It’s 3:36am. I can’t sleep. I have had a knot and a feeling of discomfort in my stomach for the last 12 hours. I have tried to talk it through, sleep it off, and pray it to be gone…but it is here. I can’t help but feel that there is richness in exploring it…maybe even in accepting it. My writing is an attempt to better understand myself and the sharing is meant to hold myself accountable to my learnings.

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Insecurity. I feel it in my body…in my stomach. I know this feeling. It comes when I’ve made a mistake or feel I have underperformed. I never felt it while traveling and now it comes and goes so regularly. Why?

As I search for meaning on the ever-wise Google search browser, I find myself dissecting the various definitions that emerge.

Insecurity is a feeling of uncertainty, a lack of confidence or anxiety about yourself.. – Vocabulary.com

Emotional security is the measure of the stability of an individual's emotional state. Emotional insecurity or simply insecurity is a feeling of general unease or nervousness that may be triggered by perceiving of oneself to be vulnerable or inferior in some way, or a sense of vulnerability or instability which threatens one's self-image or ego. - Wikipedia

I can immediately see the problem. I am not grounded in my current sense of “self”. In fact, I don’t even know where to start to conjure up a vision of my evolved “self”.

It has been over two and half months since we returned from our 13-month trip around the globe and I still feel like I am in “no man’s land” between two worlds. I have found language around the grief about the finality and realization of this dream. In an effort to be purposeful about our self-care, Kapil and I have spent the last month in weekly therapy sessions to navigate our semi-old, yet kinda new, and slightly overwhelming lives back at home. We have been trying to carve out spaces for some brief processing amidst the busyness of the Western Bay Area life, but it feels far from sufficient. It is almost like my body is elevating its alert mechanism to get me to pay attention to my center. It’s screaming, “ALERT. ALERT. You are losing your sense of self. Prepare for crash landing.” Ok, Aila. I am listening to you.

I can “find” my “mini-self” in compartmentalized buckets and stand in my power in that smaller scoped portion of the master canvas. I trust myself as a mom, not to always keep my patience, but to know who I am in this role and how I want to show up. As a partner, I am learning how to co-create an environment that works for both of us and I feel confident in the safeguards we have currently put in place (by way of therapy, protected family weekends, protected morning walks, etc.). Professionally, I have enough of an experienced foundation to find solace in my problem-solving and leadership skills, though I have not reached the pre-trip pace of my stride in productivity. I know who I am when I travel —when I am completely free of overarching social obligation and “present” to the interactions of that moment. And in my larger context, I know and trust the “I” as a kind person who cares about what others are going through and who wants to support and caretake, where appropriate. What I can’t seem to figure out, however, is my larger “I”—who am I in the macro view? What does the matrix of mini “I’s” add up to? Ego, where are you?

Am I over-analyzing myself? Yes.

Can’t I just be grateful for what I have and live in the present moment? Yes, and the nervousness still seeps into my body.

Am I having a mid-life crisis? Maybe.

This last week seemed generally strange. Mid-week I had the privilege of being in a professional meeting where a potential client was inviting me to permanently join their team. I felt “in my body” while talking about the work and the acumen I could bring to the table as a consultant, but quickly spiraled out of it, when I was asked about my future professional direction. I nearly obsessed for the rest of the day (and the beginning of the next) on trying to “figure myself out.” I desperately tried to decode the puzzle of myself so that I could find clarity and be out of my discomfort of “no man’s land”. When I penned a few of my values, I gave my mind and heart a rest, but my body sensor was awake. The insecure feeling started shortly afterwards an continued on and off for the next few days.

Then during the weekend, we prepared for hosting our first Travel Talk/Meet-Up event at our home. It was a small an intimate list of about 20 people who witnessed our journey, caught our announcement on social media, and were able to make it to our home on that specific date and time. I was looking forward to seeing this community…the ones who are in our home world, but who know our travel world.

