It’s been an incredibly long while since my last post (an Egyptian revolution ago, to be exact), and to be honest, it’s because not much has inspired me lately. I feel like I want to say I’ve fallen upon some rough times, but my problems pale in comparison to what we’re watching on the news every day. Really, I’ve just been unhappy. I let the half-empty glass get completely empty and couldn’t seem to find a way to tip the glass over and climb out.

About two months ago, my unhappiness finally hit its tipping point. A couple of dramatic outbursts, ruined relationships and days where I couldn’t get out of bed later, I decided it was time to pick myself back up. I grabbed my insurance card, went to the Internet and made an appointment with the first therapist that would take me.

Uh oh, you’re thinking. She’s going to talk about the T-word. Sarah’s crazy. Go ahead, get the stigmas out of the way now, and then continue reading…if you want.

This isn’t my first rendezvous with therapy, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. In middle school I saw a therapist because I had severe anxiety over staying home alone. I didn’t start babysitting until I was almost 15; the fear was so debilitating in middle school my mother couldn’t run around the corner for five minutes to pick up a carton of milk. Then, during my freshman year of high school, I was back on the plush couch for a mild case of depression and anxiety that came with adjusting to high school.

And now I’m back on a couch — after an especially awful April 1 weekend — trying to make sense of what’s happened, nearly one year since my “trip of a lifetime.”

Looking back even just six months, a lot has happened: I stopped traveling, moved back home and started working full-time again at a dead-end job. My family dynamic drastically changed, relationships started and ended, I was rejected from graduate school and friends are moving away or preparing for weddings. Somewhere, through all of these external factors, I got lost in the shuffle and really bummed out. I stopped seeing the positive in just about everything, even the travel high I had come off of not long ago and the prospect of saving for more travel.

I felt like a tourist on a really shitty vacation where all it does is rain, your hotel reservation gets lost and your car breaks down on the way to the airport. Except, this shitty vacation was my life. Death Cab for Cutie’s newest single, “You are a Tourist” seemed to sum up my feelings quite nicely:

“You feel just like a tourist in the city you were born, then it’s time to go

And you find your destination with so many different places to call home.”

I miss traveling, but more than that, I miss what it did for my outlook. Everything was new and exciting while on the road and little seemed to get me down, not even dodging bullets in Bangkok or a lost ATM card. The world was engaging me and I was completely immersed in it. So many places DID feel like home and I was happy.

I stopped writing about travel because I had started to feel guilty about my time away, feeling as though my travels brought upon these misfortunes. If I had never hopped that one-way flight to Bangkok on Jan. 7, 2010, how different would things be today? Therapy has helped me find the answer: not much. Friends would still be engaged, my family issues would still have come to a head and my relationships would still be teetering on the edge of success or failure. My trip through Southeast Asia and the Middle East was great. It was more than great; it was an opportunity that many will never take and it makes me unique. It helped me to define the person I can and want to be.

My disposition is on a slow mend and I’m back to restructuring the type of life I want to live. With a little bit more time, I’ll be back to finding my destination and all those places to call home.