Closing the chapter on South America

Excuse me while I blow the cobwebs off this blog.

South America feels like an eternity ago, but we are back and we will never be the same. Not that anyone around us will probably realise, but South America fundamentally changed us forever. Not so much South America itself, but just circumstances and experiences that happened to us and around us during the time period we were away. If anyone has ever watched the TV show ‘life in pieces’ they will understand what I mean about lots of little stories all happening simultaneously, discrete from one another but ultimately all linked. That's how our time in South America felt. It wasn't just one story, the story of us in South America, it felt like there were all these little stories happening around us involving us directly or not, and all of it impacted and shaped us in ways we never expected.

People say travel changes you and it does, our first big adventure off into Japan and then living in Australia definitely changed us as people, but this changed us in a different way, I think it broke us a little. Then again when I look back, I think at times we were a little bit broken in Australia too.

Everything feels different now. We are different, our perception of people and circumstances are different, our priorities are different, our outlook on life is different. But I'm sure to the world we seem the same. I suppose that's the reality of your mental state, mostly invisible on the outside but glaringly obvious on the inside.

South America was very intense for us mentally, we felt very disconnected from our previous life. Everything was felt so deeply, and discussed in-depth and dwelled on, pondered and mulled over until you couldn't see beyond it. Every thought that came into your head stayed there and bounced around gaining traction as there were no distractions to dampen them. I remember saying to Philly, "life would be so much easier if we were stuck in the daily grind" and I stand by that statement. Life is easier when you're busy going through the motions, because you don't allow your self time to think, time to reflect, time to ponder deeply, time to question yourself, your life, your priorities, your future, your relationships. It's easy to go through the motions and to fill your time. And when there are no motions to go through, when everything is constantly new, everything is a challenge and every thought has time to brew… it's bloody hard. I'm sure a lot of people are experiencing excess time with their own thoughts due to the lockdown restrictions during this pandemic, I imagine there are a lot of thoughts bouncing around heads, realisations and priorities shifting, a lot of people longing to return to the daily grind and a lot of people realising they don't want to. Time in your own thoughts is painful and it’s jarring, but it’s very necessary.

I'm the type of person who can only write about what is in the forefront of their mind, so many random blogs are brewing in the background but none seem relevent until I close the psychological chapter that was our time in South America. I felt I couldn't write  because many of the stories that shaped us weren't our own, but now I feel I can write again, I can write about us.

Our time in South America was spent deconstructing everything we thought about ourselves and our lives, and not by choice, but you can't choose where your mind goes, trust me I tried, I have battled with my subconscious and I lost miserably. I thought it was a dark time, but it wasn't dark, upon reflection I see it was more like a ridiculously vibrant time, where everything was so intensely colourful and rich, our emotions were all felt so deeply that sometimes we longed for grey, but I'm glad we don't live in the grey; it's safe and comforting, but it's not real. Life is colourful and painful and all-consuming to the point of exhaustion, but that's the vibrant life we should live, and that's what South America gave us.

Now as the world seems to be starting the process of returning to our new normality, more and more of us are re-entering the daily grind and with that comes a certain fear. A fear of the grey, I desperately hope that post pandemic, post South America we stay rich in-depth of colour, aware of what is important, conscious of our decisions, continually reflecting and re-evaluating and appreciating this gift of life. Now that I see these experiences were deep colour rather than darkness I feel I can write again and I will no longer yearn for the grey.

Pursuit of honesty in our broken identity

Well we have been radio silent for a while now, and honestly it’s because I have had no idea how to put into words our mental state these last few weeks. It’s funny because we’ve tried to explain to people a few times through text or on video call and everyone seems to glaze over it, move onto the next topic. No-one seems to really understand we’ve been struggling so much, or even seem to realise that we have been trying to ask for help. Thankfully, I can say we seem to have worked through it, and are coming out on the other side. Weirdly though the thing that has shook us so deeply was the breakdown of somebody else’s relationship. Bare with me, because I’m starting to think that everybody out there thinks we shouldn’t care about other peoples relationships, but the truth is we really do.

Part of me wonders if everyone else just pretends to be ok. Or maybe its because other people have many things to preoccupy their lives with that they can push it to the back of their mind, whereas we are out here with nothing but free time to ponder. I don’t think that’s true though because when we found out about our travel buddies relationship breakdown just before this trip, we were both super busy, yet we really struggled to come to terms with it. We both went into a state of shock, we were both mourning for the loss of their relationship, or the relationship we thought it was. It was so unfathomable to us that there would be cracks or flaws, because we thought they had it all figured out, they were living the dream, they seemed so happy. We couldn’t escape the pain of their broken relationship. It felt like the world had come along with a bat and knocked our legs out from under us. This time though, it was more like the world came a long with an axe, hacked off our legs and beat us over the head with the bloody stumps.

