I left Bangkok at the tail end of Songkran, the Thai new year. At some point, Songkran was mostly about various Buddhist rituals of cleansing and blessings. It’s since evolved.

For three days, the entire country erupts into a massive full-scale waterfight. It was impossible to walk to the nearest 7-11 (in Thailand, this is always only a minute walk away) without being soaked through and covered in chalk, which strangers smudge on your face and arms like warpaint. In Bangkok, a city that’s blazing hot year-round, I swear the temperature shot up ten degrees the first day of Songkran. It was fiery out. The water, ice-cold at times, felt pretty fucking great. The whole city feels like it’s on holiday. Everyone reverts to acting like a five-year-old. Everyone is laughing and playing and running about dumping water on one another. There’s no notable difference, at least in my neighbourhood, between the Thais and the farangs. Everyone’s fair game.

I’ll admit I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Bangkok, and Asia in a larger scope. A lot of messed-up things went down during my time there, and I often felt disarmingly out of place. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Thailand, but I’m immensely glad I stayed the four extra days to catch Songkran. I’ve never seen anything quite so mad: it’s Thailand simultaneously at its best and at its worst. On the positive side, it’s delightful, childlike fun, and everyone forgets to be so guarded all the time. Of course, in Thailand, this means there are boatloads of fatalities from road accidents and insane drunken revelers. I read some pretty insane stories of people being stabbed when they didn’t want to play.

The only photo I got of Songkran, mostly because I quickly became very protective of my electronics and kept them hermetically sealed in super-resilient ziplock bags I’d bought for the Amazon. This is before things got really rowdy, so imagine the truckload of people spraying waterguns at the people on the street, who in turn are pitching buckets of water from those huge buckets at the passing vehicles. Also, make sure everyone’s covered in chalk.

Somehow this seems perfectly in line with my experience of Thailand and Southeast Asia. When I left Bangkok, I’d had three absolutely delightful days in which I finally stopped working. (And on a weekend, no less!) I relaxed, played, met new people, and generally fell in love with the country, really for the first time. There was some drama around my leaving that made it bittersweet. But then maybe that’s just how Thailand works: like their food needs to balance sweet and salty, sour and spicy, the experience never excludes the nastier aspects. Everything is balanced.

So I left with a bang, but ultimately made it out in one piece. I left for the airport, still soaked through and covered in chalk, with my giant suitcase and as many belongings as I could stuff into it. For me, this is “moving.”

I spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of home. It’s always been fluid, to some degree or another, but as I’ve become more and more a drifter, it’s become even more intangible. For me, all these places are home, even if they’re only temporary. Even if it’s only three months. Even if I have an end-date in mind. Even if I have an onward ticket (which I never do, because I’m a raging commitophobe).

These places are my homes because, in that temporary space of time, they’re where my life is. I develop routines, I work, I create my own space, I learn to salvage food from whatever I can find at the markets, I make friends, I form new habits. My life changes every time I move, because everything around me changes. But in that moment that’s who I am and that’s what my life is—there’s no sense that part of me is somewhere else, or that this specific moment is temporal and will pass.

And so every few months, I pack up and leave, and my whole life changes.

Turkish coffee in the Ottoman coffee house in top of a hill on the Anatolian side of the city: delicious sludge.

It took me ten days to get from Bangkok, one temporary home, to Barcelona, my new home-for-a-while. I ended up in limbo. I spent eight excruciatingly painful hours stuck in the Mumbai airport, a little over a week in Istanbul, and fifteen hours in Athens en-route. In every place, I felt truly and utterly adrift.

I suspect that my sense of “roots” is different from most. In the past year and a half, I’ve made my homes in five different countries on four different continents. Travel has become an integral part of who I am: when I say I’m a vagabond, I really do mean it. I haven’t stayed in one place much longer than a month.

But in all that time, I’ve always had a “home” that anchored me. Even when travelling, I’d have a home to return to. I often have a matryoshka doll system of keys, where one key opens a room that contains another set of keys, and so on. In Istanbul, I didn’t even have keys, only couches and people’s telephone numbers. I didn’t have a place that was mine, and nowhere felt like home.

It was a truly bizarre feeling.

Barcelona is gorgeous at all times, but I think it’s prettiest at night, in the rain. In El Raval, where I live now, there’s beautiful old buildings covered in gorgeous graffiti everywhere, and a million tiny winding side streets to explore everywhere.

A lot of people travel to explore themselves. This is especially true for people on a gap year, or people who’ve recently been fired, or people facing some kind of life-altering crisis. It’s a cliche to say that in exploring the world you’re exploring yourself, as mirrored in your own interactions with said changing world. But most cliches are true for good cause (and I believe that in itself is something of a cliche, and here we are with the infinitely looping mirrors and matryoshka dolls again). And it’s true: pushing your boundaries and exploring things outside your comfort zone teaches you more about yourself than it does about the world. It’s impossible to face so many external changes and not change, fundamentally, inside.

