In 2024, I decided to go down to Mexico City for a month, which turned out to be one of the best months of my entire life. I got to explore an absolutely beautiful city, practice my Spanish, and meet so many new people, many of whom I still regularly talk to.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that prior to going to Mexico, I was extremely anxious about it. I was anxious about not making any friends, having dangerous encounters, and getting terrible food poisoning. I was so anxious about food poisoning, in fact, that I had actually made a list of all the restaurants within walking distance of my hostel and cross referenced with the number of reviews that had mentioned food poisoning.

In the end, nothing majorly bad happened, and, like I said, I ended up having one of the best months of my entire life. You would think that after one majorly impactful experience like going to Mexico, I would have come to my senses and realized that most, obviously not all, travel ends with little serious incident.

But the reality is that as I’ve gotten older, I have continued to experience fairly serious anxiety preceding nearly every major trip I’ve taken since graduating college, including the one that Sophie and I are on right now.

Let’s Talk About Laos

Around Thanksgiving, my sister and brother-in-law, joking about the inevitability about stomach issues while backpacking, asked me what country I thought Sophie and I were most likely to get sick in. I immediately said that I thought we were almost certainly going to get sick in Laos.

The reason I was concerned about Laos is that it is ranked 147 on the Human Development Index out of the 193 countries surveyed. While there’s a lot of nuance and imperfection with what that actually means, Laos was certainly one of the least industrialized countries I would have ever visited. Even though I was excited to visit, especially to see the nature of Laos, the contrast between it and my normal life did give me a fair amount of anxiety.

After going to Laos, I can definitely say that no reasonable person would come to Laos and say that it is a super industrialized country, but obviously people in Laos don’t live like wild animals. While I logically knew this, even before coming to Laos, there was an emotional part of me that was concerned about what it meant.

In the end, not only did nothing bad happen to Sophie and I, but we genuinely felt that it was one of the most special places that we’ve ever visited. We were honestly incredibly sad when we finally had to leave, and wished that we had more time to explore more of the country.

Also, as an aside to all of this, Cambodia is actually ranked 151 on the Human Development Index, but I wasn’t nearly as worried about going to Cambodia for some reason.

Growing & Unpacking

I left Laos with a lot to unpack, both metaphorically and, as is tradition with Sophie and I, literally. Leaving Laos got me thinking about how unprepared I was when I went to Brazil for five months in college. I didn’t have a working SIM card, for some reason, and I had one debit card tied to a bank that I did not inform about my plans to be in Brazil. Yet, I decided on more or less a whim to upend my life for a while and travel. There were certainly ups and downs, but my time in Brazil is fundamental to who I am today.

Today, I travel with two debit cards from two different banks that have both been informed of our travel plans. I have an eSIM app on my phone and a phone plan that has unlimited international data. I even have two international power adapters for some reason.

The root of all of the preparation is anxiety that there may be a problem that I encounter somewhere down the line, like a bank outage or a rogue power adapter thief.

But I think the root of all my anxiety is that I’ve gotten accustomed to my comfortable life in the US.

For instance, I’m very fortunate to have not had to experience true, existential loneliness as an adult, so it was nerve wracking to show up in a city where (almost) no one knew my name and have to make a whole new set of friends. (As it turned out, two friends I had made from college were both living in Mexico City at the time.)

As adults, our lives tend to converge, and we do new things less and less. So new things get scarier and scarier. Some people, like Sophie, are way better about handling newness than others, like me.

And I want to be clear that anxiety is good in moderation. Not having a working SIM card or a working debit card in Brazil were two of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. But too much anxiety can strip the joy out of the world.

There are many reasons that I’m thankful for this year, too many to count really. But among those reasons is the opportunity to get more accustomed to newness again.