Travel Talk — Life Happens, DEAL WITH IT

sorry not sorry I use language in this post! you’re forewarned. 

There are few things that strike panic and and anxiety in the fibers of my being quite like a certain parasite one can acquire while traveling. Yes, I’m talking about the Unnamables. ( I refuse to utter their name on my blog space because those little critters don’t know anything about personal boundaries BUT I DO and they’re not welcome here. ) 

If you have ever had the misfortune of encountering the Unnamables (the “sleep tight and don’t let the _____ _______ bite” kind) , then I hope you will bear with me and give me much needed sympathy and patting of my head. Feel free to write in the comments things like “Awwww poor thing” and “Don’t worry, Sarah, everything will be okay.” Even if you haven’t ever encountered them, I still welcome your pity and sympathy.

I’ve realized that a lot of travelers don’t know anything or seem concerned about the Unnamables. It’s stigmatized to talk about them, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with how clean or dirty you are. As long as you breathe at night and there’s blood in your body, you are a potential target for the Unnamables, regardless of if your sink has dirty dishes or not. The more awareness and information there is about them, the less likelihood there’d be of them spreading. Everyone should have some basic knowledge about them, so I’m sharing some experiences here and I’ll share some tips in my next post about travel strategies you can take to minimize the likelihood of you getting them.

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About two years ago, I encountered the Unnamables for the first time. It was summer, and I thought it was mosquito bites at first. But the large, red splotches on my arms and legs did not go away with lavender oil or after a week. And they itched like hell.

Since that fateful day I have been traumatized by these little creatures. Unlike other kinds of infestations, they are particularly tricky to treat because they’re tiny, good at hiding, like to travel, and hard to kill. Some people don’t even react to the bites while others react almost instantly, while still others can take 48 hours to a week to notice red bites on their skin. This makes it difficult to realize that you’ve encountered the Unnamables right away — and well, for anyone with anxiety or OCD, THIS IS A NIGHTMARE.

After that fateful day that prompted me to throw out half of the things I owned and do laundry obsessively for 3 weeks, live out of plastic bags, and spend a shit ton of money on things like mattress covers and chemicals, I vowed “never again.” The whole situation triggered massive anxiety for me and I was completely obsessed with the Unnamables for about four weeks — reading everything I could find on the internet about them. It consumed my every waking day. Suffice to say, my health really suffered. Some studies have even shown that people who encounter the Unnamables end up exhibiting PTSD-like trauma symptoms. I don’t mean to make light of PTSD, but much of the battle against the Unnamables is a psychological mind game. Waiting to see if new bites appear — but are they old bites that just took longer to show up? Waiting to see if you’re in the clear, or if your cleaning just made the Unnamables scatter farther into nooks and crannies. Or maybe they’re just molting and breeding and not feeding for a week, which can happen. Those suckers can go for a year (or longer) without eating. A big problem with these suckers is that if you miss just one while decontaminating, you might have to start all over. I was so neurotic about deconaminating and washing / drying my stuff, I’m pretty sure I could have directed the CDC. (kidding….kind of.)

So it’s no surprise that I developed an intense psychological anxieties and fears after this experience. The thought of dealing with this again felt worse to me than dying, and if I had the option of decontaminating something valuable to me or just burning it, I would choose the burn option.

Later that fall, after I’d begun to breathe a bit more normally and forced myself to stop reading Unnamable forums, I encountered them AGAIN — in Cologne, Germany in an Airbnb. (I’m sorry Cologne lovers, but this experience has forever marred my impression of your city, which has only ever brought me bad luck.) It was terrible because I was traveling, had to bring my luggage to a really big orientation and was worried about contaminating other people, not to mention had just moved into a new apartment that I didn’t want to contaminate when I got home. Fortunately, I and others were spared.

That was over a year ago, and since that time I traveled to Berlin, Frankfurt, Greece, Nuremberg, Innsbruck, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and many other cities — staying in hostels and Airbnbs and hotels — and never had a problem.

