Whisper #6The Ache That Follows
June 24, 2025 | Safwen Daghsen, 12 min read
I still remember my first flight alone, my dear reader.
How my stomach dropped during takeoff.
How the city lights shrank beneath me.
For the first time, I felt it—that intoxicating taste of freedom.
What I didn't know then: Freedom isn't a place you travel to.
It's a practice of coming home to yourself.
India
I still remember the first days in India.
It wasn't spiritual.
It was incredibly shocking.
I was like a little kid in awe and the only world I knew is Wow.
The country felt like a giant forest that swallowed cities whole.
Everything was loud, unfiltered, alive.
People smiled without needing anything from you.
Chai vendors shouted over traffic.
Cows moved like they owned the road.
Life pulsed.
There was a kind of grounded chaos I hadn't felt before.
It stripped something off of me.
I had arrived with an ache I couldn't name, and suddenly, there wasn't space to carry it anymore. The jungle was too loud to hear my worries. And in that first silence, something broke open.
I thought: this is it.
This is the freedom I was chasing.
The Seeker's Journey
I started counting airports like rosary beads, my dear reader.
Sleeping in train stations, laughing with strangers, watching the sun rise in places I couldn't pronounce. I was volunteering in ashrams in India, hitchhiking between countries, eating with my hands in temple courtyards.
The jobs came and went with the seasons - hotel receptionist in Bali where the ocean became my morning ritual, horse trainer for months in Malaysia learning a language of subtle movements and trust.
I became whatever kept me in motion, whatever funded the next ticket.
I wasn't a tourist. I was a seeker. At least that's what I told myself.
I thought I had transcended structure.
But what I really did was build a new routine out of randomness.
The Mirror
Everywhere I went, I met people like me.
Hungry. Wandering. Free, but not really.
I remember meeting a Brazilian man I worked with at a hostel in Malaka, Malaysia. We shared the reception desk, swapped stories during quiet shifts. He had been on the road for six years. No home, no plan, just a backpack and a lot of crazy stories.
I was super impressed. Until one night, he told me his personal story.
His wife had gotten sick. They had a baby. He panicked. Gave the child to his parents. And left.
He called it freedom. Said he was giving himself space and that this is what he wanted, to travel the world.
But his eyes said otherwise.
He wasn't traveling. He was fleeing.
And I saw myself in him.
The way I told stories.
The way I exaggerated my own detachment from everything.
The way I feared slowing down.
The way I feared being trapped in a box and labelled.
Little did I know that outside every box, there is a bigger box.
You see, my dear reader, there's a difference between traveling with a purpose and traveling to escape.
Between seeking new experiences and seeking distractions from your own life, and it's not necessarily one or the other, it's always a mix of both.
My intention for you, is to acknowledge and know the difference between the two.
It is the same as looking at the parts of you that you dislike.
Over time, sunsets stopped hitting.
Hostel chats blurred together: "Where are you from? How long have you been on the road? Where to next?"
Different people. Same questions. Same dance.
Even awe becomes a loop if you repeat it long enough.
We called ourselves citizens of the world. But couldn't last two weeks in our hometowns.
There was always an excuse to leave. "It's too small." "Too negative." "Nobody gets me here."
It is the same as when the world gets all of you but you don't.
I remember an old woman in India at a temple.
She spoke English, looked at me intently, and called me Jesus—something that happened throughout my travels, this strange recognition in strangers' eyes.
When I told her where I was from, she put her hand on my heart and said:
You can travel the whole world, country by country, but if you're not traveling inside, please go home.
I smiled politely, but inside I was defensive. Who was she to tell me where I belonged? To suggest my journey wasn't authentic?
Years later, her words haunt me. The way her hand felt on my heart. The way her eyes saw through me.
Because the truth, my dear reader?
Sometimes the place isn't the cage.
Sometimes your own nervous system is.
I loved being called Jesus wherever I went, that was a story that fed into my distraction.
The Sunset Realization
I didn't plan to go home. But reality has a way of making decisions for you.
I was running out of money.
Job applications vanished into digital voids.
The anxiety I'd been fleeing started catching up - no matter how fast I moved.
Then one evening, watching another perfect sunset in another perfect place with another group of wanderers, it hit me:
Then what?
Another country, another town, another culture.
What am I really chasing here?
The horizon never ends.
You can spend a lifetime following it.
The painful truth surfaced: I was running from my own fears, avoiding myself. And at the time, going home represented the ultimate failure.
The admission that my grand journey wasn't working.
I mean I learned a lot about life, people, cultures and how most of the comfort we think is necessary was just an illusion.
My dear reader, in that moment I saw myself clearly.
The bitterness rose in my throat as I booked that flight home. Because I knew what waited for me there, everything I'd been running from.
All the parts of myself I'd tried to leave behind.
Back home, I'd have no choice but to face whatever I was escaping.
These days, I preach for exactly that confrontation. That's where your real growth is waiting - not in the next destination, but in the courage to stop running.
By no means I'm telling you traveling is bad, my dear reader.
Travel can expand your mind, open your heart, and teach you about the world and yourself.
But at least be honest about it.
Are you traveling to explore? Or traveling to escape? Are you running? Or are you chasing something truly aligned with your being?
