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    Baggage: Confessions of a Globe-Trotting Hypochondriac
    Baggage: Confessions of a Globe-Trotting Hypochondriac
    Baggage: Confessions of a Globe-Trotting Hypochondriac
    Ebook440 pages6 hours

    Baggage: Confessions of a Globe-Trotting Hypochondriac

    By Jeremy Hance

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    An award-winning journalist’s eco-adventures across the globe with his three traveling companions: his fiancée, his OCD, and his chronic anxiety—a hilarious, wild jaunt that will inspire travelers, environmentalists, and anyone with mental illness.  

    Most travel narratives are written by superb travelers: people who crave adventure, laugh in the face of danger, and rapidly integrate into foreign cultures. But what about someone who is paranoid about traveler’s diarrhea, incapable of speaking a foreign tongue, and hates not only flying but driving, cycling, motor-biking, and sometimes walking in the full sun?

    In Baggage: Confessions of a Globe-Trotting Hypochondriac, award-winning writer Jeremy Hance chronicles his hilarious and inspiring adventures as he reconciles his traveling career as an environmental journalist with his severe OCD and anxiety.

    At the age of twenty-six—after months of visiting doctors, convinced he was dying from whatever disease his brain dreamed up the night before—Hance was diagnosed with OCD. The good news was that he wasn’t dying; the bad news was that OCD made him a really bad traveler—sometimes just making it to baggage claim was a win.

    Yet Hance hauls his baggage from the airport and beyond. He takes readers on an armchair trek to some of the most remote corners of the world, from Kenya, where hippos clip the grass and baboons steal film, to Borneo, where macaques raid balconies and the last male Bornean rhino sings, to Guyana, where bats dive-bomb his head as he eats dinner with his partner and flesh-eating ants hide in their pants and their drunk guide leaves them stranded in the rainforest canopy.

    As he and his partner soldier through the highs and the lows—of altitudes and their relationship—Hance discovers the importance of resilience, the many ways to manage (or not!) mental illness when in stressful situations, how nature can improve your mental health, and why it is so important to push yourself to live a life packed with experiences, even if you struggle daily with a mental health issue.

     

     

     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHealth Communications Inc EB
    Release dateOct 6, 2020
    ISBN9780757322075

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    • 4/5
      > Okay, you’re right to ask why I didn’t mention my paralyzing, crippling fear of snakes when I was bumming around Peru. The answer is simple. I wasn’t terrified of snakes then. I probably would’ve hugged and played footsie with a snake just for fun (though the latter would have been challenging). But I am terrified of snakes now. Steve’s decided. The thing about living every day with OCD is that you quickly discover your obsessions aren’t fixed. In fact, the more you beat back one, the more likely, at least in my noggin, a new one will rise like a demented Highlander> Obsessive-compulsive disorder latches on to the simplest anecdote (or even just a single word), which can turn on the obsession switch. It’s like I have marbles rolling forever in circles in my brain, and one word—snakes, cancer, rabies, elephants, airplanes, motorcycles, snow, dessert, cookies—provides the initial velocity to send it rolling down a seemingly never-ending spiral of fear and despair and pointless bargaining. There is no rationality in OCD, so stop looking for any.> The internet is pretty much the worst thing that ever happened to OCD sufferers. Having instantaneous access to the most horrible, god-awful, soul-crushing things that can happen to a human being is like OCD catnip> Few know the tension of an ecotone better than those with mental illness, where you exist somewhere between “normal” and “fucked in the head” all the time. This is the curse of chronic mental illness. You get so good at hiding parts of your life, you often can pass off as hunky-dory as anyone else. But then you have a bad day, a bad week, a bad month, a bad year, and all of a sudden, you’re here again, lost in your personal jungle, unable to see your way out

    Book preview

    Baggage - Jeremy Hance

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