A bit of my history with travel club- In 9th grade I went on my first trip with my school's 'travel club' to China, it was a crazy experience, but now, thinking back to my China trip, it was a fantastic learning experience for me, it made me a million times more competent as a traveler, mostly because I did everything wrong on that trip...The next year they were traveling to France, Italy and Monaco, three countries I was dying to visit, and so I was persuaded to go again. The second trip redeemed the first in my eyes, when the trip was coming to the end everyone else was excited to go home to their families, I think I was the only one there who was sad it was over. The next year they went to Germany and Austria, for financial reasons, I didn't join them. My family has always been one that values experiences over material goods, we never had a lot of money growing up but when we saved up any money it always went to trips rather than new clothes. That's why in 9th grade when I went up to my mother and begged her to let my join my best friend Ella on the school trip to Egypt (we were supposed to go there but they switched it to China when the rebellion happened there) it didn't take much to persuade her, I was only 14 so I didn't exactly have the money to spend on such a trip so my mother called it my Christmas present- don't be mistaken, she never, ever in a million years would have gifted me something of equal value. The next year I wasn't supposed to go on the trip because my mom said I'd have to pay myself and I just didn't have the income to do that, then AGAIN my best friend Karol was going and asked me to come too, my other friends were going to talked to the teacher in charge to see if they could squeeze onto the already filled trip, long story short, she managed to get a bus with four extra seats, one for me and each of my friends! My mom surprised me by saying that she would pay for the trip if I would pay for spending money. The next year I wasn't so lucky, I would have to pay all by myself if I wanted to go, at first I convinced myself I didn't want to visit Germany so I didn't care, and by the time I realised I really wanted to go it was too late to save up enough $$ to go. That's why my name was at the top of the sign up sheet when my teacher decided we would go to Greece.
Fun fact- my oldest sister went on the exact same Greece trip during her senior year, because my teacher doesn't like to repeat trips we didn't rearrange our Egypt trip to go to Greece- a country viewed as having equal amounts of ancient history, when Egypt broke out into war, and so we went to China instead. Lucky me, ended up getting to go on both trips.
Pre Greece trip-
The summer before my senior year I had a serious run in with my anxiety issues. One of my major triggers for anxiety and panic attacks is sleeping out, I'm still not entirely sure why, but it happens, and that summer it caused me to be unable to stay out at a summer camp and it was a whole mess and my mom got very mad at me about it. Of course she didn't tell me she was mad at me about it, but she was, in one of those passive aggressive ways, when I got home from camp we made arrangements to see a counselor to deal with the anxiety issues, which she claimed she was okay with, but only in the way a parent is pretending they're okay with because they're an asshole if they're not?? If that makes sense. Anyways, the whole counselling thing turned into this big thing that was like fix-me-in-time-to-go-to-Greece fiasco, Greece was the end goal, make it to Greece, or make it so that I'm able to go to Greece, whatever. I was in a difficult position because on one end I never, ever wanted to go through what I'd just been through again, especially with people I knew from school, but on the other half I'm a ma-hoosive art history nerd who's ideal vacation spot is Greece. Damn. By the end of my counselling session I'd learned a lot of techniques to dealing with anxiety- none of which I really use to deal with my anxiety- more of which I use when I have a small case of insomnia. But it was too late for me to back out of the trip so I was basically stuck.
Stuck on the trip-
The night before we left my anxiety was so bad that I was in and out of sleep on the bathroom floor, preparing to vomit at any point. At 5am my parents got up to take me to the airport, my mom yelled at me for not sleeping and I cried all the way to the airport while my dad awkwardly drove me in silence. When I got to the airport I went to the bathroom and vomited for a good 10 minutes, got tims and a gatorade and waited to go through security. I felt better the instant my friend Lilly got there, not less nauseous, but the anxiety calmed a little bit. We went through security together, I cried a lot, and I got on the plane and headed to Toronto. It was completely and totally awful. I was exhausted, and emotional, and sick, and miserable, the anticipation for what the trip would hold was making me sick. literally. Lucky for me a lot of the people on the trip were people who knew I had some anxiety issues, including teachers and what not so everyone was pretty understanding about it all. I cried my way through some pretty average conversations, I don't know why I was crying, I just was, and that's what I told them before we continued to talk about commercials. Seriously. At one point my teacher (who taught me philosophy, a class where I did a presentation on anxiety and all that jazz and therefore knew what was going on) asked me how I was doing and if I was excited for the trip and all I answered was "well I have to be now, don't I?" We were in the Toronto airport waiting for our flight to Greece. Oh that's the other thing! Lucky old me got stuck on the group of flights that left at 6am, and then spent the day waiting in Toronto to go to Greece, not the best flight plan for someone who's obnoxiously anxious for the trip, but it did mean I got to see my family and buy a cute hat from the mall(which I proceeded to wear every single day on the trip)
Voila! The infamous cute hat, the best thing I got from my terrible day at the mall in Toronto,
Anyways, the whole point of this post is not only to lead into my next one - Grecian Adventures (all about the good parts of the trip), but also to point out a few things:
1 - bad things don't have to be all bad, the beginning of this trip was absolutely horrible, but if you read the post about the actual trip you'll know how much I absolutely adored this adventure, and
2 - the only way to really deal with anxiety issues, is to force yourself to. I went to so many counselling appointments but at the end of the day I had to force myself into the situations that would trigger me, I can't just learn how to cope with my demons, because that doesn't do anything if you don't ever see them, I have to sit down with them and have a cuppa with them and learn how they work so that they don't hold me back, before Greece I would always shove them away and find ways out of situations that would bring them to light, which did a whole of 0 things to help me live with them. Besides, after a couple days on the trip I was arguably the most mentally stable person on that trip, it just took awhile for me to trust myself.
Sidenote: I realise this post is extremely all over the place and sounds very disjointed and for that I apologise, I've been out of school for too long and it's been ages since I posted last soooooo I'm a bit rusty! Also note that I changed names because I didn't bother asking people if it was okay to use their names so I just changed them altogether.
