickly realize that you're no longer part of that society. And that, for me, is much more difficult and painful than arriving in any new country and having to meet people, understand the country, see if I'll like it or not, travel alone or not. Because it was my home, my friends, my life too, and now the stranger, the different one, the one who doesn't fit in, is me.

I'll give you a parallel:

You dear reader, imagine that you are invited to a reunion with your friends from high school or college. People you knew, liked, but are no longer part of your life. And this reunion will be at your old school or college, a place you went to every day, you know it like the back of your hand.

You'll leave your family and friends at home and go to this reunion. It's going to be great, you're going to talk about how life is going, the changes, the achievements, remember the funny stories, try to arrange to see each other more, it's going to be incredible....only this meeting is going to last 2 months, not an afternoon. With the people you already know and care about, in the place you know! It's going to be like before!

It won't.

I've been thinking about it, whether we stay in the same place with the same people, so we don't have to deal with the strangeness of ourselves in the place (and friends) that used to be home. Or not.

Every choice has consequences, and every choice, as we already know, has trade-offs. Every choice! Not just the nomadic life. The ones I have to deal with now are these, and everyone reading this letter has their own.

Well, let's get on with what I promised:

1 - Travel tip of the week:

My tip this week is to see some of the sights in your city! One of my best friends took a vacation last year and her husband didn't, so they didn't go on a trip. She and I went to several museums in São Paulo (my hometown), we visited restaurants we wanted to, we went to Chinatown. It was super cool, and we did everything by subway and Uber, and slept in our own house!

2 - Practical travel tip:

Take a photo of your suitcase open, especially if you're carrying something valuable. Take a photo of the weight of the suitcase when you check it in, record everything! I'm not an alarmist who thinks that because a baggage change happened once, now it's going to happen all the time. But really? What does it cost to take photos? If it helps you in the event of a problem, why not? Even if you need to claim reimbursement from the airline or insurance for damaged luggage or lost items?

3 - Who to follow:

Well, I'm in love with Eva Zu Beck's content, a blogger from Poland who does a type of travel content I really like - in fact, I've been getting a lot of inspiration from her content to learn how to film like this for you, because what I lack is the material, not the trips, laughs.

4 - For the nomads:

How's your sense of community? Not just meeting people, but your circle of friends who you don't have to introduce every time you meet.

On the nomad cruise I took to Brazil, this was one of the topics raised in one of the lectures. There were 400 of us nomads and no one had the right answer as to how not to feel friendless. Some complained about not finding friends in the street to have a coffee with, others - like me - were from big cities and we don't find anyone in the street to have a coffee with without wanting to hahahaha but we had other complaints about this.

I feel that the more I open up my radius of nomadism, the harder it is to maintain a close circle of friends.

What do I do? (and I can't even call it a tip, it's just trial and error)

Every relationship takes work and there has to be willingness on both sides for it to work. Friendships included. I try to cultivate good friends, people I'm interested in being around and having around, even if that means having virtual coffees and sending 15 audio messages that turn into little podcasts to tell me how things are going and find out how things are going with my friends, and the third - and worst for the millennial in me - calling people - yes, as the Mayans did.

Don't freak out little grasshopper, you're not the only one feeling a bit lost about this, and it's not just nomads. I'm reading Leandro Karnal's "The Hedgehog's Dilemma: How to Face Loneliness", which talks about today's loneliness and he doesn't say anything about nomads, maybe it's inherent in being human and not in "being-human-who-doesn't-have-a-fixed-residence-close-to-your-friends" - not that it makes me happy and calm, at least it gets me out of the "I'm the only one doing it wrong".