Tom Sykes, "The Years of Travelling Anxiously"

 

Tom Sykes is the author of seven books. His reportage and travel writing has appeared in New Statesman, The Independent, the Scotsman, New Internationalist and numerous other titles all over the world. He is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Global Journalism at the University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

About The Years of Travelling Anxiously, by Tom Sykes
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you're convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won't die despite being stuck with them in an ambulance in a smoky Global Southern gridlock.

Over the last twenty years, writer and academic Tom Sykes has been lucky enough to travel all over the world. But his trips have often been marred - if not ruined - by anxiety. Part travelogue, part wellbeing memoir, The Years of Travelling Anxiously recounts jittery visits to Nigeria to get married and undergo IVF treatment, stressful encounters with bigots and bureaucrats in France, the Philippines and the USA, and what can be learned about mental health on the road from a baby with an inspiringly calm attitude to travel.

The Years of Travelling Anxiously tries to solve a lifelong conundrum about the causes and consequences of panic and distress, and in so doing help other anxious travellers, or indeed anyone who gets anxious about anything, wherever they go.

You can read more about The Years of Travelling Anxiously on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From The Years of Travelling Anxiously 
I thought I’d learned. Grown. Don’t we all? We cling to these stories of progress in both society and our personal lives. From birth we’re fed maxims about life getting easier as it goes. Face your fear, conquer your fear. "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger," wrote Nietzsche. I thought I’d spent enough time in the Philippines to have squished all fear of it. After living here plus eight trips over the last thirteen years, I’ve toughed out the heat, the traffic jams, the pollution, two minor car crashes. I’ve been to the places where drug-users were executed by vigilantes. I’ve interviewed an activist who was hounded at home by a soldier who warned them to stop dissing the regime – or die. I stayed cool on all those occasions. 

I thought I’d devised strategies. I’d learned to pass the auto-stalemates by looking out the window and noting graffiti, adverts or the arbitrary poetry of urban breakdown – storm-dislodged hyacinths mantling the Pasig River, kids racing each other through a concrete pipe abandoned diagonally across a Cubao backstreet. If there was nothing to see, I’d read a book or pen my own. Writers shouldn’t be short of material in a mesmerising city like Manila. 

So why now am I in a taxi on Kalayaan Avenue, Quezon City, shaking like machine gun recoil, battling for my breath, launching water down my torrid throat? Why has the soothing inner voice of curiosity – how interesting is this, how fascinating is that – declined into the gravelly tones of paranoia? Will I make my interview on time? Are my questions facile and white and privileged? Do I smell? Why is the hand-fan strapped to the head rest in front of me only multiplying the amount of warm air rather than cooling me down? Will I have enough change for the driver at drop-off? Does the driver know where he’s going? Am I going to die? A Philippine taxi with rear seatbelts is as common as a good film starring Gerard Butler. 

These are rookie worries – or should be. Worrying about these worries only adds to the worry. It’s a self-perpetuating process.