I went on holiday for the first time in years and here's what I did wrong.
How can you possibly do holidays ‘wrong’? You go away, you have a great time and all the stress that’s built up evaporates and you come back the best version of yourself. Right?!
I hadn’t been on a proper holiday in years and to say I was excited about a 10-day break in Mallorca is an understatement. I had a wonderful time but that’s not to say I didn’t balls up a bit along the way and these are the three things I got wrong…
I put Apple Air Tags in my luggage.
Sounds like a great idea, no? Perhaps even genius. Should anything go awry with my case, I could confidently stride up to the help desk at my destination and inform them that, according to ‘Emma’s Luggage’ in Find My… they’d be able to locate my suitcase in Naples, or wherever.
I’d watched Victoria Magrath’s vlog a week before I started packing and one of her cases had gone missing on a staggered trip around Europe and she had mentioned Air Tag so I thought I should get some.
What happened was that I put one Air Tag in my suitcase, and another in my companion’s and when we arrived in Palma only one was showing as being nearby. The other was still showing up as being in Gatwick. My case was, according to my Air Tag, still in or around the South Terminal and panic set in immediately.
I began to do the maths about how long it would take the case to get to me, how that would impact our itinerary having to come back to the airport to collect it, and what did I have in my hand luggage that I could wear for the next two days. I realised I hadn’t packed contact lens solution in my handbag so would have to find a chemist and that despite Victoria suggesting it’s prudent to pack a change of clothes, even if it is a lightweight set of activewear, I hadn’t so only had the clothes I was standing up in.
In a daze, I went through passport control, had my passport stamped and walked through the airport all while doing the mental gymnastics about how to make a missing case cause the least amount of disruption to a 10-day relaxing break.
My airport energy was less ‘We’re on holiday! Hooray!’ and more Midnight Express as a film of sweat began to settle on my brow.
That is, until we got to baggage reclaim and both cases popped onto the conveyor next to each other at exactly the same moment. Just under an hour of panic for no good reason, which is why my conclusion is that I won’t use them again.
If you don’t respect your holiday, why would anyone else?
Both in my time working for magazines in-house and as a freelancer, there is one thing I have always been terrible at and that’s taking time off. I struggle to see a gap in the schedule that would allow me to take a holiday without causing some sort of disruption so I just haven’t.
I’ve visited friends in America in the last few years, but always with work attached in some way so this was the first time in nearly 10 years that I was putting on an out-of-office and permitting myself to unwind.
It’s been so long since I unplugged that it doesn’t come easily so I checked my inbox a few times and while I did respond to some emails explaining I was on holiday but here’s what they wanted to know, in the main people were pretty good about saying we could catch up when I got back.
That wasn’t consistent though and there was a handful of ‘I know you’re on holiday but…’ and I could feel my stress levels rising as I started to worry about letting people down and getting what they needed to them in a timely fashion.
I was in the middle of composing a measured but firm response to a message asking me to do something that day when I just closed the laptop and went to sit by the pool. I hate ignoring people or looking inefficient but something told me this was the right tactic.
I remember a friend of mine worked with a team leader who had a long commute to work every day so their emails would start the second they sat on the train to London. From 6 am most mornings there would be a barrage of emails, WhatsApps and slacks and my friend would reply and feel stressed a good three hours before arriving at their desk. I remember them saying to me once, ‘I created my reality. That first time I replied, I set a boundary that I can’t undo and now I’m stuck in someone else’s stress cycle’.
What I realised here, was that if I kept replying, the messages wouldn’t stop and the demands would only get more urgent and stressful but that would be my doing. By corresponding, in the hope of being helpful and available, I wasn’t showing any respect for my holiday so how could I expect someone else to?
I thought a holiday would ‘fix’ everything.
This year has been a bit of a challenge for various reasons that are too many and long-winded to go into here, but a few days before I flew, I had dinner with one of my best friends and admitted something I’d been bottling up for a few months. ‘I think I’m low-level depressed and have been for a little while,’ I said over spaghetti vongole and a bottle of Primitivo.
Now, I’ve been depressed in the past in a way that has been life-limiting and this isn’t that, but there are whispers and shadows of those sorts of feelings lurking around me at the moment and even though I can see them in the distance, I haven’t been able to shake them off.
I was waiting for the dark cloud to lift, but a third of the way through the trip, I still felt a bit, well, sad. I was having a great time and was enjoying incredible sights, delicious food and that joyous feeling of my skin feeling warm from the sun, but there was that indescribable nagging feeling at the back of my mind that wouldn’t budge.
I’d gone into this holiday thinking that because it was such a rare treat, I’d feel renewed and re-energised. I thought, given it was something I hadn’t done for so long, that going away would be a balm and a fix to everything that had been feeling iffy.
That’s a lot of pressure to put on a holiday and what I realised, as I finally slipped into my own bed after a delayed flight where a woman in the row next to me watched an entire film on her phone without headphones, was that what I needed in addition to a holiday was some therapy. So, off to The Self Space I go…