Road trips will solve all your problems
Leaving the city you're in right now will have better lasting effects than increasing SSRI's.
The first road trip I went on completely by myself was from St. Louis, MO to Gunnison, CO in the summer of 2021 after completing my freshman year of college.
It was a 15 hour drive complete with a hotel pitstop in Kansas (where I locked myself out of my room), one-lane mountain roads, and leaving my car on the highway to pee behind a tree while stopped in traffic due to a mudslide. I have always said to do it big or don’t do it at all.
Since that initial road trip there have been many more taken by myself, with friends, or with my older brother in the 2012 Highlander Lennon and I named “Scottie” somewhere between Moab and Denver when the speed limit on Highway 70 was 85mph.
When I moved to Tulsa for college my sophomore year, Scottie came with me and helped me move in or out of residences eight different times. In the past four years, since I turned 18, Scottie has had very few rest days. And then all of the sudden I walked the stage at graduation and he moved me back home to St. Louis one last time and his long trips became far less frequent.
By the middle of February I had not left the city of St. Louis since November to visit my brother in Boston with my parents which strictly violates my personal rule of not being in the same city for more than 30 days straight.
Between those months I have reverted entirely to my internal world and the inability to complete any tasks that are not hardwired patterns I can do without thinking. I woke up every morning exhausted counting down the hours until I could plausibly get back into bed. I would finally pull myself into the bathroom at 10 a.m. after I would hear my dad’s medicine alarm. After that it was a sluggish series of eating too much bread, putting on clothes that I had not yet unpacked from my moving bins, and sitting at my cluttered desk to do my work and fill out applications to do new, better work. When I would occasionally drive somewhere myself it would take sudden brake lights or a honk to pull me into noticing the external like how the radio had not been playing the whole drive or an ominous worry that I might have hit someone in the time period I do not remember. There is not much from these time periods I do remember, as trying to look back at the memories generally brings up a black cloud covering whatever memory scene I should have. Papers pile up on my desk, clothes on my bathroom floor, and I receive emails from people I don’t remember reaching out to. My mom had me sleep in my older brother’s old room because she thought it might make the nightmares go away.
Going through life during these periods feels like playing a video game. As if I am sitting in a dark room, controlling a character who is living on a faraway island and at any point I could starve or ignore or kill my character and it would have no effect on me. Which also means that I would look to the people around me as NPCs. I have two good friends from high school in St. Louis, Naia and Nainika, but I had not seen them since September. I left texts from my high school teammate, Verena, on read for months. In my mind they were just characters in my video game put there to make it seem like there were people around when really they were not controlled by anyone. My therapist suggested I start playing a social simulation video game so my brain could see the vast differences between my life and a game. While I do see a difference, playing Animal Crossing on my Nintendo has just become another way to block out the external world. I thought that by retreating deep inside myself I would find solace but instead it only pulled me deeper into an endless void.
I decided to drive down to Tulsa to visit Blakely and Archer for Valentine's weekend. Blakely’s boyfriend (the new one that I actually like) is away at Advanced Individual Training in Georgia and Archer had recently broken up with his girlfriend so we were all alone for the holiday. We got each other Valentine flowers and cards addressed to “Pimp Daddy”, went thrifting, ate out at our favorite restaurants, walked around downtown in the rain, binge watched a Netflix show while dying my hair, and took nibbles out of 24 different macaroons to try them all. As soon as I ran from Scottie into Blakely’s apartment that Thursday evening I got into Tulsa my player-controller and my player joined bodies again and I felt like a living, breathing human. There were no dark clouds in Tulsa and on the drive back home I stayed in my body the entire time.
The night I returned back to St. Louis I texted Naia and Nainika to set up a brunch for the following weekend, I apologized to Verena for ghosting her, I started cleaning out and organizing my bedroom in hopes that I would stop dreaming about being able to play with my high school lacrosse team one last time.
Life is a series of dominoes and I keep having to remind myself that I am living in this world and not just controlling someone in a fake world on a Nintendo Switch and that all the people around me are living in this world as well and their lives do not pause when I am not speaking to them. When we move, everything else moves as well. My brunch with Naia and Nainika turned into a Mardi Gras party where I reconnected with other friends from high school that stemmed into more weekend plans. When I started talking to Verena again she told me her sister was playing in an adult field hockey league in St. Louis and I joined the team for the spring season. After seeing my own favorite thrifting store and coffee shop in Tulsa I started to research similar places in St. Louis and have already found my new favorite coffee shop to work at. These things never would have happened had I not traveled to Tulsa to spend Valentine’s weekend with Blakely and Archer.
When I wake up halfway through the night I have to place a hand on my chest because it feels strange to not have it beating out of my chest anymore. I restarted projects I had stopped months ago. I have started writing again because I have started living again. In writing, one must either have something important to say or they must do something of importance to write about. I do not have many important things to say but I do generally find that the more I am trying new things and meeting new people the greater the tendency for words to flow out of me with the same ferocity that they flow down Niagara Falls.
I am not sure what came over me when Scottie and I crossed the border from Missouri to Oklahoma but I have learned these three things:
Prioritize good friendships
Get out of the city you spend most of your time in
Make the space you live in a nice one
My psychiatrist thinks that this reconnection to the outside world is because she increased my Lexapro dosage, but I know it is actually because of the road trip.
Yours truly,
Calihan
P.S the first episode of “Between the Stacks” is coming out tomorrow so long as I continue editing at the speed I am now.
I think about real life relationships in terms of The Sims often and I've actually found it to be helpful because I'm very bad at keeping in touch with people. When I haven't spoken to a friend in a while, I visualize their friend meter getting low and that's when I know it's time for me to reach out unless I want that good friend to turn into an acquaintance.