It doesn’t matter if its friends, family or random YouTube couple you follow living in a van - the break down of other peoples relationships seems to really affect us. Philly and I were walking home alone from Machu Picchu and I am sobbing my heart out and Philly is trying to help us navigate the path through this to help understand why this is affecting us so much emotionally and how to come through on the other side. How can the breakdown of somebody else’s relationship make us feel like this. We have both felt so empty inside, void, like someone has died. We literally felt like nothing mattered anymore, like there was no purpose to anything. We felt like we couldnt trust anyone or anything. We were shadows of oursleves. On the long walk down those hundreds of steps, Philly spoke some serious wisdom. He said that we need to learn to identify with people not build our identity in them.

Philly had realised that we seem to have built parts our identity upon these key people in our lives. It was only when randomly talking to my little sister about religion did I really understand what he meant. I was explaining to Ciera how if people base their faith in God upon the actions of Christians (similarly for any religion) they will ultimately stop believing in God, because we are all humans and we are flawed. Your faith cannot be built on people it has to be about a relationship between you and God. Then I realised this was what Philly and I were experiencing. When our beliefs in certain lifestyle choices, our belief in love itself, in honesty, when these are being shaken by the failings of those around us, we have clearly built our belief systems in the people rather than the ideals themselves. This is what we have found so hard about all the various perceptions we have of people in their happy relationships and happy lives, because we’ve realised we put our belief in those life choices and systems ultimately in the success stories of these people. So when people we respect are full time travelling, or self employed, not following the 9-5, pushing for the dream, raising kids that fit around their lifestyle, living in a van, whatever it is... whenever their relationships breakdown, for us we lost hope in all ideals we associated with them. The things that underpin our identity we had built in people who we identify with, so when those people fail our identity failed with them.

Over and over again people we love and respect are coming out as not being truthful with themselves or those around them and this is really difficult to come to terms with. Philly says I am a rare breed, someone who is so unashamedly open about themselves and their failings, but I cant live in a world where I believe this is rare. A good friend of mine asked why I shared everything online and not just write it for myself and the truth is I want people to critically engage with their own mental state. I hope that being brutally honest about our own headspace rather than pretending everything is ok will encourage more people to be honest with themselves. Maybe someone is going through what we are, putting their identity in the wrong things, or maybe someone is struggling to come to terms with something and are too afraid to reach out for help, or maybe someone is in the midst of their own relationship breakdown, I don’t know. But what I do know is you have to be honest with yourself, don’t pretend everything is ok. I truly believe the truth can never be wrong.

Donkey Induced Reflection

What type of self reflection can be brought on by a donkey? Well not so much the donkeys themselves, as conversations about them. I was speaking to my friend on the phone telling her I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about donkeys for three days. On our hike, at the summit of the mountain we were greeted by donkeys coming up the other side. One had collapsed in exhaustion when it reached the top, the others then stumbled down the steep rocky descent, their joints groaning under the weight of the load they were carrying, They were going over on their ankles, knees buckling beneath them. The very last donkey was physically unable to carry on, so was then kicked violently down the mountain by his handler. Upon witnessing this I obviously started to cry lol (See picture of me at the summit about to cry). From that moment on all I could think about were the donkeys and cried half way down the mountain. Anyway, I’m telling my friend all of this on the phone, how heartbreaking it is and how people wouldn’t use them if they knew the reality of using donkeys on tours. To which she responded “This is typical Keely, you always have to be someone’s saviour… now it’s the donkeys!”

Me about to cry at the donkeys

At the time I laughed, “yeah, typical me haha”, but then I sat wide awake for three hours that night thinking about the ‘you always have to be someone’s saviour’ part. She had said maybe time on the other side of the world should be for me to stop needing to always be involved in something, to stop trying to fix people and think about my self. So I lay in bed thinking about this, wondering what it would be like if I didn’t always want to wage into battle on behalf of the underdog (or in this case underdonkey). So I’m lying wide awake questioning everything about my own personality and trying to think about anyone else I know who also “always has to be someone’s saviour”. Maybe they are egotistical, maybe wanting to help people is all a farce and we are truly selfish at the core. Then I realise the perfect person who fits this description my friend had for me... my dad.

