I have arrived home after several days of travel. This trip was akin to a move from one home to another, so it was very involved. In the past, I had always liked the process of travel. I flew for the first time when I was 22 years old, so I was not very experienced with the whole airport/plane travel system. I made up for my lack of experience with business trips and vacations all over the world for the next 10 plus years.

In the past, I found business travel to be exciting – believe it or not, I liked going to the airport, checking in and reading while waiting for my plane. I liked to have a fun magazine or novel and occasionally, to watch the in-flight movie. I even enjoyed staying in the hotels and the diversity of people I’d get to meet. At some point, however, I realized that all of this travel equated to lack of sleep and lack of self-care.

Travel - Not Taking Care Of Myself
I was not very good at setting my own boundaries regarding amount of sleep I needed, when, where and what I would eat and having my own personal time & space. There were times I’d be at a client site and they wouldn’t order lunch, but instead passed bowls of Halloween candy around the room all day. Other times, I’d be up until 1:30 am preparing with my team for a sales meeting – only to meet for breakfast at 7:00 am. There were also international business trips where I’d get off the plane, shower and go right into the office, with no time for a nap. These trips, plus international vacation travel tended to trigger disordered eating behavior for me. I will focus this post on how it felt to travel this time, what I became aware of and how I feel in the aftermath.
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Well, I am getting ready to take an international flight – a travel experience that will last an entire day, with 7 hours in flight and more sitting in airports. I have done a lot of traveling, both for work and for vacations. Each time I have traveled in the past, I have felt depleted. Exhausted, spent, tapped out. These are the times when my old addictive self would have wanted to get that adrenaline spike from bingeing and purging.

Over the past couple of years, I have started to really make an effort to create an easier travel schedule. While I used to “put my nose to the grindstone” and power through the travel, with lack of sleep – I now make plans for a more balanced experience. I will share these tips and some actions you can take as you plan for future trips.
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I used to have a hard time with evenings — especially when it got dark. I would feel depressed, like I had not taken advantage enough of the daylight. I would feel a huge sense of loss and emptiness. I could never figure out why, but I chalked it up to light deprivation or seasonal affective disorder (SAD). In my first step toward recovery, after seeing the medical intuitive & learning to eat really healthy foods, my body started to repair itself. After awhile, I found I was not feeling so depressed at night and figured that the SAD symptoms must have really been caused by bingeing & purging.

At the time, I was still in a very stressful job and had difficulty feeling like I wanted to go to sleep. I slept well once I went to bed, but was very antsy before bed — finding all kinds of little things to do before finally settling down. I wondered if I had an aversion to going to bed. And then I started wondering why? What happened that made me not want to go to bed? Was it being afraid of the dark or having nightmares as a child?
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Have you ever had a situation where something happens to you or someone says something that is upsetting – and it sticks in your mind all day? I just had that recently. I was talking to a friend, who said some things that pushed my buttons. We were courteous to each other, but after we spoke, I realized that this person is not someone I want in my life anymore.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that I’ve been doing an inventory of people in my life over the past year. In some cases, I’ve given up friends or acquaintances who were draining my energy or had values that were out of alignment with mine. As I am changing, some of my friends don’t understand this “new me.” I’ll write more about what that process has been like in another post.

Stuck In My Story
Anyway, it was freeing to make the decision that this woman was no longer going to be in my life. It was like a relief. And yet, my mind kept going through points in time during our history where she said or did things that made me angry. I talked about them with my husband and thought about them as I was on my walk. And then it hit me – what was I doing? I was walking along past some of the most beautiful views, in perfect weather – and I had noticed none of it! I was immersed in my story of how she had said or done this or that – and how angry I was. My body was feeling the results of my negative thinking – my shoulders were tight and sore. It was like waking up from a dream.
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Those of you who’ve been reading my blog since the beginning know that my husband and I have been married for over 10 years. I only told him about 5 months ago that I had bulimia. Some of this is covered in my Telling Others post, but I thought it might be helpful to hear how it felt from my husband’s point of view. He has been tremendously supportive of my blog since I first got the idea to start it. I was afraid to even bring it up to him at first, wondering what his reaction would be. Surprisingly, when I told him, he was excited. He jumped right in and wanted to help in any way he could. His technical skills have been valuable in getting past all the quirks of Wordpress and making the technology run smoothly.

A Post From My Husband
Now he has agreed to write a post for my blog! Today, I asked him if he’d like to share his perspective on learning that I had an eating disorder. He is going to cover what it felt like when I told him, whether he suspected beforehand and what it felt like to support me in my recovery. I’m sure I’ll learn as much from the post as you will, because while we’ve talked a great deal about my situation, it’s different when you read someone’s words.
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Do you watch Nanny 911 or any of the Nanny reality TV shows? If so, you would see frazzled parents with several children who seem “out of control.” The children fight, misbehave, don’t go to bed easily or on time and often end up controlling their parents. Nanny 911 comes in and spends time retraining the children.

Basically, what she is doing is identifying a goal with the parents – to have well-behaved children who follow the household guidelines. This allows the parents to feel more relaxed and peaceful. With the goal identified, Nanny 911 starts to work with the parents to retrain the kids. Let’s explore what typically happens:
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