I was sitting in a ramen shop in Tokyo, scrolling through the day’s photos, when I started crying into my noodles. Not cute, Instagram tears. Ugly, snotty, hope the staff doesn’t notice crying.
There were forty seven photos from Sensoji Temple. I’d deleted forty six of them. Not because they were blurry or badly composed, but because in every single one, I looked like someone had punched me in both eyes three weeks ago and the swelling never went down. My eyelids were so puffy and drooped that you could barely see my actual eyes. I looked perpetually stoned or recovering from a three day bender.
The thing is, I felt amazing. I’d just spent the morning exploring one of the most beautiful temples I’d ever seen. I was healthy, happy, living my dream of long term travel. But my face was telling a completely different story, and I was so tired of it.
I’d been traveling full time for almost four years at that point. Four years of telling myself that looking rough was just part of the lifestyle. That I was too busy living to worry about something as shallow as my appearance. That real travelers don’t care about stuff like that.
But sitting there in Tokyo, deleting photo after photo of what should have been one of the best days of my trip, I finally admitted the truth: I cared. I cared a lot. And pretending I didn’t was making me miserable.
The Problem I’d Been Ignoring Since I Was Twenty Three
My eyelids had always been a bit hooded. My mum has the same thing. But somewhere in my late twenties, they got dramatically worse. The skin on my upper lids got heavier, started folding over itself. By thirty one, I had these deep hoods that made me look exhausted no matter how much sleep I got.
It affected everything. I stopped taking photos with new friends because I hated how I looked. I’d position myself in group shots so someone taller was slightly in front of me. I learned to tilt my head back in selfies to stretch the skin. I became an expert at strategic angles and good lighting.
My ex-boyfriend once asked me why I never looked happy in photos. I snapped at him that I was happy, couldn’t he tell? But he was right. I looked miserable. Not because I was, but because my face had stopped cooperating with how I actually felt.
The worst part was the comments. “Are you feeling okay?” “Did you sleep at all last night?” “You look really tired, maybe you should rest.” People meant well, but every comment felt like confirmation that yes, I looked as bad as I feared.
When Running Away Stops Working
I’d left England partly to escape a bad breakup and a job that was slowly killing my soul. But if I’m being honest, I was also running from having to deal with things about myself I didn’t want to face. My body. My face. The growing disconnect between the adventurous person I wanted to be and the insecure person I saw in every mirror.
Travel was supposed to fix me. All the Instagram accounts said it would. Go find yourself. Lose yourself to find yourself. All that poetic nonsense that makes solo travel sound like therapy you can photograph.
And don’t get me wrong, travel gave me so much. Confidence in so many ways. The ability to navigate impossible situations. Languages I’d never have learned. Friends from seventeen different countries. A life I’m genuinely proud of.
But it didn’t fix the fundamental problem: I still had to look at my own face every day. And every day, I liked what I saw a little bit less.
The Night I Finally Googled It
After Tokyo, I spent two weeks in a small town in rural Japan, staying in a guesthouse run by the sweetest elderly couple who spoke zero English. It was peaceful. Quiet. The kind of place where you have no choice but to sit with your own thoughts.
One night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I finally let myself research what I’d been avoiding for years. I sat on the floor of my tiny room and typed “droopy eyelids” into Google like I was searching for something shameful.
That’s when I learned the actual term: ptosis. And that there was a surgery for it: blepharoplasty. I stayed up until three in the morning reading everything I could find. Medical articles. Reddit threads. Blog posts from people who’d had it done. Before and after photos that made my chest ache with something between hope and grief.
I cried again that night. But different tears. Relief tears. Tears that came from finally naming the thing that had been haunting me. Tears that came from realizing I wasn’t vain or broken for wanting to address it.
The Impossible Logistics of Staying Still
Here’s what nobody tells you about being a digital nomad: it’s really hard to have medical procedures when you don’t have an address. When your plans change based on visa runs and cheap flight deals. When the whole point of your lifestyle is flexibility and movement.
I couldn’t exactly have surgery in Japan and then hop on a flight to Vietnam three days later. Recovery takes weeks. Stability. Somewhere safe to heal. None of which I had.
For the first time in four years, I felt the weight of my choices. I’d built this beautiful, free life, but it came with limitations I hadn’t fully considered. Like not being able to take care of my own health without completely dismantling my entire existence.
I spent the next month bouncing around Southeast Asia, supposedly enjoying myself, but really just spiraling about what to do. Every hostel mirror was a reminder. Every photo opportunity was torture.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
I was in Chiang Mai when I finally called my older sister, Emma. It was two in the morning her time in Manchester, but she answered anyway because that’s what Emma does.
“I need to come home,” I told her. “Not to visit. To actually stay for a bit.”
There was a pause. Then: “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
And I just lost it. Told her everything. About my eyes. About feeling trapped between the life I’d built and the thing I desperately needed to fix. About feeling stupid for caring so much about something cosmetic when I was supposed to be this enlightened traveler who’d transcended shallow concerns.
She let me cry for a solid five minutes before saying, “Babe, you’re allowed to want to feel good about how you look. That doesn’t make you shallow. It makes you human. Come home. Stay with me. We’ll figure it out.”
That conversation saved me. Gave me permission to need help. To admit that my carefully constructed independent life had a giant hole in it, and I couldn’t patch it alone.
Coming Home Felt Like Failing
I landed at Manchester Airport on a grey Tuesday in October. Emma picked me up, took one look at my face, and hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. “We’re going to fix this,” she whispered. “I promise.”
