Previously Unexplored

I want to spend the weekend in Boston. There is a convention there that I very much want to attend – Arisia. At Arisia will be a very high concentration of my friends from all over the US: California, Minnesota, Kansas, Illinois and of course, pretty much the entire Eastern seaboard. I’ve missed all of these friends deeply over the last year even though I’ve been able to catch some time with them and I’ve been looking forward to this convention for a while now. But the thing is, I really don’t want to go.

Getting to Arisia involves spending four-ish hours on a bus and right now, that is the second to very last things I want to do. The only thing I want to do less is getting on another fucking airplane. Twenty-fourteen was amazing for a number of reasons – one of them being the number of new and exciting places I traveled to – but it has me 99% burnt out on travel. The grass is always greener and last year the other side was a home I didn’t have. Now I have that home and even though I logically know that it will be here waiting for me when I get back from Boston, it makes my skin crawl to think about getting on that bus.

It’s been difficult to write about my issues with traveling. I don’t want to seem ungrateful and I know just how magical it all looked. The reality was much different. I desperately missed my friends and family. I was frequently ill and the stress of traveling only made things worse on my body. A simple trip ‘home’ was expensive, time-consuming – usually at least fourteen hours one way, and involved dealing with customs and immigration. Usually by the time I got ‘home’ I was exhausted and barely had energy to enjoy the time with the people I had traveled to see. It was beyond difficult.

It’s not Arisia’s fault that it is the year anniversary of all that starting. I’m sure that I’ll have a great time there. But that doesn’t make me feel much better about getting on that damn bus.