4 Months Into My trip: How Does it Feel To Live The dream?

DISCLAIMER:

This is an old post, when I still used my blog as a “Journal”. I’m currently reviewing the oldest posts and editing them for spelling/grammar/style mistakes. I am Italian and learned proper English at 30 so I’m sure you’ll be merciful.

I don’t believe in horoscopes, magicians or fortune tellers, but let’s pretend for a second that I did..

What if I went to see one  and he  told me that, 4 months from my departure, I would have been living in Thailand, with a boyfriend and a job as a ballet teacher for Thai children? I would have probably laugh out loud!

But here I am. Today I reached another milestone and whilst  sitting on my mattress, in my house in Thailand and 2 fans as my best friends, I can’t help but thinking of all the things I experienced  during these 4 months. And I still can’t believe how far I’ve gone.

I’m  trying to recall all the memories, the faces and the emotions but it’s a damn hard job! and I’m a bit disappointed as this trip has literally been a roller coaster of emotions.

Me, Tomas and the cute little Thai Kids

I am aware that I’m now living in dreamland, and that when I will be back to my “normal life” I will look back at this with a great deal of nostalgia, missing every moment of this life.

But I’m trying to learn to live the “here and now” every day. The future has still to come and the past is, well…in the past!

HOW DO I FEEL AFTER 4 MONTHS ON THE ROAD?

I’ll be honest, This is a tough one. I have so many mixed emotions inside me and trying to separate them clearly is not easy.

First of all I feel grateful for the life I have now: being able to  experience the real Asian culture, far away from my comfort zone is somehow hard but yet very rewarding.

Sometimes I also feel restless, as it’s not exactly  my nature to settle down anywhere for more than a couple of weeks ( I know, I know, I’m such a wild animal!) so I find myself daydreaming about all the places and adventures that  I still want to experience and this makes me feel good.

Sometimes I also feel worried. I can’t help but thinking about  when I will be back , with no money and no job.

I wont lie to you: this thought  scare the shit out of me.  There are moments when I literally panic and picture myself sitting at the dinner table with my parents, eating a hot soup whilst they say “we told you that it was a mistake to quit your job and leave!”

But these are just quick moments, and if I think about all the extraordinary people I met, the amazing places I’ve seen and the emotions I felt, all the insecurities and worries disappear and I know I made the right choice.

This is a dream coming true for me, I worked on it for months and so far it definitely exceeded my most optimistic expectations.

Before my departure I was expecting a lot of fantastic sightseeing of beautiful temples and cities but I got so much more than that. I don’t think my life will ever be the same as it was before my trip. I can feel it, the inevitability of  “there is no coming back from this”.

And it is a great and terrifying feeling at the same time. But I don’t see the “terror” as a bad thing. I’ve now learned that whenever I step outside my comfort zone I am naturally scared.

Being outside my comfort zone implies that I’m taking risks. It means that my future is no longer structured in a predictable way and this also means that ANYTHING can happen.

The brave side of me thinks about this “ANYTHING” as infinite possibilities, infinite paths ahead of me and  infinite adventures.

The scared little child inside my head is a little less confident and sees the “ANYTHING” as uncertainty and danger. But we all know what part of me is going to win anyway!

CELEBRATING MY PAST AND MY FUTURE

I thought about a nice way to “celebrate” my 4 months into my great adventure and I put together a video with some of the best memories of my  trip so far.

I also created my very first bucket list to celebrate my future : 101 things that I still want to do/see/experience (I started with 10, and ended up with 101 only because I had to stop somewhere otherwise the list would have been close to infinite).

Living the HERE AND NOW is now a way of life for me, yet I think that it is important to look at the past with a smile and be thankful for the amazing moments I got as well as  being able to dream about what I still want to do with my life.

This doesn’t mean that I’m living in the future. It’s just a nice way to dream and sometimes by doing that I also get the courage to start putting my dreams into practice. That’s exactly what happened with the dream I’m living right now.

Every journey (physical or emotional one) start with a single step. And the first step  is always dreaming about it.

I’m 35 and if I look back at my life, I can say without a doubt that I lived it to the fullest, on my own terms. I don’t have a single regret.

It’s not been easy all the time, and the more I grow older, the more difficult it becomes. If only because society expect  me to follow a totally different path.

But I never cared much about what “they” say. Everybody has different needs and different dreams. And, as hard as it can be sometimes, I’m not giving up my dream life for anything in the world.

I stay positive, and I can only be thankful for all the blessings in my life.

So here is my bucket list for the future: (I put a star close to the activities I managed to do!)