When you dread a holiday

Let’s play a quick game. Rate your reaction to this scenario. 1 is freaked out and full of adrenaline. 10 is happy and excited:

A friend tells you they’ve booked a spontaneous 14 day trip away for you both. You’re off to a remote part of a country you’ve never visited before. This will involve a small plane which rattles as it takes off and which you’re pretty sure should have been scrapped back in about 1970. There may be a tropical storm or two to ride out. It’s possible, your friend suggests, that you might even have the chance to camp out on a beach one night. The stars are never so bright as when you’re camping. You will wear a sarong for much of this trip and maybe see a dolphin. And look, if it’s not a dolphin, it’s a really big fish which is still cool. 

Did your heart beat with excitement? Did you think “ooh a holiday in a far flung place? Sign me up!” Well congratulations, you are normal! All this offer does to me is make my heart beat slightly faster, while something unpleasant stirs in my stomach. I do not look forward to holidays because holidays are change. To be clear, I'm fine with change - I even look forward to it sometimes - but some small but powerful inch of my brain (which I assume is a hangover from hunter gatherer times) views any change as a threat to my very existence. A holiday in another country? Oh no, not a holiday! Are you trying to kill me? Why would anyone want me to go through such pain? This small but powerful part of my brain overrides the rest of me every time. 

When I left school I went interrailing in Europe with my friends. My mother had to accompany me to the starting point because I’m a big baby. When she left, I cried for 3 hours, had a nap and then proceeded to have the best holiday of my life (apart from the bit where I found out the guy I liked back home had hooked up with another girl and I had to swim out to the buoys and scream at the sky). 

When I book a holiday I turn into a different person. A new culture, new language, new ways of doing things - these are all undeniably wonderful to experience but my brain makes like a xenophobic reform voter and eyes it all with suspicion. “What’s wrong with a good old fashioned British seaside holiday?” It asks, misty-eyed at the thought of times gone by that it didn’t personally experience. I think my anxiety is stuck in an imagined 1950, wearing a hankie on its head and privately thinking that plane travel will never really catch on. I find a lot of things about my own mental illness embarrassing, the inability to deal with good change is right up there. Can’t enjoy an amazing holiday because your body doesn’t feel safe in a new place? It’s so stupid that other people tend to think you’re being ungrateful or horribly negative. I feel like this too sometimes. I want to bang my head against a wall and reset it in some vague hope that then I’ll be able to appreciate my good fortune. 

I hate that I cannot enjoy a holiday without panicking about all the What If thoughts the trip will throw up. A new situation or place or feeling guarantees anxiety, no matter the flavour. It feels as if some part of me failed to evolve. Which I guess is true in a way. The unknown has always unnerved human beings. We needed a healthy dose of caution so as to avoid walking through quicksand or stepping on an alligator. But these were big unknown threats, not nice treats. It’s doubly pathetic that I feel the same way about quicksand as I do about a trip to the beach. 

Things I have packed to go on holiday as weird OCD talismans: antihistamines in case a foreign animal stings me and I cannot breathe. Old antibiotics I found in a cupboard which had expired in case I got a nasty cut. A first aid kit with a sting sucker in it. Sleep tablets just in case. My mini heated blanket which only grannies have.