Am I depressed or did I just go on holiday?

One of life’s greatest joys is the purity of holiday happiness.

Your old routine of work, chores, and responsibilities temporarily parked, you embark on a new way of life on holiday; walking until your legs ache, eating whenever you’re hungry, and sleeping whenever you feel like it. You have wine at midday, and coffee at midnight. Cake for breakfast, and carbs for dessert.

The shackles of routine unbound, you move about your day embracing every experience, living with intention, and filling your day only with exactly what your mind and body feel like in the moment. No diets, deadlines, or demands. Your tech loses its hold on you, as you start to care less about keeping up, and more about soaking up your experiences.

Your perspective grows exponentially. You realise you’ve been working too hard, or that you want a new career. You realise you’ve been sacrificing yourself in relationships, or haven’t shown enough gratitude for who you have in your life. You realise your hobbies have stopped, or you want to start learning Italian, pronto. You promise yourself you’ll go on holiday more often, that you’ll live the kind of life that can inspire you as much as holidays do.

Then comes the point in every holiday when you’ll remember your life at home, perhaps be comforted by it, but also somewhat unsettled. Is it dread? Is it anxiety? Either way, you’ll ignore it. And as the days count down until your holiday ends, you work even harder to make the most of every moment and savour every meal.

So you wrap up your holidays, loaded with memories, partially sunkissed, and energised by a fresh perspective on life. You might have experienced the beauty of foreign cultures, connected with new people, tried new food, wandered down new streets and pushed yourself out of your comfort zone.

You’ll arrive back home, relieved to be in comfort, but underpinned by a heavy weighted feeling. Your house will feel small, and you’ll resist any activity that threatens to pull you out of your holiday bliss and back into reality. Emails can happen tomorrow. You’ll wash the clothes on Monday. Friends and family will ask you about your holiday, your favourite moments subconsciously already curated for response.

You don’t want to go back to work. You dread work. You dread the responsibilities and the banality of it all. It’s as existential as it is futile. Before your holiday, you are content with your routine, even happy. But holidays tip the scales so far out of your routine and into a life you dream of, that it rocks the foundations of your everyday life.

There is beauty in this torment, in this friction between reality and holidays, a moment of inspiration captured in your daily life. The panic you feel holding on to your recent experience.

But as the warmth from the memories of your holidays fade, your routines begin to reassert themselves, your inbox becomes managed, your meals planned, and your house stays clean. Until sometime a few months later, you’ll remember the purity of holiday happiness, open up a browser and book your next holiday.

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