My little sister and I have always said, “Dad is too good for his own good”. Whether its bringing home the drunk homeless guy (who clearly fancied my mum) to give him showers and food, or giving up a spare room in our house to recovering addicts, or being a personal taxi service for the Syrian refugees, or the various committees he is on trying to help the underprivileged, or just befriending broken people and bringing them out for coffee every time you think you are getting some alone father daughter time. The man has his thumb in so many pies its hard to keep track!

Last year I bought my dad a book called “The Best Yes” in the hope he would realise he doesn’t always have to try and help everyone because he is spreading himself too thin. How ironic that I’m trying to tell my dad that sometimes he needs to look after himself and his family and not always try to be everyone’s saviour, and here I am being told the same thing a year later (on a much smaller scale). As I think about my dad and how infuriating he can be, I am deeply aware that he does it all from a place of love. There is no egotistical nature in him at all, he doesn’t try to help people to make himself look or feel good, even when the things he’s involved in are ridiculously stressful, time consuming, emotionally and physically draining – the man can’t help himself! It would actually hurt him to watch people suffer if he thought he could make a difference. I lay there in bed thinking about all this, becoming fully aware that this is me.

Philly says I’m turning into my dad and in turn he is becoming my mum. His perfect example was when some donkeys arrived where we had set up camp, I obviously had to stroke them, show them love and try feed them (all captured on video), Philly then had to shout at them to go away as they started to invade our camp and were going to end up eating all our stuff and trampling our tent. He told me this was the perfect metaphor for my dad and mum. Where dad always wants to show everyone love and help them and welcome them in, and mum is the one that has to shoo them away, but ultimately to protect us. Now I see that Philly doesn’t want to shout at the donkeys, but I put him in a situation where he has to, and this is genuinely the same as my mum and all the ‘cronies’ dad has brought into our lives. I have so much love and respect for my parents, it’s only as I grow older and start to turn into them, do I really understand how they shaped each other.

Anyway, where am I going with this all... I barely know myself.

I think all this donkey prompted reflection has made me realise that I am my father, and it would be psychologically painful for me to stop trying to be involved and help the metaphorical (and actual) donkeys. So my friends recommendation to focus on myself while in South America would ultimately leave me completely miserable and empty. However, equally I am aware I don’t want to turn Philly into my poor mother, so it seems I need to find some sort of balance.

I think the desire to be a ‘saviour’ is not some egotistical selfish desire to make yourself feel good, I genuinely think it is something innately human. If you seen an abandoned baby animal - I reckon most of us instinctively would want to take it home and nurture it? Not for some self gratification, but because within us all is that desire to help… to save. Are all humans called to be saviours at our core?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

Keely x

Embracing Our Current Emptiness

Do you ever feel a bit empty and not fully understand why? I think that’s been us this week. The thing with travelling is it leaves you a lot of time with your own thoughts. The long buses, or the time swinging in a hammock or lying on a beach. Maybe those last two seem super relaxing, they probably are when you are on holiday, but for me it’s changed this week. It’s officially moved from Summer holiday territory, to long term travel. All my colleagues at home are back to work, all Philly’s Uni friends have moved onto their next thing, and we are here, swinging on hammocks and drinking beer on the beach. Excuse me while I verbal diarrhoea my live thoughts here as I’m sure things will change as the weeks and months go by. However, right now we are having a lot of long talks and a lot of reflecting. I presume a lot of people who enter into long term travel experience similar things. I mean I could probably wait till we come out on the other side and have lovely dialogue about finding ourselves or some crap, but maybe people need to hear about people losing themselves as well.

I think for me the struggle is losing a sense of purpose, I feel a little aimless at the moment, and I am the type of person that needs a purpose, to be working towards something. I remember after Uni I missed that feeling of constantly having something on my mind, ya know, even when you were binge watching Scrubs, at the back of your mind you knew there was some work or assignment or revision you had to do. I remember telling my brother in law I thought I wanted to do teaching, and he said I would always be bringing work home, i would always have marking to do and planning, and I would never have a free evening or weekend again. He said teaching would consume my entire life, and for some reason that made me want to do it even more lol. I can’t switch off, I need to have something to do. Philly jokes even teaching wasn’t enough for me, I had to become a youth leader and have youth to worry about on the weekends and call throughout the week, and join the tennis committee so I had those emails and meetings to worry about. I personally need to be involved, I need a purpose, I need to be useful and here I have none of that.

