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This is not a conventional travel story. It is a record of a fragmented period of life, specifically the year 2021, during which experience did not unfold in a stable or continuous way, but rather through states of psychological instability and survival-driven functioning. In 2021, repeated international departures occurred within a relatively short period of time. At the time, these movements did not feel like structured decisions or planned travel. They were experienced as urgent, discontinuous, and difficult to fully integrate into a coherent sense of daily life. Within that year, the financial cost associated with this period was significant—it was a direct extension of the mental health struggles I had been dealing with over the previous years. In just a few years, I spent approximately $300,000 USD managing this condition. However, this figure does not fully explain the lived experience behind it. These expenditures were not experienced as lifestyle choices, but rather as a means of maintaining continuity and preventing complete psychological collapse. A clinical context is relevant to this period. A diagnosis of dissociative fugue was given in relation to these experiences. From this perspective, the repeated overseas travel can be understood as part of a dissociative pattern, where movement, environmental change, and displacement functioned as a way of interrupting overwhelming internal states and maintaining survival. For several years afterward, the records from 2021—photographs, videos, and digital traces—remained untouched. They were not emotionally or cognitively accessible in a stable way. Engaging with them did not feel like ordinary remembering, but rather like encountering material that was difficult to integrate into a continuous sense of self. Only recently has engagement with these materials begun again. Among these materials, one extended sequence in a coastal resort setting is particularly prominent. It includes a self-directed ceremonial framework often associated with a wedding motif. Here, the wedding motif is not a symbolic interpretation added later, but part of the recorded structure of the experience itself. It appears as a way of organizing time, actions, and presentation within that specific setting, during a period already marked by psychological strain and reduced stability. What remains is an archive of survival during a period of significant psychological instability—preserved in visual and digital form. |
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