In your teenage years, you spend a lot of time fantasising about life and thinking about all the places you will travel to when you have the money. You obsessively make lists, save recommendations, and bookmark hotels and destinations; hell, millennials like us even saved magazine cutouts. Cut to your early twenties when you’ve just started earning real money in the real world, and you’re suddenly unstoppable. You’re slowly ticking things off your list. And travel became the answer to many things- adventure, boredom, heartbreak, love, and so on.
If I was tired, overwhelmed, stuck, or just generally feeling like I was moving through life on autopilot, my instinct was always the same: I need to go somewhere. Somewhere else always felt like it would be lighter. And to be fair, sometimes it was.
But between then and now, life happened. Now, I’ve been sitting with a quieter, more uncomfortable truth: not all travel is healing. Some of it is just tiring. Especially when you become a parent. It’s tough handling one child; it’s tougher handling two…even more so when they’re closer in age. But regardless, I’ve come to believe that at times travel can leave you more depleted than when you started. Only to realise that what you actually needed wasn’t a new place to begin with; it was rest and support.
We’ve turned travel into this aspirational cure-all. Burnout? Book a flight. Emotional mess? Take a break. Life feeling too much? Just get away for a bit. And while that sounds romantic, it also puts an unfair amount of pressure on travel to fix things it was never meant to.
Because travel doesn’t pause life. It just relocates it.
I’ve come back from trips feeling heavier, not lighter. Physically tired, yes, but also mentally spread thin. And yet, when people ask how the trip was, the answer is almost always, “So nice.” Because anything else feels like admitting you did travel wrong.
But here’s the thing we don’t say enough: travel today isn’t just about going somewhere. It’s about performing being there. There’s a version of travel that exists on our phones, right? It’s the perfect light, calm mornings, empty streets, effortless joy. And then there’s the real version. The one with delayed flights, bad sleep, decision fatigue, unfamiliar routines, and that constant background noise of are we doing enough? Or are we missing something?
The gap between real travel and posted travel has become exhausting in itself.
You don’t just experience a place anymore…you curate it. You feel this subtle pressure to extract something meaningful from every moment. To justify the cost, the logistics, and the time away. Even rest starts to feel productive only if it looks good.
And when you’re a mother of two, this gap widens dramatically. Because travel doesn’t become lighter with children. It becomes layered.
There’s the visible part of it, which is kids on flights, snacks everywhere and the constant prayers with the almighty to hope they don’t cry. And then there’s the invisible labour that travels with you. Sleep schedules that don’t magically adjust to new time zones. The mental math of safety, comfort, hunger, and overstimulation. The fact that “switching off” isn’t really an option, you’re just parenting in a different location.
Even the moments that look calm are often carefully held together. A quiet beach photo might come after a meltdown. A peaceful café moment might be timed perfectly between naps. And somehow, we’re still expected to feel rather refreshed at the end of it. How? Why?
So, when people say travel is healing, healing for whom? Because healing requires rest. And rest requires space. And travel, especially the way we do it now, often removes both. You’re constantly adjusting. Adapting. Managing. Moving. Even joy gets scheduled.
This doesn’t mean travel is pointless or bad. I still love it. I still crave new places, different food, and a shift in perspective. But I’ve stopped expecting it to be the answer for things; or for it to solve problems it’s not meant to.
Sometimes, all travel does is give you clarity. It shows you how tired you already were. It shows you what you’ve been carrying quietly. It shows you that no amount of beautiful scenery can replace consistent rest or support.
And as mothers, we’re especially sold this idea that a short break, any break at all, should be enough. That a few days away should reset us. But you can’t reset a system that never actually powers down. You can’t heal while constantly being “on,” even if you’re on a beach.
There’s also something deeply honest about admitting that not every trip changes you in some profound way. Some trips are just trips. Some are chaotic. Some are logistically impressive but emotionally neutral. And that’s okay. What’s not okay is pretending every journey is transformative just because it looks good online.
I think we need to let travel be what it is and not what we need it to be. Let it be joyful sometimes, tiring other times. Let it be beautiful and inconvenient. Let it be fun without demanding that it fix us.
Because when we stop romanticising travel as healing, we make room for real healing. The kind that happens slowly. In familiar spaces. With routines, help, boundaries, and rest that isn’t packed into an itinerary.
So no, travel doesn’t always heal. Sometimes it just reveals. And honestly, that’s still valuable too.