I’ve travelled 30,000km around the world from where I started out in October, leaving one home for a new uncharted one. (That’s just point-to-point, home-to-home, and doesn’t include all the offshoot trips I take from these homes. The map of my journey looks like a series of distracted loops blooming around fixed points.) I only have 6000 more kilometers to go before I reach my next home, months from now, and I don’t know who I’ll be when that happens.

But I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned my limits, and the things I need to stay (relatively) grounded. My original plan was to stay in Barcelona two months, then couchsurf my way around Spain/Morocco/Portugal/France/Iceland for the last month or so. But I’ve learned my limits, and I’ve learned how important it is to my mental well-being that I have a place, however small, however temporal, however tenuous, that is my own—that I can call home.

So as rootless as I thought I was, there are still anchors that hold me. I’d love to be a true vagabond woman, but I’m ready to admit that I’m not, really. I’m just forging my own strange path, as convoluted and seemingly random as it may be.

From Bangkok, I took a bus to the border, made my way through two brutal little border towns (the Wikitravel page for Poipet, on the Cambodian side, actually makes a point of rhyming the town with “toilet”), then continued along to Siem Reap. I spent a week there, swimming in my $8/night guesthouse’s pool, visiting Ankor Wat, and firing off machine guns at the rifle range on Valentine’s Day. (No cards needed!) I spent another week in the dusty, chaotic, and infinitely broken city of Phnom Penh—a city big enough to hold millions of people, but so broken it couldn’t sustain any form of public transportation. I then took a series of boats and buses into the Mekong Delta, and, after a few days, ended up in Viet Nam’s capital city, where I drank tar that masqueraded as coffee until I flew back to Bangkok, my newest adopted home.

All told, I spent just shy of a month travelling through Southeast Asia, and I’m not entirely sure I liked it. That’s new for me. I’ve visited dozens of countries and hundreds of different cities, and I’ve never really landed anywhere I just didn’t like. I think I may have liked Sai Gon, but it’s hard to tell, as I spent the vast majority of my time there working from waking to sleeping. Cambodia, though, where I spent vast leagues of time, I despised. I think I’m attracted to places that are chaotic because they’re so far from what I know—but Cambodia was another world altogether, and I just never felt that I really enjoyed it.

As with anything though, I learned things. And while I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Cambodia, and I don’t think I’d ever say I was happy while I was there, I don’t for a second regret doing it. Beyond anything else, it taught me an awful lot about myself, about how I work, and about parts of the world I’m not comfortable with.

Playing hide-and-go-seek in Angkor Wat. As much as I loathed it for being, well, basically a lot of falling-down buildings covered in tourists (I’m over ruins, alright?) it was pretty neat. I liked that you could jump around in and through the whole thing—except when they considered you to be inappropriately dressed, which I so frequently am.

1. I can cross any street.

I’m an enthusiastic pedestrian even in my hometown (wherever that may be). When I land in a new place, the first thing I do is walk for hours. I’ve done this my entire life, and it’s bar none the best way to get a feel for a place. I love getting lost in strange places. I love accidentally discovering interesting places I may not have come across were I driving. I love walking down a street and drinking in the environment surrounding me.

In Southeast Asia though, sometimes this is a trickier task than you’d assume. There are people everywhere. And the further you get into Viet Nam, the more bikes there are, which means that instead of two columns of traffic, you suddenly have to cope with twelve. In Cambodia, there’s usually four streams of traffic, all going in opposing directions: crossing is less “look both ways” and more “look everywhere constantly”. Viet Nam, in spite of having about a hundred bikes to every car, is far more organized, but the crossing-the-street situation is still so intense that, in the tourist districts of town, there are people there solely to help tourists get across the street. When I went to the grocery store in Ho Chi Minh, I walked along a “hem”—basically a series of tiny little criss-crossing alleyways-cum-streets. Most of the way, it was about wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and I was walking along, in the dark, next to two streams of motorbike traffic heading in alternate directions, desperately praying they’d stop for me when there was another bike passing at the same time.

I was actually quite terrified just walking down the street.

And I’ve adjusted to the strange cadences of street-crossings in all kinds of other cities. Cities where there’s no such thing as right-of-way, and marked crossings are clearly just decorative. I remember when Rome and NYC made my nerves spike as I crossed the streets. The rhythms of Southeast Asia, however, are wildly removed from anything I know. When I first landed in Bangkok, there were certain streets I had troubles crossing. I’d watch for a local waiting, and follow them across the road. Now, after Cambodia and Viet Nam, streets that once left me paralyzed seem calm and laid back in comparison. I no longer am thrown if I’m left standing in between lines of traffic, waiting for the next seam.