Over the past year and a half, my neurotism has slowly calmed while traveling. I no longer traveled with everything in plastic bags. I would put my bag on the seat next to me on trains and not panic and check every five minutes. When I slept new places, I didn’t check my skin every hour for signs of bites. And after returning from traveling, I didn’t worry much about having brought any back with me.

But yes, I was the crazy person who would pull out the flashlight on my phone and check every room I slept in for signs of the Unnamables. This, however, has turned out not to be a bad practice…..

Over Easter I went to Amsterdam to meet up with some good friends of mine…and a caught a live Unnamable crawling across my neck.

Cue: “WHY GOD?! WHY ME!? SURELY THREE TIMES IN ONE PERSON’S LIFE IS ENOUGH!? HAVE I NOT PAID MY DUES!? WHHYYYY.” One would think.

Fortunately, I was more or less prepared for this, but gosh, I feel so wasteful with plastic bags and I hate this — the Unnamables are really not friendly to the environment. Plastic bags are the only secure way to seal decontaminated things off from potentially contaminated things. Anyways, I knew the drill, but it was still stressful, and I’ve still sent all of my family and friends whiny / OCD texts every five minutes about my whole decontamination process asking for reassurance. But I’m home now, holding my breath that I didn’t bring anything unwelcome back home with me, trying not to check my skin every five minutes for signs of bites. (Writing this post has been a great distraction!)

The problem with the Unnamables and an (undiagnosed) anxiety disorder is this: a lot of times anxiety is about wanting 100% certainty about something. You know, 100% certainty that the stomach pain isn’t your appendix bursting — but the only way to know that FOR SURE is to go to the doctor, right?! Or, the whole — did I turn the oven off? And the only way to know that FOR SURE is to go back and check it — and keep going back and checking it every time you worry that you didn’t “really check.” So anxiety / OCD is about needing 100% reassurance about something, but then as soon as you get that reassurance, you need it again. Ah yes, life with anxiety.

Of course, with the Unnamables, the only way to be 100% certain that you didn’t bring them back with you is to burn all your stuff and travel nude. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible because I didn’t have a place to burn things. 😛 As you can imagine, for someone with anxiety, decontaminating stuff (washing / drying / heating / inspecting), never feels like it is “enough” — even if you’ve already washed / inspected something five times. Anyways, it leads to paranoia and irrationality and it’s not pretty. It’s taken me awhile to recognize this as an anxiety cycle, and also, to realize that my reaction to the Unnamables is probably stronger and more extreme than someone without anxiety.

Fortunately, over the past year, I’ve done a lot of work with my anxiety. A lot of this has had to do with reframing the “story I tell myself.” For instance: the Unnamables are not fucking Superman. They may be a pain in the ass, but they’re not invincible. This is really reassuring to remember.

Finally, someone once said to me, while laughing, “Well, if it is the Unnammables, then you know, that’s life and we’ll deal with it.” That’s right, she said this while laughing, and I wished I could’ve been as chill as her. I’ve tried to make this my motto: It’s life and we’ll deal with it.

It’s helped to accept that the Unnamables are an (unfortunate) fact of life. Much like snakes, which I also wish didn’t exist, there’s is not much I can do about their existence in the world. And it would be a pain to have to deal with them again, but you know, that’s LIFE — you never know what’s going to get thrown at you. It doesn’t help to lose sleep over something that hasn’t happened to you yet, and if it does happen to you, then, well, you’ll be an adult and deal with it.

I always loved this line from Better off Ted (video below). At the end of the day, I’ve accepted that I will be able to take responsible action to remedy the problem and DEAL WITH IT.

“That’s right, WE’RE GOING TO DEAL WITH IT, TED. Just like YOU’RE GOING TO DEAL WITH IT.”
“Yeah, EVERYONE’S DEALING WITH THINGS NOW, TED.”

So I’m DEALING WITH IT. In the meantime, think I’m going to treat myself to a bath and a glass of 🍷

xo,

Sarah