Catching The Travel Bug: Is There A Cure?

It's funny to think about the person I was before I started traveling. I was shy, naive, insecure, and ignorant about the world surrounding me. I knew very little about much except for life in my own home state of New Jersey, and yet I always felt a deep and innate desire to go out and see something else that the world had to offer. I watched movies like Into The Wild and read Jack Kerouac novels, and I deeply identified with this sense of wanderlust. I wanted to go somewhere completely different with no goals in mind other than to see if life was lived any differently and if people were different from those in my home town.

While in college, I was granted the opportunity to do this. As soon as I started taking classes and seeing study abroad posters, I knew it was what I wanted; what I needed. And for some reason, the place that I felt I needed to go to fulfill my wanderlust craving was indeed the beautiful and magnificent country of Australia. And once I landed in my new temporary home for the next six months (conveniently called the Sunshine Coast), I was greeted by sweltering heat and smiling faces and different accents and perspectives, and I knew the from this moment that I had a very big problem.

I was hooked. Much like a junkie dependent on drugs, I felt dependent on travel, and without it, I felt like life just wasn't fulfilling. I had heard people telling me that once you start traveling, you won't be able to stop, and since that day that I stepped on my first place to head to Australia, I've been living my life by a regimen of working, saving, and then bouncing; leaving everything behind to find something new.

They call it the travel bug. I've been infected, and I just can't seem to find a cure. Maybe I just don't want to be cured. Each place I go to just proves to be more fascinating then the next, and I end up coming home with a list of more places I want to go to then where I've been.

I don't think this is a bad thing. When I find more people like me, more people infected with this travel bug, I feel relieved; almost as if there's hope to make this lifestyle work. I'm not crazy for not adhering to society's norms of getting a degree, starting a career, and then choosing someone to settle down with. I'm not crazy for wanting to leave and experience the world during the short amount of time I have here. People have been doing this for ages!

So, even though there's no cure for this disease...lets call it travelitis, maybe it's possible to make it a perfectly live-able condition that will not burden your life, but instead will enhance it. You will have unique experiences that will shape you into an open-minded and thoughtful person, and yes, you can most certainly make a lifestyle out of it.

I just need to find out how this lifestyle is going to work for me.