I’m pretty sure I can cross any goddamned street you could throw at me, at this point.

2. A traveller and a tourist are very different things.

The Mekong delta was gorgeous, and interesting, and I’m glad I went. But honestly, I would have rather explored it myself. I’ve had this trouble before, in a place with a similar feel (the Amazon) and a similar motive for me: I don’t think I’d have been able to explore either of these tropical, water-dwelling places without purchasing a tour, but I didn’t like it either time.

In the Mekong, they kept waking me up at 6am to go do something wretched, like see a fish factory. By the by, a fish factory is pretty much as disgusting as you’d expect: it reeks, there are some fish, and that’s pretty much it. Of course, I tend to go to sleep around 4am anyway, and in Asia, because I’m twelve to thirteen hours off from most of my clients, my night-owl tendencies have become infinitely worse, and I tend to go to sleep somewhere between sunup and 10am. So waking up at 6am for four mornings straight was basically my personal idea of hell.

Skulls at the Cambodian killing fields in Phnom Penh. The killing fields were actually ridiculously serene and beautiful, which made it seem all the more chilling. Honestly, given the massive genocide and fucked-up-edness that Cambodia/Kampuchea endured, and how recent its genocide was, it’s no surprise it’s rather on the destroyed side.

But that, I could have handled. What threw me was being, essentially, stripped of my independence. Sure, I had lots of time to go visit places and wander about on my own. But ultimately, I felt as though I was on someone else’s schedule, and that bothered me intensely. I spent much of that time feeling like a little kid being taken on a field trip. I know lots of people do this and have no problem with it. I, on the other hand, cannot handle it. I’d rather spend a week wandering about cafés in a city on my own, never seeing anything, than I would be led by the hand through a place.

I’m certain this ties into other things as well, like my reluctance to travel with other people, my inherent introvert nature, my gazelle-like desire for space that’s mine and empty of anyone else but me, and my tendency to avoid tourist traps, even if they might be tourist traps for good reason. My style of travelling is just different from most peoples’, even if I’m not working, which doesn’t happen more than once every ten years. It’s nice to try other people’s styles from time to time, but I can’t sustain it, and it’s best if I just admit as much and let myself absorb a place the way I want to.

3. Every now and then, take a goddamn break.

I’ve been working from the time I wake to the time I sleep—and then sleeping about four hours a night—for the past month. Maybe longer. It’s really grating on me, and I can feel myself getting horrifically burned out as a result. Last weekend, I took the whole thing (almost entirely) off–I think I only worked a few hours Saturday morning, and a few more Sunday evening. Having two days off was pretty fantastic, and I suspect I would have completely lost my shit had I not done so. As it is/was, the stress is/was biting into me so deeply I spend/spent some nights doing nothing but drinking, working, singing along to sad songs, and crying. I honestly don’t know what it is that’s setting me off: is it that I feel so displaced and lost? Is it just that I’m overworked and overdone and teetering on the brink of burnout? Either way, I think there’s a certain balance to be met. Yes, I need to work a lot, even if it isn’t healthy for me. I run a business, its rhythms are as unpredictable and wild as Ho Chi Minh City traffic, and I can’t always be in control of them. But if I’m determined about taking one day off, once a week, that may help me hang in there until the 18-hour days are over and I can finally go back to being human again.

This may not suffice. It’s entirely possible that I need real, live, actual time off. It’s been some time since I’ve felt so overwhelmed and burned out. But part of running a business means that’s not always possible, and I’m so freaked out about money that I’m motivated to keep working like a madwoman. Ideally, everything I’m doing—much of which is unbillable, investment-in-my-future type work—will pay out in the future. However, the longer I do this, the more aware I am of burnout. That awareness, I think, will be enough to drag myself out of it eventually.

Floating markets in the Mekong delta. I’ll admit, as much as I was annoyed, misanthropic, and depressed most of this trip, I got to see some really cool things I wouldn’t have otherwise. I think this boat was the one on which I accidentally met some older Canadian gentlemen when I loudly stated how I was planning to throw myself under a bus when I hit sixty. They were pretty fantastic, and I wish I’d told them when we parted that, if I turn out to be like them when I’m nearing sixty, I’ll change my stance.

Ultimately, I suppose I just took a trip and I didn’t like it so much. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me, and so it’s a bit of a challenge for me to deal with. But I don’t, even for a single second, regret it in the least. I did learn a lot—mostly about myself, but also about the world around me. And really, that’s what I’m aiming for here. This whole crazy trip of mine is all about pushing my boundaries, learning new things, and making myself stronger.

Even if I spend a month or so going through hell, I’m coming out of it infinitely stronger, more adaptable, and more aware of the world around me. As miserable as I’ve been, that’s still a win as far as I’m concerned.