My Struggles With Travel Hypochondria

red and white pills

Anxiety for me goes off and on. My life is like a series of peaks and troughs. Some periods I feel great, everything is fine. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I’m stressing out about everything in existence.

The annoyance with the troughs in life are that sometimes they seem to be hard to pull yourself out of, eventually it can seem almost impossible.

Your anxiety can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy – never is this more true than when you’re having bouts of hypochondria. [Read more...]

Dealing with Bed Bugs in Vancouver, Canada

magnified bed bug on hair

Before I moved to Canada, I wasn’t really aware that bed bugs were real. They were a foreign idea and I never considered that I could get them. My sole experience of bed bugs was that oft used phrase “Goodnight, sleep tight…don’t let the bed bugs bite.” To my mind those little insects were a fairy tale, up there with the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. [Read more...]

I’ve Acquired a (Mis)Pronunciation Phobia While in New Zealand

Speech bubble made from a keyboard. It’s probably no surprise to anyone who knows me that I get embarrassed quite easily. Often times, this makes traveling difficult. To be a traveler, you can’t be afraid to make a fool out of yourself because it’s inevitable. If you’re an anxious, easily embarrassed person (like I am), it might even hold you back from traveling, and seeing new places.

I’m not afraid of going to new places, per se. I’m afraid of making a fool out of myself when I don’t know the how to’s of a new place: how to order from a Korean restaurant, how to fill up a tank of gas in New Zealand, and how to pronounce an unfamiliar word. Although an eloquent writer, I’m pretty horrible at speaking. [Read more...]