Wherever You Go, There You Are — and That’s a Good Thing
A hospital stay in Quito reminded me that you don’t leave your fears behind when you travel, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. Your baggage is a great teacher.
Quito wasn’t supposed to be the hard part. I’d planned to spend a few weeks there in early 2020, maybe writing a bestselling novel or two (snort) while coming down from the high of a truly magical “pinch-me, I’m dreaming” trip to the Galápagos Islands with a friend.
Galápagos delivered and then some in the adventure department, and we’d returned to a beautiful country property near Puembo to decompress. My friend would fly home from there, and I would head into Quito proper.
Trevor (the other half of Midlife Nomads) was due to join me in a few weeks, and I figured I’d settle in and enjoy the in-between.
Instead, I got sick. And sicker. And sicker.
It started before my friend left, and I had to convince her to leave me there. Had Trevor not been on his way, I don’t think she would have agreed to head back to Canada.
As it was, she added a couple of extra nights onto the hotel reservation so I wouldn’t have to move right away — bless her — and procured a Z-pac (a 5-day round of antibiotics) from an American doctor at our hotel. I assured her I was fine.
Morgan Freeman narrator voice: She was not fine.
A few days after she left, I did manage to drag myself into a taxi and relocate to the “rincón familiar” (family-run boutique hostel/hotel) I’d booked in Quito’s city centre.
The place had an incredible view, and a deadly set of intercepting stairs.
Within days, it was clear I needed more than antibiotics. Actually, the turning point was when I attempted to walk the two blocks back to the place I’d dropped my laundry, and wasn’t at all certain I could make it back.
This wasn’t just midlife gut needs a day of soup sick — pretty soon I was in the local ER, hooked-up-to-an-IV, messaging home through a fog of nausea and fear sick.
I remember lying there under familiarly obnoxious fluorescent lights but surrounded by unfamiliar sounds, trying to piece together medical-Spanish with Google Translate, and feeling the panic rise.
That old voice, the one that tends to show up when life tilts sideways, was right there with me:
What are you doing here? You don’t belong this far from home. This is reckless. You’re alone. What about your kids? How stupid do you have to be to get into a situation like this? Go back to your real life. Go home.
It’s not unique to Quito. That voice has followed me to conferences, on client calls, across road trips, even into relationships, where all kinds of people have told me all sorts of other ways of being that are perhaps more appropriate for *ahem* a woman of a certain age.
(Let’s be real here, there is no “right” way to be a woman at any age.)
What felt different this time was that I didn’t let that voice and its insecurities take over as it had many times before.
It wasn’t that I didn’t feel scared or ashamed — I did.
Part of me still believed, deep down, that getting this sick, this far from home, was a personal failing. That I’d somehow let myself become weak. That I should have known better. That I should suck it up and retreat; get on a plane, regardless of cost, return to the familiar and lick my wounds.
Never mind that getting on a plane like that would’ve been reckless… I was probably contagious, and definitely dehydrated. Rationality takes a hike when panic walks in the room.
Not only that, but Sick-Me is an asshole. She is sucky, and grumpy, and apt to pick a fight if the light’s too bright or you breathe in the wrong direction. I couldn’t subject anyone to that… not unsuspecting airline passengers, and certainly not strangers.
But there was really no way around it. I had a serious respiratory infection and some kind of viral goblin turning my insides all the way out. I was in no shape to be Miss Independent.
And so I did the thing that’s always been hardest for me instead: I let myself need people.
First the doctors and nurses in the ER, who spoke gently and moved quickly, poking here and prodding there.
Then the pharmacist who patiently worked with me through Google Translate, loading me up not only with prescriptions but with saline rinse, coca tea, and vitamins.
Then the hotel owner, who tut-tutted and sent one of their kids up those treacherous stairs with warm meals delivered to my room for three days straight, without being asked.
And finally, friends back home and out in the world… the ones I knew would lend a shoulder without a single, “Oh poor you, sick while on vacation!” or some other such snipe. The ones I could have a good cry to; the ones who knew they didn’t need to solve anything and I wasn’t asking for a rescue, just a nonjudgmental moment.
There was no brave, Instagram-worthy transformation. Just the slow, terribly unsexy work of a control freak releasing control, choosing to rest and having to trust even as every instinct screamed the opposite.
And somewhere in that blur of nausea and breathlessness and unexpected kindness, I remembered:
You’ve been scared before. And you’re still here.
Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote the bestselling book Wherever You Go, There You Are. It’s technically about mindfulness; about learning to meet yourself with presence, without judgment, exactly as you are.
But that phrase has taken on an expanded meaning for me as a traveler.
No matter how far you go, you can’t outrun yourself. You don’t get to leave your stuff behind when you cross a border. You bring it all: the fear, the control issues, bad habits and all.
That voice in your head that always knows where to punch… it doesn’t care what zip code you’re in. Being in a new place doesn’t erase any of it. It just challenges you to deal with it in a different way than you might have defaulted to, were you comfortably surrounded by the familiar.
When you’re out of your element, your resourcefulness kicks in. Your adaptability shows up. All those layers of lived experience, both beautiful and bruised, come to the surface.
When you’re sick and scared, and all your usual coping tools are offline, that’s when the real you can’t help but show up, packing all those tools you forgot you had until you needed them again.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Eventually, I got through it. Slowly. Quietly, with a whole new appreciation for limonada caliente and electrolytes. And maybe a bit more confidence that whatever this world throws at me, I’ve gotten through it before and I will next time, too.
Travel gives us all kinds of opportunities to meet ourselves more honestly in new places, whether that’s mid-freak-out over a missed flight, or crawling out from under a viral fog in a hotel room three flights of stairs too high.
I don’t like to think of such moments as “finding ourselves” as though we’re lost little lambs, aimlessly wandering the earth in search of identity and validation. Sometimes, we just need a reminder of how complex and awesome we really are.
If you’re willing to look, what you find might be someone stronger, softer, and more capable than you thought.
✌🏻 Miranda
I can relate to this SO MUCH! That inner critic voice can really sneak up on you at these more vulnerable times. Getting sick during travel sucks, it happens, then makes for the best stories, most of the time
So well said!! I’ve beaten myself up also when scared and solo traveling when things don’t go well. I too have thought, “catch the plane, go home, be safe, lick wounds.” But you are right. Each experience we have navigated though is a forever reminder that we have hidden strengths.