A travel skincare routine for times of emotional intensity

I’ve written before about my carry-on musts; I bring many of the same things on every trip, with a few variations depending on the environment (hot/cold, dry/damp, etc.) and the nature of the trip (which is what I’ll write about today). This go-to capsule collection makes packing, for me, a million times easier.

It took me a while to get to this point: I used to spend at least 50% of my packing time on my cosmetics bag “strategy,” but that effort never ushered me to a particularly streamlined result. I distinctly remember hauling a very large, very heavy cosmetics bag with me while trekking across Morocco, thinking it was somewhat normal, but realizing that it really wasn’t when my fellow trekkers took one look at it, couldn’t stop howling, and proceeded to discuss the number of toiletries I carried at least once a day during the entire journey through the mountains.

(A feat, since that topic was competing with the likes of lice-ridden mountain hut mattresses, altitude sickness, wayward camels that galloped off in the wrong direction with half of our group, how to make and dramatically pour Moroccan mint tea, how cold the next hut would be, how hungry we were at all times, and the baby goats that we’d randomly and delightfully come across in remote valleys.)

Handling livestock, which I later forgot to declare at customs

If you tend to haul a very large, very heavy cosmetics bag around on your trips, I think it’s perfectly fine (and who’s to say what’s normal?). But I will say that having a smaller kit makes me feel blissfully light on my feet. And I can pack in a hurry, which I did for a trip back to my New England hometown last week, tweaking my carry-on formula because I figured it would be an intense trip from an emotional standpoint.

As some of you know, my mother has had Parkinson’s disease for nearly twenty years and is now in its advanced stages. It’s never easy to watch someone you love suffer from a disease like this one; in its early stages, all you can think about is what it will be like for them down the road, and when that time arrives, it’s often just as brutal as you’d feared. You realize all that you take for granted, moving with relative ease through the world, your body doing more or less what it’s designed to do.

Lately, whenever I’ve seen my mom, I’ve thanked her for holding on for all of us. Life with advanced Parkinson’s, as I’m sure you can imagine, is very hard. Her disease has progressed to the point where, on this trip, I thought I should also tell her that she didn’t need to feel as though she had to hang on for us so tightly if she really couldn’t. It just seemed like the right thing to say.