How can you have an anxiety disorder and travel the world? Good question. I ask myself that regularly, too. Especially when I’m about to walk into a cave, when I’m in the jungle, or when a mosquito lands on me. My heart starts racing and my throat feels like it’s closing up. Please don’t let the cave collapse, please don’t let me run into wild animals, and please, please don’t let it be a dengue-infected tiger mosquito. And even before I find myself anywhere near the heat of the moment, my brain is already spiralling – googling for the fourteenth time, at 4 a.m., whether Brunei is really safe.

Let me tell you: travelling with an anxiety disorder is no fun. But sitting at home in your bedroom isn’t either, if you ask me.

So, how do you travel with 101 fears?

Be afraid and do it anyway

I’ve come a long way, and when I say long, I mean really long. If you add it all up, I’ve had over 15 years of therapy by now, and I’ve tried it all: from ACT to CBT to schema therapy. But one kind stood out: exposure therapy. In 2019, I got keep going tattooed in small italic letters on my right ribcage. All I have to do is expose myself and keep going. And since it’s inked on my body, I try live with that motto every day – which is most of the time easier said than done.

By seventeen, I had developed such a severe anxiety and OCD disorder that I couldn’t even go to school anymore. My days consisted of performing compulsions and managing panic attacks. I didn’t even have the time to go to school. With sertraline and therapy, I slowly got the life of a twenty-something back: clubbing, going on holiday and getting my diploma. But did I enjoy it? Not really. Before a night out had even started, I was already worrying about getting home. So I promised myself one thing, no matter how much it sucked: keep going. However hard and heavy it gets. You just have to make it through.

‘I’m having a panic attack’

In 2021, I took my first solo flight to Rome to visit a friend. While I was busy managing my panic attack at the gate, some KLM crew members sat down next to me. I felt my armpits soaking in sweat and it was almost like I forgot how to breathe. If I was panicking this much at the gate, how was I going to survive two hours on a plane?! A little hesitant, I reached out to the crew members and said: ‘I think I’m having a panic attack, can someone please talk me out of it?’ It turned out to be the cabin crew flying me to Rome, and they kept an eye on me the entire flight, coming over a few times to check if I was okay. Thanks to them I stepped off that plane with full confidence.

Little did I know, out of 52 weeks in a year and out of so many countries, the G20 summit happened to be in Rome THAT week. So I was welcomed by the army, standing on every corner of the street with massive machine guns in their hands (not the most warm welcome, lol). In my hotel room, I tried to give myself a pep talk: “It’s dark, the army scared you and you just need some time to adjust. Tomorrow is a new day – it’ll probably be better then”. That was the moment I decided that from that day on, I’d give myself 24 hours to get comfortable somewhere new. And still, those first 24 hours at a new destination cost me a lot of energy (and mental breakdowns). I need to remind myself of that a little more often.

Crying out loud

During my first trip to New York, I cried in the shower every single morning. The idea of going outside scared me too much. In India, I didn’t dare get on the back of a motorbike because I was afraid we’d be run over by elephants or fall off a cliff. In China, I cried in restaurants because I barely dared to eat anything because my anxiety told me i’d may be allergic to the food, or would accidentally eat a deadly mushroom. Oh, and in the Maldives? I refused to do the one thing that people do there: snorkelling. Nurse sharks and sharp coral? No thanks.

My biggest fear

My biggest fear is dying. But over the past few years, I’ve discovered there’s one thing worse than dying: not living. Yes, my biggest fear may be dying, but the fear of dying without having lived is even bigger. So I went outside to Times Square, I got on the back of that motorbike, I forced myself to keep eating and I went snorkelling. Sometimes only for just ten minutes, but those ten minutes were a huge victory for me. Proof that I can do it and more importantly: that I tried.

My boyfriend recently said I basically need to do everything twice. The first time, I find it horrible and I don’t enjoy a second of it. The second time, when the experience is not unknown anymore, I can (most of the time) actually enjoy it. And there’s something to that theory, because when I went back to New York a year later, I laughed more than I cried and I finally saw why my best friend is obsessed with the city.

Now that I’m older and have given myself much more exposure therapy, I sometimes feel sorry for that seventeen-year-old girl who didn’t dare to go outside. Who had so many big dreams and so much she wanted to see and do, but was held back by her own catastrophic mind. I had just turned 28 when I went on my first solo trip to Bali, and surrounded by beer-ponging 21-year-old backpackers I realised what my twenties could’ve looked like. I robbed myself of so many ‘good’ years.

Besides fooling myself, I feel like I was also fooled by all the picture-perfect posts on social media. Everyone makes (solo) travelling look SO easy. Is there really no one else who is scared of tripping in the middle of the jungle and ending up with an infection? No one who secretly cries themselves to sleep on their first night in a hostel? No one who’d rather take paracetamol from home than some unknown pill from a Vietnamese pharmacy? Apparently everyone on Instagram and TikTok is fearless and brave, and every backpacker has adrenaline seeker written on their forehead. Well, I love to tell you: not me. I wish I had seen someone on social media, or with a blog, who knows how an anxious person thinks and what an anxious person struggles with while travelling. I never saw that person online, so I decided to become her.

So, as someone who’s still doing it scared: welcome to my blog! I have an anxiety disorder and I travel the world.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

Curious to see where this anxious brain has been so far? Start with my guides to India (yup, I’ve been there lol), Albania, Morocco or the Maldives. And follow me on Instagram and TikTok (@nomadwithnerves) for all my victories, mental breakdowns and everything in between.

Keep going, you got this!