What can solo travel teach us about managing a creative life?

When burn out hits and you're supposed to be having fun.

I’m thinking of the Adam Sandler skit where he’s an Italian travel agent who specializes in leading various tour groups around Italy with Romano Tours. The meat of the sketch is him explaining how yes, you can go on a glorious trip to Rome for 10 days but, “If you feel sad before you go on vacation, you will feel sad when you are on vacation.” Because, duh, you are the same person. 

The reason I went to this sketch in my mind is the jokes are hitting close to home right now. I am here in my beloved Paris with all its well-known personality quirks. I have walked ten miles a day for the past three days and have slept about 4 hours a night, max including the red eye I took to get here. I have loved almost every sweaty minute of it until this afternoon.

Last night was the first real good night of sleep I have gotten and it has somehow made me feel more tired - like my brain remembered the alternative to feeling so awake.  So, after a beautiful walk near the Louvre this morning, I came home and gave in to my tiredness with an attempt at a nap - only no luck. This, plus a lack of sun, and an annoying errand I had to run, made me grumpy. So then I gave into my mood which is foul when I’m tired and feel like I’m wasting time.

You can really see the way Joan Mitchell was influenced Monet here

I had a happy-go-lucky post I was going to write about Monet’s waterlilies, which I saw on my first day here, but I thought it is better to be real and tell you about solo travel burnout so here we go.   

I know this is spoiled of me as a woman without children or a family to care for, but I hate feeling tired. It makes my brain shut down. I get angry and confused about what my priorities are. I start to feel lost if I am not able to stick to a self-determined schedule or accomplish something of value like learning something new. Yes, even on vacation I need objectives. 

Plus add to it that when you’re traveling by yourself, you have no one to bounce these moods off of, or pawn them off onto. I can’t make a joke or a snide comment to my partner as a way to diffuse my irritation at the driver of the 69 bus who blew right past me as I stood up to present myself to board.  (Yes, there is a 69 bus in Paris and it has the best route going from the Eiffel Tower all the way down the seine, then off to the Père La Chaise cemetery and beyond. Quite a bargain for 2.50 euros.) 

I have tickets to Rock En Seine a music festival for tonight through Sunday night. I am making myself go tonight because I know it will be fun and I am curious to see Boygenius live. But I feel like the couple from this above sketch who go to The Vatican, spend 20 minutes there then go back to their hotel and watch Paddington Bear 2.  Sometimes you just want the comfort of the familiar, and for your body to finally get some rest. 

I have written about travel burnout before on my Medium page from when I was living as a nomad attending artist residencies for 3 years. I wrote the post after year one and I am curious to consider whether I would change anything.  Maybe I will do a repost here on my substack so people don't have to go to another platform to read it.  (Let me know in the comments.)

The words from the essay that 4+ years ago, pre-pandemic, still sound pretty wise to me right now so I am going to share them.

This is the part where I get to how I solved my burnout rather than lose a bunch of money cutting my trip short.

First, I needed to remind myself that where I was and what I was doing didn’t come with a template. After joining a bunch of Facebook groups for solo female travelers and reading books by women who have struck out on their own adventures, I realized that no one is The Expert. The part of me that wanted to do it ‘the right way,’ needed to make like Cheryl Strayed and take a long hike.

Second, I had to keep in mind that this trip had an expiration date, and so did my life as a nomad. (Not to mention my life on this planet and who knows when that is.) I decided that I wanted to look back on this trip and not have regrets about wishing my time away because I couldn’t see the bigger picture. After all, while constant traveling was starting to feel normal to me, and all European cities were starting to look the same, it was not and they are not.

I asked myself what I wanted to get out of the experience and how best to make that happen. I made a list of my goals for the remainder of my time (drawings, paintings, book proposal, karaoke) and pictured how I wanted to feel (connected, grateful, abundant). I then thought about my resources, big and small, that I could leverage. What would I do if I felt I had enough right now to make it work, at least for the short term?

I hope that these words, while specific to my experience, ring in some way true to one’s life as a creative person. Similar to the strange and somewhat scary experience of hitting the road alone, the life of a creative person can be lonely and without immediate validation. There are ups and downs, and yes plenty of burnout if you’re not careful.  But boy do you learn a lot, and get the privilege of living your life the way you want.

Gratitude and intention as the ways forward still feel like the best moves to me so I will be applying those to the rest of my trip. But also to my studio practice when I get back in there this September. 

What keeps you going when you hit a burn-out wall?