The Real Homecoming
Coming home later—really home, to Tunisia—was the real slap.
I remember getting into a taxi at the airport, fresh off a 38 hours flight home.
My last job in Asia had been on a construction site, building houses.
All I had was a worn pair of jeans stained with paint and dusted with welding debris.
The taxi driver looked me up and down, scoffed, and muttered something about me being too dirty for his car.
That was my welcome back. A slap before I even reached my old street.
So I got out. Threw my backpack on and walked the 10 kilometers home. I’d walked so many roads abroad to save money. But that walk, back on Tunisian soil, back in my broken jeans was something else.
It was the first time I realized: returning home isn’t one decision. It’s made again and again, every step, especially when the world tries to shame who you became.
People looked at me like I had lost my mind. I was still barefoot. Eating with my hands. Going to bed before 8. I had stopped eating meat, stopped chasing the next big thing.
They didn't know where to place me.
Friends asked: "So, are you finally back?" "What are you going to do now?" "Are you applying for engineering jobs?" "Are you traveling again?"
The first few months, I ego-tripped on the adventure. I loved the questions about my travels, loved telling the story. I felt it gave me a freedom, a sense of being different.
Until I got tired of it and hit the present reality.
Your stories are stories now.
Life is here and now.
For months I was kissed by that same anxiety that followed me while traveling. The geographical cure had worn off. The fears were waiting, patient as always.
This is what happens, my dear reader, when we use travel as medicine for our inner unrest. The relief is temporary.
The "coming home blues" that so many travelers experience is really just the reunion with what we tried to outrun.
Until I started writing and digging, trying to understand what fears were hidden behind all that movement.
And truth is, it's a mix of multiple things, but mainly this: I didn't feel safe in my being, in my body, in my breath.
My shadows were driving me, distracting me, making me chase the next shiny thing under the name of freedom.
But that freedom was just escapism wrapped in a shiny shell.
Afraid of going broke.
Afraid of being not enough.
Shouting at the world so I could feel seen and worthy while inside gripping tight and secretly believing in my own unworthiness.
It took courage and brutal honesty to look inside.
That is one of the reasons I wrote to you, my dear reader, that loving the lovable parts is easy.
I loved the traveller in me, the yoga teacher, the one with stories to tell.
But I hated the scared part of me, the one who felt unsafe. And what I did was leave him behind and run away chasing stories and adventures.
By no means I'm minimizing the joy of traveling. I still travel, but now I do it with alignment, with purpose, and I take all of me, even the scared parts.
And I'm not saying I've got it all figured out. If you read my previous letters, you probably know that I left the tech world with all its fancy perks and six-figure salary.
Earlier this month, I got worried about some financial stuff. I opened my journal from India and saw the younger me who wrote: "I spent 70 USD in 3 months. If I survive this, I can survive anything."
It brought me to tears.
Because as much as he panicked, as much as he was afraid of the world, unsafe in his being, he believed he will make it.
And I still pull from his strength to this day.
I even whispered a promise to him, because in that same journal he wrote: "I'll make a blog and a newsletter and write my heart out to the world."
Whispered Life, this very letter and the previous ones are a promise to him, now fulfilled.
What the Journey Taught Me
Here's what I learned about running, my dear reader:
It feels like freedom until the moment your legs give out and you realize the ground was always there to catch you.
When you finally stop moving, your body becomes the messenger for all the emotions you outran.
They arrive like old friends who've been chasing you across continents - exhausted, but relieved to finally find you home.
For me, coming home to myself wasn't grand or spiritual.
It was small, daily surrenders:
- My yoga practice helped, sitting in meditation for 10 minutes every morning, my body rebelling like a mad Arabian horse, heart racing, thoughts screaming for distraction. Some days, those 10 minutes felt longer than entire months of travel.
- Walking the same path daily without music, without filters, without escape routes. Just feet on earth, breath in body, sky above. Boring, until it wasn't.
- Writing until my hand cramped, asking again and again: What am I feeling? What am I avoiding? What do I need? Sometimes the answer was just one word: Rest.
The hardest part wasn't the practices.
It was facing that voice inside that whispered, "You're nothing without your stories. Nobody will love the ordinary you."
The voice that said I needed to be extraordinary to be worthy of love, of space, of breath.
I had to learn to whisper back:
I am enough, even when I'm still.
Especially when I'm still.
And here's the strange magic that unfolds, my dear reader:
The silence you feared becomes the sanctuary you craved.
The feelings you avoided become your most patient teachers.
The ordinary moments - making coffee, watching clouds, feeling your feet on the kitchen floor - become sacred without trying.
The real journey happens when you stop journeying.
When you start noticing the unspeakable world around you.
That's home.
So if you find yourself needing that next trip, that next adventure to feel alive - ask yourself what you might be running from.
There's nothing wrong with traveling the world — in fact I'm flying back to Asia next week, this time differently. But the most important journey is the one that leads you back to yourself.
My dear reader, I'll leave you with few lines that I sent to my dear ones before they travel :
When you walk, feel the earth beneath you.
When you eat, taste it like a prayer.
When you sip your coffee, let it soften your face into a quiet smile.
And somewhere between your inhale and your exhale,
love yourself, just a little more than before.
You don't need a plane ticket, to feel all that.
With Love and Stillness
Saf