(Disclaimer: Please take this with a pinch of salt! If you travel often you will definitely understand where I am coming from. If you don’t understand, please be polite anyway)

It is really hard to come home…Don’t get me wrong, when I’ve been travelling for hours I am glad to shower and fall into my own bed. But the novelty is short lived.

While you are travelling you forget that the world is going on around you. That people are commuting to work and doing the school run; while you explore private islands, with fine white sand between your toes. People think that you are the privileged one…They don’t understand how uncomfortable it feels to fit back into normal life.

It is, of course, undeniable that it is a first world problem. However for the past few years it has floored me for almost a month every-time I’ve returned home. After a short break I will simply wish to be back there, the way anyone would. But after a long stretch I find myself so at odds with everything around me that I don’t know what to do with myself…

I’m not an especially emotional person, in fact, everyone who knows me jokes that I don’t have a heart merely a block of cement. But in the past couple of years, in the first few weeks of being back from a trip I have found myself overwhelmed by sadness. An emotion so intense that I often worry if I’m going to burst into tears in public places.

Yes, the tan lines are real and the perfect pictures on my Instagram show the story of a girl who loves to travel. But there is a darker side to it…There is that moment when you come home and you realise you are constantly antsy because you are not moving. You hate waking up in the same place everyday. It drives you almost to the point of insanity and nobody understands.

Once you have traveled all you want to do is do it again. People call it the travel bug or wanderlust. But really it is the need to be surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Greek. French or Portuguese. But that language where others know what it is to leave, change, explore, learn and grow. Only to go home and feel more lost in your hometown than you did in the most foreign place you visited. That is the hardest part about travelling – It is the reason we all run away again.

You often hear people say you only hate the road when you’re missing home. But for travel addicts it is the complete opposite. You only hate home when you’re missing the road.

So if you see someone who is fresh home from a trip, looking a little miserable. Please don’t make jokes about them or point out that they are lucky to see the world. We know we are lucky but it doesn’t make it any easier…Especially when the salt water threatening to well in our eyes is now the closest we can get to the tropical oceans we swam in only a week before.