Passport Stamps or Band-Aids

Not All Who Wander Are Free

Barcelona Airport. May 2025.

I’m heading to Rome for a long weekend.

I’m no longer running away. I’m simply going.

The First Hit

I remember the first time I was on a plane. I was 21, standing at Algiers airport. Heels on, heart aching, eyes sparkling. Destination: Belgrade. My first-ever city trip.

Ten years and an absurd number of flights later, it still remains one of my favorite trips.

You could tell it was my first time. Not just from the way I insisted on wearing heels to the airport (rookie mistake), but from how my eyes lit up at every little thing: the gate screens, the boarding call, the plane taking off. It was a brand-new world opening to me, a world I never thought I’d get to see.

I was thirsty for freedom and had found a water oasis in the desert of emotions that was my life.

You see, I come from a modest Algerian family. Love was tight, and money even tighter. Trips weren’t really a thing. We didn't have passports gathering stamps; we didn’t have passports at all.

The fact that I heard about the Belgrade International Games, got myself invited, and somehow financed the whole thing through a loop of grit, creativity, and dumb luck? It was a miracle.

That trip changed everything. I was recovering from what I thought was the heartbreak of my life, and suddenly I was somewhere completely new, surrounded by beauty, diversity, and strangers I could connect with deeply. It mended me in ways I didn’t know I needed.

Most of all, I met this angel of a human who showed me an entirely different way to exist in the world. She introduced me to a reality I hadn’t dared to imagine: that you don’t need money to travel. You just need curiosity, resourcefulness, and the right kind of programs.

That’s when my love for travel started.

What I didn’t know is that it was the first hit to what would later become a full-blown addiction I’d go through every stage of.

Euphoria

After that trip, I spent the year looking for and applying to programs. First, a teaching opportunity in Turkey. Then, just before graduation, I found an internship in Budapest. I chose it over graduating that year. Everyone thought I was out of my mind. But to me, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt. It was something I needed to do.

I moved to Budapest through that internship, which turned into a full-time job.

With a 600-euro/month salary, I somehow managed to book a trip nearly every other weekend. At first, it was all joy. The honeymoon phase was euphoric.

I was the happiest I had ever been, discovering Europe one city at a time, getting more cultured one free walking tour at a time, having my mind opened one conversation at a time.

I didn’t care about the early 4 AM Ryanair flights, the -20°C December nights spent outside train stations in Bratislava, or packing my own food to Copenhagen where I couldn’t afford to eat out.

I was high on novelty.

And novelty, as neuroscience shows, is a powerful activator of the brain’s reward system. Dopamine floods the system in the face of unpredictability and newness. Travel became my steady source of it, and its high lasted until Monday.

But it was doing more than that.

The stimulation and variety I lacked in my everyday life were fully supplied by these adrenaline weekends.

In my job, I felt stuck, bored, intellectually under-stimulated, emotionally unfulfilled. My personal life was a series of one-time dates and a 6-month friendship rotation. But travel gave me movement, stories, and the illusion of growth.

Without realizing it, I had started outsourcing my aliveness.

What began as a celebration of life slowly became a coping mechanism.

I wasn’t traveling because I wanted to.

I was traveling because I had to.

And like all highs, the euphoria came with a cost, one I only noticed once I was out of the cycle.

Dependence

Life in Budapest was conflicting in many ways, and not just for me.

It was a familiar story among the not-so-little expat bubble we’d formed. We were absolutely in love with the city. And honestly, how can you not be?

The city had a cinematic charm: every cobblestone street felt like a movie set where you were the main character. Every ruin bar an unexpected adventure. Every cozy café a reason to become an artist. Every wild Gozsdu night felt like it had no tomorrow.

But underneath the magic, we were quietly struggling.

Depressed, not only from the lack of belonging in a society we were structurally and linguistically excluded from, but also from the weight of our stalled careers, the emotional fatigue of impermanence, and the isolation that no weekend trip could fix.

The expat life, especially in transient cities like Budapest, Dubai, or even Barcelona, has a dark side no one prepares you for.

You’re constantly building sandcastles on the shore, only to watch them wash away when the next “let’s move on with our lives somewhere else” wave comes crashing in.

The relationships are beautiful, intense, but brief. The cycles of hello and goodbye are relentless.

It’s a life filled with beauty and burnout in equal measure. And for many of us, this blend of novelty and disconnection becomes a loop:

chase the high, numb the low, repeat.

We’re not addicted to pleasure; we’re addicted to the anticipation of it.

Friends and clients I coach often tell me how, midway through one trip, they’re already planning the next, unable to simply be and enjoy where they are.

This paradox is at the heart of Dr. Anna Lembke’s work in Dopamine Nation, where she explores how modern addiction isn’t just about substances, but also behaviors like social media, food, sex, and yes, travel.

Dr. Lembke explains that every time we experience a dopamine spike, the brain produces a counterbalancing pain response to return to baseline.

The real high? It hits before the trip, in the act of planning, booking, anticipating. That’s when dopamine floods the system.

But often after that phase, the spike starts to drop, and the brain turns toward pain. Sometimes, during the trip itself, you already feel the comedown, and that’s what pushes you to book the next one.

Another quick hit to feel better.

You think cocaine is expensive? Think again.

The Many Layers Underneath

The day I decided to leave Budapest was as dramatic as my life there was.

I was crying on my favorite swings by the Danube, swaying gently to the sound of "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd. My closest friend sat beside me, quiet, she knew I was already gone.

