Where am I?
Hi readers,
I’m interrupting my series on Japan because I left my diary all the way back home in Spain, and I’m currently writing from the USA, where we came to have a lovely white Christmas with Kevin’s family.
It is also a strange state of affairs in my online life right now. For the last few months, I’ve been going through some sort of radical self-acceptance, which has required an equally radical self-honesty. In doing so, I have decided to stop being addicted to people on social media who make me feel jealous to varying degrees.
For a long time, I called it inspiration. In reality, it was aspirational—the daily reminder of what I thought my life was missing. The hardest part was realising that this “addiction” has had me stuck for many years, not truly evolving my life and my career at the pace I should’ve been.
A few months ago, I felt a peak in anxiety, and my self-esteem reached a new low, so I came to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth it to me. Full stop.
Since deleting the apps from my phone, I have been consistently calm, the most I remember being for a while. I’ve been slowly getting rid of my addiction to comparison, and I’ve been going back to simple pleasures. In my peak posting anxiety, I asked myself: What was I doing twenty years ago when I didn’t have the internet? And I’ve gotten many answers that have given me clues on how to better spend my time without worrying about online performance.
On Substack, I have found amazing creatives, excellent writers and photographers, and new people to follow who don’t spark that competitive nature in me. Instead, I love reading their Substacks, uplifting them, and sharing them. I have finally found the community I’ve been looking for the past fifteen years, only to find I’m slightly burnt out on this whole social media thing.
I’m a creative, a trained creative director—I love to build worlds for a living, and with those worlds come different audiences. The only thing these multiple worlds have in common is the space they share in my head.
So where does that leave Travellera? If people subscribed six months ago, what happens when, six months later, I have changed my mind? I’m unsure; this newsletter is about questions I still haven’t found answers to. It started as innocently as they all start, but that ugly dashboard with arrows going up and down and graphs that only reflect the roller coaster of emotions it is to hit publish has left me disheartened about writing here. These graphs and numbers only evoke similar feelings that the social media apps did. Did we all run away from them just to land in the same place?
I started this Substack out of a love for travel and writing, but recently, my way of travelling has changed, and travelling with a child has been as challenging as you can imagine. Writing travel essays has also become difficult. At some point, I couldn’t focus on either, leaving me frustrated and resentful. I have also grown disillusioned with travel content, and I’m beginning to believe it’s better to let places be. I want to return to travelling without expectations or outcomes (such as a stupid IG reel).
The online world keeps making me feel not enough, but the offline world shows me every day how valuable my contributions can be when I’m present. I feel like I have matured this year, like thirty-five is the year where I finally make some right decisions for myself. I’m ready to move on to the next thing, something that’s grounded in the real world. Travellera might be part of a dream I’ve recycled too many times. One that no longer fits the life I’m actually living. So, I may have to leave the initial concept I had for Travellera with the person I was before becoming a mother.
As I was putting my child to sleep, a thought came to mind: Maybe ideas live in the places you live in. My travel journal idea was born while I lived in Germany. I was always a traveller, but it was when I started earning money that I began to enjoy the freedom of travel and the fun of photography. Sharing my travels and photography served a real purpose. This was around 2014/2015, as a young twenty-five-year-old me started taking over the world and enjoying the old-school travel blogs.
Now, ten years later, I have returned to Madrid, the city that made me, and I’m about to live near the university where so many of my creative ideas were born but were closeted out of a lack of confidence and resources. I can hear them knocking on the walls of the drawer I’ve placed them in, their pull growing louder and louder. Madrid brings the romantic in me, and it manifests in many self-reflections, with a journal-meets-illustration-and-photography style. It was also where my interest in photography took shape, constantly dragging my best friends and siblings along to shoot fashion editorials. I didn’t hear this pull when I lived in Germany—it was Travellera who wanted to come out and play. Maybe I embraced the German practicality too much; there’s not much room for romance over there. Still, every time I returned to Madrid, I could hear echoes of these shelved ideas in the streets, where I saw my younger self’s memories being relived, like faint ghosts.
A few months ago, when I felt like giving up, I remembered I had been here before—in my previous social media hiatus that lasted over the year I was pregnant. Someone commented that “giving up” sounded too negative, and they were right. I realised that, what I was genuinely feeling, was the need to let go—a softer and less fatalistic approach to releasing things that don’t work anymore.
This time, instead of trying to recycle and repurpose my travel content again, I had to let it be and be okay with what it was from 2019-2025.
Then this poem came to me; it only comes when I really need it, it’s as if the spirituality in it carries a bit of magic.
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.
She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.
Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice.
She didn’t read a book on how to let go.
She didn’t search the scriptures.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back.
She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.
She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.
She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.
She didn’t analyse whether she should let go.
She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.
She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line.
No one was around when it happened.
There was no applause or congratulations.
No one thanked her or praised her.
Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that.
In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face.
A light breeze blew through her.
And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…
After reading it, I always feel a release. This time it’s time to let go—not of social media profiles, but of the hopes and dreams attached to them.
I won’t make drastic changes, like changing the name or branding of my Substack. My “Japan diaries” series has given me a better idea of how I want the newsletters to read.
I’m inspired by The Simple Letter, Super Ordinary Life, and The Salon, and I see myself leaning toward this kind of artistic journaling.
There will still be occasional travel content because, of course, I still love to travel, and I’m constantly on the road. I’m not sure yet how much of all this will end up taking shape, since I find myself with one foot in and one foot out of socials. So please hang in there with me as I figure all these things out.
I wish you all a happy holiday season and a soft new start to 2026.
Love,
Ana
What do you have on the horizon for 2026? How do you feel about Substack becoming social media? Have you experienced any internal changes recently? My favourite thing about writing is to keep chatting in the comments!
This has been one of my favourite reads of the week! 'Maybe ideas live in the places you live in' - what a thing to think about.
Food for thought here Ana. I think of Substack as a place where you can develop your original voice. And you do that by creating only when you get the urge to create. But, it's still social media with all its assorted anxieties-a break or rethink can be a good thing. As they say in zen you can "put it all down" for a while!