day 10: hitting my brick wall (or travel is humbling).

On day 10 of our trip, I hit a wall.

Actually I hit the wall on the night of day 9, when we pulled into the garage past 9:00 at night from rock-scrambling and sunset-watching, with plans looming over us to wake up and take another hike first thing the next morning.

I was miserably, desperately, darkly tired, and left David to fend for the kids while I took the first shower and climbed right in bed. We’re always hungry here because we burn so many calories, and I knew vaguely that I really needed to eat some food but couldn’t think or move or even read the new novel that I love. I flipped open to my bookmark and then fell asleep, only to wake up an hour later, dizzy with hunger, stumble to the kitchen to eat a few forkfuls of cold leftover grilled chicken and broccoli straight out of the fridge, and go right back to bed.

The thing is, I feel like we decided on a reasonable pace when we mapped out the trip. We’re not frenetically site-seeing or doing enormous hikes. It’s just the daily wear and tear of travel: there’s so much we want to see and we’re all together all the time, and the reality of our road trip just caught up with me on Day 10.

I’m bone-weary.

Not only am I an introvert, who’d had a total of an hour and a half of alone time in 10 days, but I’m an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person — google it, it’s a real thing), which doesn’t mean that I’m more likely to get my feelings hurt, but that my senses literally get overloaded quicker than other people’s. Noise, crowds, sun, heat, wind, dust, travel, epic canyon views.

Right about the time we hit the mid-point of our trip, it just all wore me clean out.

Now, the mature thing for me to do would be to tell my husband “I’m exhausted. I really need some sort of a break.”

I’ve learned over the years how to do that at home, what my triggers are, and how to carve in regular down time.

But travel is disorienting; often you don’t know that you’ve pushed too hard until after the fact. And my particular truth is twofold: 1. On a certain level I want to do all.the.great.things — I hate to miss out on any part of the adventure, and, 2. Often I just don’t like who I am.

I want to be one of the cool, high-energy ones. I want to be a risk taker, an adventurer, and an avid-exerciser. I want to be less uptight and more laid back. I don’t want to need so much alone time. And I certainly don’t want to answer yes to 26 out of 27 questions on the Highly Sensitive Person self-test.

(Although I still laugh every time I read “Do you find yourself needing to retreat to a darkened room to be alone during the day?” because, I do)

Aside from my sin, it’s probably the thing about myself I like the least.

Instead of accepting who God created me to be and taking helpful measures to pace myself, I expend energy fighting against it, trying very hard to be someone I’m not, and projecting my insecurities onto the people around me (i.e. feeling that they’re all wishing I were different).

And this only makes me more exhausted, miserable, and generally resentful to the people I love most.

So I trudged out of bed at 7:30 the next morning and picked a fight with David (in front of the kids no less), which ended in a long and unhelpful argument in our bedroom. It’s a tired and frayed argument, old as our marriage, rooted in selfishness rather than in the truth, and it only made us both more unhappy.

We finally had to just stop. I was being a crazy person. What I really needed was not to prove some point to my husband, but just to be alone in a quiet house for a few hours with all the shades drawn against that blaring desert sun (you know, in my darkened room) and not explore the outdoors.

So we both apologized and we prayed together, which some mentors taught us ought to happen in every marital argument. I literally had to say aloud, “God, my heart is hard toward my husband right now. Please forgive me. Please soften it.”

And you know what? He did. Both the forgiving and the softening. Seems that the whole ordeal might have been spared if I would’ve just prayed in the beginning.

And then I had to trudge back out to the living room and apologize to my kids for being unkind to their dad and to tell them the truth: That I’m really tired and it is no one’s fault and I just need some time to rest. And he apologized to them for being unkind to me.

Kids are truly the most forgiving people you’ll encounter. I want to bottle up those kind eyes and sweet smiles for later years when I hurt them again. In the meantime, I’ll humble myself and bask in it.

David and the four of them ended up foregoing the last hike we planned here in exchange for a couple of hours at the nearby Dinosaur Museum, and lunch at our favorite place, the Moab Garage (where I typed this post with a peppery masala chai latte next to me).

Why do I tell you all of this?

I guess just to say: travel is hard.

It’s not all giggling rounds of Madlibs in the van and sweeping overlooks and Cubano’s at hip coffee shops.

It’s also crankiness, blisters, different preferences among family members as to how we should spend our day, the shame of snapping at your kids again when you’re supposed to be the grown-up here, greasy fast food because there’s nowhere better to stop for dinner, the dread of packing and unpacking suitcases and gear and food one more time, and an endless succession of waiting in line for filthy bathrooms.

We know this, because we’re a family who travels.

We’ve never taken a road trip of this proportion, but we do drive to visit family and friends, and we go overseas whenever we get the chance, and we know travel is hard. It’s a jolt to the system. Something always goes wrong and that serves to illuminate just how little control we have — over this trip, or really over our lives.

Travel is the choice to exchange comfort and predictability (or is it just the illusion of predictability?) for something else.

For something new and stretching, something that ends up making our world a bigger place, whether it’s 600 miles up I-79 to visit our family in Pittsburgh, or 3,000 miles to the Grand Canyon or 5,000 miles to the Middle East.

Even here, on my brick-wall day, I choose travel.

I have never, ever regretted the choice to make myself uncomfortable so that I could experience something new, and see more of the world God made.

I don’t regret the sin God exposes in my heart and the repentance that softens and the grace of my family that comes as a drink of cold water in the desert of my pride. The grace I’d never have known if I hadn’t failed.

I choose to accept the person God made me to be, and to believe than even a Highly-Sensitive Person can have a big adventure.

As I told David this morning, “There’s truly no one I’d rather be fighting on a road trip with than you.”