The song couldn’t have been more accurate. I was so comfortable, yet I couldn’t have been more numb.

It was the right decision. But I took it for all the wrong reasons.

I wasn’t choosing a better life. I was choosing not to deal with the one I had.

Reinvention felt easier than confrontation.

Quick weekend escapes had stopped numbing the pain, so I upped the dose: I needed a bigger fix.

A new city. A new life.

Looking back, it wasn’t just about geography.

That year, I was reaching the end of a long, quiet war within myself, a slow existential crisis that led to a breakup with something that had once defined me: my religion.

Just like REM, I was "losing my religion"

I can’t unpack that here; it deserves its own story. But I’ll say this: that rupture was seismic. It left me unanchored.

And in that void, I didn’t just want to start over.

I needed a place where the old rules didn’t follow me.

A place far away where freedom was not just tolerated, but glorified.

I thought that place to be the United States of America.

Rock Bottom

On paper, I had made it.

I was working in a fantastic job in America, the country I had always romanticized as the land of reinvention. My salary had grown exponentially so I could finally afford whatever I wanted: food, expensive trips, clothes, a walk-in closet!

But no matter how far I flew or how hard I tried, I couldn’t outrun the pain.

From the outside, everything looked beautiful. Smiles on Instagram. Brunches and diners. A big corporate job that made sense.

But on the inside, I was unraveling.

I would come home to a messy house and scroll for hours, order food I didn’t even want, rewatch old shows for numbness. Dating apps were open in the background like white noise, not because I was looking for connection, but because I couldn’t sit with the silence.

Travel no longer gave me a high. So, I turned to other behaviors: dopamine-heavy apps, overwork, over-eating. I was trying to plug every hole in my chest with distractions, and none of it worked.

Dr. Gabor Maté writes, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain?”

I was in pain, and I had no more escape routes left. The avoidance techniques I had honed for years suddenly collapsed. For the first time, I wasn’t able to dissociate my way out.

I wasn't just tired; I was existentially and emotionally exhausted.

And that was when something quietly started shifting. Not because I wanted it to, but because it had to. That version of me was no longer sustainable.

America, for all its promises, became my mirror. It didn’t give me a new identity, it showed me fragments of the one I kept abandoning.

Withdrawal

Algiers, 2020

When COVID hit, the world stopped, and so did I.

I found myself in Algiers, the place I had spent years escaping. What was meant to be a brief pause before moving to Spain turned into a year-long stay, a sentence I hadn’t signed up for. My itinerary disappeared. The stimulation stopped.

Looking back, it’s almost clinical in its accuracy: the withdrawal phase of addiction, but in my childhood home. No more airports, no more dopamine from novelty, no more curated flings to simulate connection. Just me, the stillness, and the history I had tried to overwrite with movement.

There’s a concept in Gabor Maté’s work that says addiction isn’t about substances or behaviors. It’s about disconnection: from the self, from pain that never got the chance to heal. I didn’t grow up safe enough to be myself, and somewhere along the line, I internalized that healing could only happen elsewhere, in a freer place, under a different identity.

In reality, I didn’t need another country. I needed to come home. Not to a place, but to myself. And paradoxically, that started in the very place I least expected it to: the one I was running from.

Recovery

The journey wasn’t easy. It wasn’t linear either.

But somehow, I made it.

To Barcelona. To myself.

Dr. Nicole LePera describes the Dark Night of the Soul as that moment when you collapse into the very bottom of your being, and the only way left is up.

That moment happened to me a few months into my new life. This life.

It came after a breakup that quite literally brought me to my knees, as trauma-bond breakups often do.

My first reaction? The usual distractions. I booked an expensive trip to the Maldives- of all places. But the thing about the dark night is that it isn’t just a breakdown. It’s a small death.

The death of the person you used to be.

And the only way out… is through rebirth.

And rebirth demands change.

So I started changing.

And change, I came to realize is an excruciating slow process

I started therapy. I began doing the work, the real work. I continued the long, uncomfortable process of consolidating and integrating all the fragmented selves I had curated across every city I once escaped to.

Every identity I had crafted. Every façade I had built and decorated to survive.

This time, I turned toward my shadows. I named them. And in doing so, I reclaimed my power.

I met myself, truly met myself, for the first time.

And I loved what I saw.

I had missed me.

The real me.

The wonderful little girl who had been hiding for the longest time, afraid she wasn’t wanted, afraid she wasn’t enough.

I took the Band-Aid that was on for years off and looked at the wound.

I met it with compassion. With love.

And I began to heal.

What I’ve come to realize is that my traveler identity, so admired, so envied, was often a mask.

It was shielding layers of fear:

Fear of being fully seen and still unwanted.

Fear of being boring.

Fear of being normal.

But I now understand:

Different people carry different wounds under similar masks.

In my life, and through my coaching work, I have come across some wounds that were covered with the travelling Band-Aid:

• Loneliness masked as freedom- at least it is a choice

• Fear of intimacy- never staying long enough to get too close

• Fear of abandonment- I’d rather leave before I am left

• Need for external validation- life happening on Instagram

• Fear of vulnerability- Hyper independence response

This story is mine. But the wound under the Band-Aid? I’ve seen it in others.

That’s why I was drawn to coaching as a calling. not to fix it, but to help others map their inner landscapes and identify the way to get home to themselves.

A journey I know intimately, no passport needed.