It should be freeing, but it’s less peaceful freeing and more like wtf am I doing freeing. Perhaps this is the beginning of the “finding yourself” people talk about when you long term travel. When you don’t have the busyness of every day to distract you, where you are just confronted with the constant dialogue of your own mind. Don’t get me wrong, we are having lots of fun, but there is a lot of time between the fun where we are both questioning everything in our lives lol. What am I doing? What is important to me? Why are we here? What makes us happy? We appreciate now some of the things that made us happy back in London. Number one: Vegan food options – everywhere! London is so easy for us to eat out, any type of cuisine we want at any time is only a tube ride away. We miss that A LOT. We miss our local climbing centre @Stronghold we love you. We were climbing almost 4 times a week, now we’ve climbed 4 times in a month. I miss tennis, he misses playing music & drums, I miss Church, he misses time alone and we both miss seeing my awesome nieces all the time and our idiot cat.

Being away definitely makes you think about the things you value in life, the things that matter. Turns out food matters to us more than we both realised lol, the days we’ve had a kitchen and a veggie market have been amazing, I’ve really loved experimenting making some yum vegan food. I’ve also realised that plastic waste bothers me a lot more than I thought it did, as well as waste in general and the affect us humans and our consumerist ways are having on the Earth. Philly is realising how much he truly loves bouldering and that it brings him real peace, it’s something he wants to focus on more when we get back. More than ever, we are both realising that things brings us no real joy at all. We don’t miss our clothes, our stuff, our apartment or even our comfort, we miss a purpose.

I would encourage everyone to take time out from the busyness of their life to try and reflect a bit more. Even though it’s difficult here constantly doing it, I reckon trying to do it a bit in everyday life is probably really good for mental health. Also, if anyone else out there is trying something new and like us are wondering what the frig you are doing, I would say persevere! Embrace feeling lost, because only when you are lost can you be truly found (or some similar cliche). Well, we hope so anyway!

Philly & Keely

The choices that brought us to South America

So here we are on our final day in Quito, Ecuador writing about the choices that brought us here. It all started two summers ago, we were travelling through Asia with our friends Damian and Georgia. They were heading to Canada next and then planning to do a South America trip. We joked about maybe joining them in S.A. for a few weeks in summer 2019. After that trip many months passed without thinking about S.A. Over a year later from initial convo we see them again and we talk about this potential trip. We say we will try come for up to 6 weeks, then Georgia joked 6 months, we all laughed and then looked at each other and said, maybe we could do six months??

This began a long process of discussions between the two of us about how feasible this was and what it would mean for our lives. The more we talked the more ludicrous it seemed. Philly would be graduating Uni summer 2019 (mature student beasting his Creative Musicianship degree), he was worried about the risk of leaving the music scene for 6 months as soon as he graduated. As for me, I had started a new job which I really loved and didn’t want to leave, the thought of having to start all over again at another school when we came back was soul destroying. We had our rental apartment, where we were signed into lease which still has 7 months left on it this summer. There was also the fact that we had literally no savings at that point to pay for 6 months travelling, as well as the responsibility of our awesome cat, Gus.

So based on all that, when we talked about it, it seemed like all logic pointed to this being a terrible idea. We would almost talk ourselves out of it or let other peoples opinions sway us in what we should do: “you should focus on your career”, “you should wait another year”, “you should have at least X amount of money”, “you shouldn’t leave London music scene", “you should be settling down”, “you should be moving back to Ireland”, “you should be having kids”, “you shouldn’t go it’s too dangerous... too foolish... too expensive”. However, none of the logical advice seemed to land with us. We realised that choosing not to go meant we were buying into societies view of success, the things we were afraid of losing were irrelevant in the grand scheme of life to us. So similarly to when we moved to Australia and when we moved to London, we made a decision based on what felt right in our gut, not from a list of pros and cons defined by those around us. Sometimes its easy to stay in your current chapter of life because its safe and comfortable and familiar. The safe decision for us would have been to laugh off our friends comment and stay in London, but we never want to make a decision to stay out of fear or comfort, in every chapter of our lives we always want to pursue joy, in all it’s scary uncertainty.

I personally find it really difficult to watch people around me make decisions based on fear, Philly thinks i get too emotionally invested in peoples life decisions and struggle not to get involved. It’s true I get upset when people don’t make the life decisions I think they should, but in my defence, it’s only when I know they are lying to themselves. People can make whatever life decisions they want, but don’t lie to yourself about why you are making them. Watching people hold onto toxic relationships because they are afraid they will get someone worse or no one at all, or people staying in a job that makes them miserable because of financial security, or buying a house because its the next logical life step even though they don’t want to settle just hurts me. If you are staying in a relationship because of fear of the unknown without them, that’s the wrong reason to be in one. If you are staying in a job you hate because its safe, you need to decide which is more important to you, the security of money or pursuing something you truly love. Then again, I haven't lived your life, I dont know what history people are making their decisions based on, so really what right do I have to assume I know what's best. Maybe I do care too much, but if you ask yourself why you are making a choice and the answer is fear, is it the right choice? Only you can judge that.

