Last week I found myself sitting alone in a strange apartment in a city (and country) where I’d never been before—Kiev in Ukraine.
This eventuality had come about on the end of a brief travel jag which had seen me fly from London to Berlin, and from there to Warsaw, before hitting up the former Soviet Union.
Now, in the big scheme of things this is hardly wild, adventurous international travel. I was not wrestling with crocodiles somewhere in the Australian outback, nor dodging bullets in some war-torn area of the Middle East.
Nevertheless, I felt familiar feelings of dissociation as I tried to get used to my new location.
So what is dissociation, anyway? A handy definition which I found online is as follows:
Dissociation is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity.
Which is pretty heavy stuff, when you stop to think about it. What are we, after all, other than our sense of identity? And if that identity is compromised then what do we become?
The Trouble With Travel
Travel is a quick and easy way of creating circumstances where dissociation is rife. You fly somewhere on an airplane (dehumanising enough in itself) only to come out at the other end in a location which you may not know at all, and where the familiar hallmarks of your life like people, landmarks, sights, weather conditions, language and so on are absent, replaced with new, different (sometimes radically different) alternatives.
This can be unsettling, confusing, and—if you’re not prepared—downright unpleasant.
The travelling player is more prone to dissociation than most, since he makes it his business to go to different countries to engage in fleeting romances with beautiful and exotic women. Skyscanner, cheap airlines, Airbnb, Uber and social media have all made this easier than it ever has been in the whole history of mankind. But that doesn’t mean that mankind’s internal operating systems have caught up yet. After all, most of those things are little more than a decade old.
Put simply, we were not constructed to fly to three different countries in as many days in order to meet strangers and endeavour to have sex with them. No one, not even Casanova, did anything so intense. So it’s little wonder that flying round the world for rumpy-pumpy can take its toil psychologically
I myself find that when I’ve been away from London (my home) for a while, it can go in one of two directions. Sometimes I don’t notice at all, and I can go weeks without thinking about—let alone missing—home.
But on other occasions I can start to reminisce and wonder what friends are doing. And then I can quickly descend into a pity party of nostalgia, sadness, anxiety, and even depression.
On a more banal level, like when I was sitting in the Kiev flat that night, I can get voices in my head enquiring—not-unreasonably—what the hell I’m doing sitting in my pants in someone else’s property in a place to which I have no emotional, familial or professional connection at all.
Flying Solo
If you decide to travel abroad on a daygame mission, especially alone (and I almost always travel solo, so I’m more prone to this than many), then it’s quite likely that you will experience something similar yourself.
If so, then I’d like to share some hope.
It passes.
On my first night in Kiev I was feeling pretty weird. It was dark and cold outside and my surroundings were unfamiliar, even a little threatening. So I went to bed and read Dickens until I fell asleep.
The next day, I went out into the street to orientate myself and to do some daygame. And the acts of (a) getting out into the light and fresh air and (b) talking to people were an incredible tonic, as was my renewed excitement for being in a new city.
Now, I was also lucky enough to have some friends on-hand to meet up with, which certainly helped me to feel more at home. But even if I hadn’t, experience teaches me that the simple expediencies of getting up and out and interacting with other humans makes the feeling of dissociated ‘weirdness’ dissipate very quickly.
So if you take a solo trip to a foreign clime far away from your usual support networks I recommend the following: get outside, talk to people (male and female), be grateful for the opportunity to travel, and get excited about the opportunity to explore a new place.
Plus meeting some hot new girls won’t hurt either!)
Pretty soon, I promise that your feelings of dissociation will reduce significantly.
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