“Look,” I imagined myself blurting out, “I’m here because for the first time in fifteen years I’m seriously doubting the existence of God. The comforting faith I once knew is crumbling and it’s left me feeling hopeless and lost. I haven’t slept in a day and a half. I’m starting to smell like a white guy with dreadlocks who plays a bongo drum on the sidewalk. Can you please just stamp my passport and allow me into your country so that I might proceed with my existential crisis?”

My five week stay in Bulgaria (minus four days in Malta) has come to an end, and not a moment too soon. It’s not that I regret going back to visit, not at all. It’s just that when you stay somewhere for five weeks, it stops feeling like you’re visiting a place and starts to feel like you’re living there. And I’d forgotten how hard it is to live in a foreign country. It is really freaking hard.

Here’s an overly specific piece of travel advice that probably only applies to me: Don’t ever stay in central Bulgaria for five weeks with hardly any plans and no one to talk to and think that you won’t start to get the crazies. 

For about as long as I’ve had a self-concept, that concept has included the idea that I am someone who struggles to connect with others. I’ve always thought of myself as being exceptionally awkward, someone for whom making friends is difficult, an introvert to the max who is more comfortable being alone than having to go through the excruciating gauntlet of interacting with other humans.

I know that I quit my office job a month and a half ago to have a memorable world adventure, but truthfully, I am extremely averse to risk. I am a person who can make huge life changes and then sit alone in my apartment watching old episodes of Mad Men on Bulgarian Netflix instead of interacting with this new exciting world in which I find myself. I'm good at grand gestures, but I'm not good at the general day-to-day.