The end of the world as we know it …

I'm taking an indefinite break from my travel stories as I deal with anxiety on the home front

What happens when you don’t look where you’re going. This was a year ago, I was fine, just embarrassed.

Almost exactly a year ago, I injured myself because I was in a hurry and not paying enough attention to where I was going. I tripped on uneven asphalt near my AirBnB in Toulouse, scraping my hands and cutting my eyebrow as I fell. The lesson I took from that—and that I shared with you at the end of that week’s blog post— was this:

“It’s not the distance but the journey. And it’s better to watch your steps than count them.”

I was injured because I was pushing myself to meet an abstract goal of walking at least 10,000 steps a day. But here I am, a year later, pushing myself once more to meet an abstract goal: at least one blog post a week.

That has been very hard to do lately for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I no longer feel the joy that travelling brought me for much of the past year. I’m no longer on the road, and I missed that feeling from the minute I landed at Trudeau airport in late June.

When I came back to Canada, the main reason for the return was that my Québec health insurance (RAMQ) was going to expire. You must be in Canada for at least 6 months in any calendar year to maintain eligibility, and I was very close to that limit. In addition, my private health insurance while I was travelling in Europe was pretty basic. Meaning the insurance company basically refused every request for reimbursement. That meant that I had put off getting treatment for an auto-immune disorder that was beginning to cause serious problems. I couldn’t afford the tests I’d need in France, and I certainly would not have been able to afford the $2,000-a-month treatment my doctor here ended up prescribing (and which RAMQ covers).

The health issue was weighing on me considerably when I got back, but I was tested and treated within 10 days. The special biologic medication my doctor prescribed kicked my disorder—which had gone from mild to severe while I was travelling—into complete remission. I wasn’t “cured”—my illness is incurable—but my symptoms disappeared and my life went back to normal.

If you can call life in the current political climate “normal.”

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I have been a news junkie since I started delivering the morning Montreal Gazette as a young teen. My first column was published in my high school newspaper. I spent six years as editor and publisher at a community weekly, another three as news editor of an alternative weekly, and a dozen years copy-editing on the news desk of the same newspaper I had delivered as a teenager, and six more years as a columnist at Cult Montreal. All the while, I consumed several newspapers a day and would later subscribe to dozens of international publications.

That addiction to following the news didn’t stop while I was travelling, I simply added RSS feeds from many French and European media to my already extensive collection of publications like The Guardian, the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Globe and Mail, CBC, La Presse, Le Devoir and, of course, The Gazette.

I was in France for the tense snap elections called by Emmanuel Macron following the right-wing surge in the European Parliament. Anti-immigrant parties were on the march, European solidarity seemed to grow more fragile every day. A thousand innocent Israeli civilians had being murdered and kidnapped by Hamas, 20 or 30 times as many innocent Palestinian women and children were being bombed in their homes by a modern army bent on wiping an already besieged Gaza from the face of the Earth using arms supplied by the United States. Meanwhile, 150,000 Sudanese civilians were killed in that country’s civil war, 10 million more were forced to flee. And climate change was wreaking havoc around the globe, on both land and sea.

How could it get any worse?

By the time I got back to Canada, I had my answer. Polls showed that Donald Trump was well on the way to beating Joe Biden in the Octogenarian Octagon.

My news addiction was beginning to feel like self-abuse as I started watching YouTube clips about the election race from cable news, comedy channels and Meidas Touch. I would watch clips for two or three hours most days. When Biden backed out and Harris stepped up, I began to recover some of my optimism and, by the time election day came around, I was mildly hopeful that U.S. voters would restore my faith in human decency.

And we all know how that ended.

Since T-Day, I’ve stopped watching YouTube and I rarely read much past the headlines about the coming dystopia. The rise of the religious right in the United States behind a lecherous con artist who can’t even cite a single verse from the bible is a cosmic joke. If the consequences weren’t so deadly—for women making healthcare choices, for immigrants and their families, for people who rely on government services and health insurance, for democracy, for international peace and solidarity—I might be tempted to laugh.

But now I can’t even watch the late-night hosts make Trump jokes in their openers. It’s not funny anymore. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel … sad.

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Even as a Canadian, events in the U.S. can cause cause anxiety. It’s kind of like living next door to an AirBnB, wondering if the next renters are going to be retired couple with a fondness for crosswords and camomile tea or a fraternity with a fondness for cross words and calamity.

I still remember how Trump botched the initial covid response, downplaying it and then backing dangerous, unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine and bleach. Instead of setting an example for the world of how to take a public health crisis seriously, Trump turned the almost daily televised news conferences into a reality TV circus, even introducing sponsors like Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy. The only silver lining was that the media focus appealed to Trump’s ego, and his desire to be seen as a hero meant that he backed the scientists more often than he contradicted them, and endorsed rapid vaccine production despite a large anti-vax movement among his MAGA base.

Now that the crisis is over, tho, he’s invited anti-vaxers like RFK Jr. into his cabinet, potentially jeopardizing vaccine programs that have all but eliminated diseases like polio, smallpox, the measles and the mumps. That, too, is something that can spread beyond the U.S. border and disrupt disease prevention programs in countries around the world.

That’s just one example of how the Trump disruptor agenda will ripple around the world. His isolationist economic policies such as across-the-board tariffs will spur inflation not only in the U.S. but among its major trading partners like Canada, where both exports and imports will become more expensive.

But where am I going with all this and what does it have to do with Sixty-something Solo?

When I decided in July to keep writing, even though my travels were over for the time being, I wanted to finish telling the tales of the places I explored in my last months in Europe. I am almost done, with just four or five blogs to go. But each week I dread the task of revisiting happier times while my news addiction is filling me with anxiety. I have had to really push myself to put out the last five or six blogs. My mood is momentarily lifted when I get it done and press the “publish” button, but the dread returns the moment I start thinking about the next one.

For my mental and physical health, I need to take a real break and suspend the blog until further notice. I was reluctant to do this when I was so close to the finish line, but if I don’t, I think I may take a mental spill as I chase the abstract goal of one travel post a week while the world seems to be falling apart around me.

I still have stories I want to tell, about travelling and about life, but I need to take care of myself first. I need to watch my steps. So my next one is to relieve the pressure I have put on myself so that I can think about what needs to come next as my health issues ground me for a year at least.

I’d like to sincerely thank you for keeping me company these last 68 weeks. Your support and encouragement has been deeply touching and made my travel experience so much richer. I hope my stories have made you feel a little richer, too.

Please keep your free subscriptions alive so that you’ll know when I return. If you are on a paid subscription, you can temporarily suspend it, or cancel, then switch to free.

Ciao for now.

Peter