Everyone has something that will bring them joy, something that drives them. For some people it’s money, for some it’s family, or having a nice home to make your own, or career success, a loving relationship, adventure, travel, whatever it is. I’m not here telling everyone they should travel more, because that wouldn't bring everyone joy, but I just want people to stop allowing fear to dictate their life choices, if we did we would still be in our home town in our lovely little house 8 years later. For us we just have to take life one chapter at a time. Don’t get me wrong, its frigging scary sometimes, not knowing what you are doing next can be overwhelming, like what is Philly doing when we get back, what’s our living situation going to be as we are effectively homeless after a couple weeks.? Or many other unkowns we have waiting for us. (I’m super lucky that my school are allowing me to come back after S.A. so that’s one less thing to worry about) However, the fear of what would come on the other side was not enough to define our decision.

Philly’s key question in life is “what’s the alternative?” I reckon we should all ask ourselves that in the face of fear. Maybe instead of thinking about all the things that might happen if you make the bold decision, you should think about what will happen if you don’t. For example: are you too afraid to leave that job? So your alternative is to stay there and work a job you hate, 9-5 for the next forty/fifty years, taking a few weeks holiday to keep you alive? Living for the weekend and your holidays, that’s the life you are choosing for yourself? As I’ve said before, we need to be aware that not deciding is a decision in itself, you are deciding to settle for what you have.

Look, we are completely out of our depth, we know barely any Spanish, we have no concrete plans and we definitely do not have enough money, but we are absolutely pumped! We chose to lean into the fear and step into the unknown because what was the alternative? Ask yourself, what’s yours?

Philly & Keely

Never pursue societies view of success, pursue joy.

Our fight against incremental regret

So as we enter into the next metaphorical chapter of our lives, it seemed like the right time to finally commit to writing this blog together. As a couple we have had many big life changes through the years (they will get their own throwback blog posts at some point), but this blog will soon begin with a post about our choices behind packing up our lives in London to travel South America for 6 months.

Firstly though, we will give a bit of context about us and this blog. We are both quite reflective and talk a lot about life, always wanting to make choices that feel right for us. Our biggest fear in life is having incremental regret, where we have made lots of little safe decisions, leading us to a less fulfilling life. The thing with this type of regret is it’s so subtle you don't even see it happening. So for us, we debate everything! Every choice is purposeful, never made from complacency, and most definitely, never made from fear. I think when people first hang out with us they think we fight a lot, but hopefully they soon realise it’s a healthy debate, a back and forth ending in a compromise and (almost) always laughter. Everything is always out on the table for us, communication is so important, we should never being afraid to tell each other where we are at.

Something we need to constantlly fight against is our tendency to opt out of deciding, we’ve realised not choosing is a choice in itself, we’ve chosen to settle for what we have. Avoiding decisions by procrastinating is something we are both regretfully very guilty of. Even in little things like not deciding whether to buy a drone before we left or not, basically meant we were deciding not to get one, because they are double the price in S.A., or thinking I will pay later for the Wimbledon tickets I won in a ballot, but then missing out because I missed the deadline. These are just two examples of small things we didn’t do, which left us frustrated with ourselves.

However, what we can say is so far, we have never missed out on big opportunities by procrastinating, or by making the wrong decisions based on the wrong reasons. We are proud of the fact that we tend to go all in on stuff if it feels right. Even if those big decisions look crazy to people on the outside, and even though we have a tendency to have a “wing it” vibe, people should know the winging it comes off the back of a big decision that took a lot of debating to make sure we were both 100% onboard. When you're a couple you have to both be all in for big life decisions to work, even if it’s you having enough faith in the other person to lead the way, but when you are in you are in!

For us we’ve talked about writing a blog for a long time, and it’s one of the things that was starting to slip into the incremental regret category, so paying for a domain was a way of forcing ourselves to commit to doing this. We know ourselves and procrastination is a killer for us, so if we don’t commit to starting this blog now while we are travelling and have space with our thoughts, then we will become complacent and never do it.

So, writing this blog is another conscious decision to fight against incremental regret, and to just flipping do it!! Regrets don't always come from big life altering decisions like quitting your job and travelling South America, some time it’s little things like not buying drones, not going to Wimbledon or not starting a blog. Whatever it is, join us in picking up arms in the fight against incremental regret, and lets all just start flipping doing stuff!

Philly & Keely