In preparation for the event, my Apple phone helped me create a background slideshow to zoom through our year. Though it was missing a few months in Central America and the Caribbean, the nearly 30 min, 600 picture slideshow was automated from a photo album of nearly 3,200 pictures (which was already less than 10% of the entirety of our global album). The day before the event, as we tested the slideshow out, I was glued to the screen…and I noticed that Kapil and the kids slowly gravitated towards the TV and remained as fixated as I was.

When the slideshow reel finished. I cried. I was sad that the experience was over. I wanted to be back in those fleeting visuals of photographed moments. I felt the grief of that cry and moved swiftly to the gratitude of having the space to pull out our traveling artifacts and collections to share with friends coming to the Travel Talk. It felt good to “do” something in the “travel ‘I’” of my larger “self”.

The event itself was fun and comforting. We had some loose structure, but it felt informal and just the right size to dive into some deeper discussions. We sat outside in a circle and spent about two hours talking about our experiences, but when our time was up, I didn’t feel like we had made much progress in our sharing. Luckily, this group had followed our travels, so they were steeped in our stories and geographies (as far as we have gotten to in our blogs and social media), so we had the luxury of glossing over those details. We had a general flow to our talk, but quickly abandoned it in lieu of questions, and we didn’t do an effective job of incorporating the kids into the discussion. Still, it was great to be with people we care about and who were invested in our journey. As soon as the post-event clean-up was in full swing, the feeling of nervousness crept over me and has remained disruptive for the last 12-hours. I suddenly had the feeling of insecurity—a lack of completion—in our sharing.

What revealed itself in this episode of near obsessive processing, is that we don’t know how to talk about the trip yet. We are still processing a big part of the journey—the “coming home” chapter…and that one is a real tear-jerker! And maybe, even if we were “fully processed” the journey was just too dense to talk about in brushstrokes. Aside from interesting geography, bucket-list places, and storytelling, we could do whole hour-long presentations on any of the sub-aspects of this experience: How-To for a trip like this, Traveling with Kids, Community Immersion, Risks/Character Development, Realizing a Dream, Awareness along a Number of Insights (Environment, Political Systems, Religion, Health, History, Parenting, Teaching/Homeschooling, etc.), Traveling as __fill in the blank__ (a woman, brown people, Americans, etc.), and Reintegration Back Home. It’s all relevant and meaningful to us and yet we don’t have an identity in the sharing (yet)…in this space between two worlds.

And that brings me to this very moment where I am trying to type through my annoyance and find my ego in my written reflections. Madness. Ok so back to the analysis…

The common thread between these two separate events is that in both cases, I had a feeling that there was a lack of clarity. Both conversations (directly or indirectly) morphed into “who I am” and “where am I going” questions, to which I do not clearly have an answer. For a decade, as we prepared for this journey, I was a mom, partner, and professional with a dream. My personal legend was “our journey ahead” and I aligned my mini “I’s” to that larger vision of myself. I stood in the conviction of this true North to help take decisive actions about my future. I refused job offers, declined community leadership roles, and postponed other projects, all in service of achieving the dream. And now, that the dream has been “accomplished,” I am left with an opposite process—finding my macro “I” from the matrix of mini ones.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a quick fix. If it were, our next dream of doing this all again in 2029-2030 would fill the void, but perhaps it is too distant or even too achievable of a goal for it to suffice as a compass point. We are blessed to be at a place in our lives where we can rely on physical and economic security as a foundation to paint on a very clear canvas…but what to paint? Somedays, it is easier to forget all about the liberty of re-dreaming and put my head down into the grind of daily life, in any of the sub-self mini ego domains. But more and more, I wander into an unknown place where I don’t yet know my identity.

Just this noticing of being in “no man’s land” and having a lot of love and value for the neighboring lands of this space, feels grounding. From here, I am aware that the insecurity isn’t because I lack confidence in my own value or capabilities. Instead, the insecurity stems from the fact that I don’t trust my “self”…because I haven’t learned her yet. Just naming that, gives me security and short-term direction to go on a quest of emotional self-discovery within the safety of daily routine.

No joke—it is 6:01am. The nervousness is gone. Twelve hours of visceral processing punctuated with two and a half hours of written reflection? I’ll take it. No, I’ll celebrate it!