The first week back was brutal. I felt like I’d given up. Like I’d failed at the nomadic life by needing something as mundane as healthcare. All my travel friends were posting sunrise photos from Bali and mountain hikes in Nepal, and I was sleeping in my sister’s spare room, researching surgeons.
I searched for blepharoplasty surgeons near me and felt overwhelmed by how many options there were. How was I supposed to choose someone to cut into my face? I’d agonized less over which country to visit next.
Emma helped me make a spreadsheet. We read reviews together. She came with me to three different consultations, asked questions I was too nervous to ask, and held my hand when I felt overwhelmed.
The third surgeon, Dr. Patterson, was the one. She was maybe fifty, with kind eyes and zero tolerance for bullshit. She looked at my eyes, asked how long they’d bothered me, and when I said “years,” she shook her head.
“Why did you wait so long?”
“I was traveling. I didn’t have time to deal with it.” She looked at me hard. “You didn’t have time to take care of yourself?”
I started crying right there in her office. Because she was right. I’d had time. I’d had four years. I just hadn’t given myself permission to stop long enough to deal with it.
Surgery Day Was Terrifying and Perfect
The morning of the surgery, I threw up twice from nerves. Emma made me tea and braided my hair and told me about her own surgery years ago when she’d had her deviated septum fixed.
“You’re going to be okay,” she kept saying. “And when this is over, you’re going to look in the mirror and finally see what everyone else sees. Someone beautiful who deserves to feel beautiful.”
The surgery itself was a blur. Local anesthetic. Pressure but no pain. Dr. Patterson talking me through every step in her calm, steady voice. At one point, she said, “You’re doing great, love. Almost done.” And I started crying again because kindness during vulnerability just destroys me.
Recovery was hard. The first three days, I looked like I’d been in a bar fight. Purple and swollen and scary. Emma brought me ice packs and watched terrible reality TV with me and never once made me feel like a burden.
By day five, the bruising started turning yellow. By day seven, I could see hints of what was coming. By day ten, I looked in the mirror and gasped.
My eyes. I could see my actual eyes. They were open. Bright. Alert. I looked like myself but better. Like someone had turned the lights on in a room that had been dim for years.
What I Learned About Home
I stayed with Emma for two months total. Long enough to heal properly. Long enough to realize I’d been running from more than just bad eyelids. I’d been running from vulnerability. From needing people. From admitting that the independent traveler life, as beautiful as it was, couldn’t give me everything I needed.
Those two months taught me that home isn’t a place. It’s people who show up for you when you’re swollen and scared and feel like you’ve failed at the life you built. It’s sisters who take time off work to drive you to appointments. It’s mums who make your favorite soup even though you’re thirty two and shouldn’t still need your mum.
Back on the Road with New Eyes
I’m writing this from a café in Lisbon. I’ve been back to traveling for three months now, and everything feels different. I take photos now. Lots of them. Selfies even. I look at them and see someone who looks healthy and awake and present. Someone whose outside finally matches their inside.
But the bigger change is internal. I don’t run from hard things anymore. When something needs dealing with, I deal with it. I’ve learned that taking care of yourself isn’t giving up on adventure. It’s what makes adventure sustainable.
The local experience I never expected wasn’t finding the best street food or the hidden beach. It was finding my way back home, admitting I needed help, and learning that sometimes the bravest journey is the one that takes you inward instead of outward.
My eyes are open now. In every sense that matters.
The Photo That Broke Me
I was sitting in a ramen shop in Tokyo, scrolling through the day’s photos, when I started crying into my noodles. Not cute, Instagram tears. Ugly, snotty, hope the staff doesn’t notice crying.
There were forty seven photos from Sensoji Temple. I’d deleted forty six of them. Not because they were blurry or badly composed, but because in every single one, I looked like someone had punched me in both eyes three weeks ago and the swelling never went down. My eyelids were so puffy and drooped that you could barely see my actual eyes. I looked perpetually stoned or recovering from a three day bender.
The thing is, I felt amazing. I’d just spent the morning exploring one of the most beautiful temples I’d ever seen. I was healthy, happy, living my dream of long term travel. But my face was telling a completely different story, and I was so tired of it.
I’d been traveling full time for almost four years at that point. Four years of telling myself that looking rough was just part of the lifestyle. That I was too busy living to worry about something as shallow as my appearance. That real travelers don’t care about stuff like that.
But sitting there in Tokyo, deleting photo after photo of what should have been one of the best days of my trip, I finally admitted the truth: I cared. I cared a lot. And pretending I didn’t was making me miserable.
The Problem I’d Been Ignoring Since I Was Twenty Three
My eyelids had always been a bit hooded. My mum has the same thing. But somewhere in my late twenties, they got dramatically worse. The skin on my upper lids got heavier, started folding over itself. By thirty one, I had these deep hoods that made me look exhausted no matter how much sleep I got.
It affected everything. I stopped taking photos with new friends because I hated how I looked. I’d position myself in group shots so someone taller was slightly in front of me. I learned to tilt my head back in selfies to stretch the skin. I became an expert at strategic angles and good lighting.
My ex-boyfriend once asked me why I never looked happy in photos. I snapped at him that I was happy, couldn’t he tell? But he was right. I looked miserable. Not because I was, but because my face had stopped cooperating with how I actually felt.
The worst part was the comments. “Are you feeling okay?” “Did you sleep at all last night?” “You look really tired, maybe you should rest.” People meant well, but every comment felt like confirmation that yes, I looked as bad as I feared.
When Running Away Stops Working
I’d left England partly to escape a bad breakup and a job that was slowly killing my soul. But if I’m being honest, I was also running from having to deal with things about myself I didn’t want to face. My body. My face. The growing disconnect between the adventurous person I wanted to be and the insecure person I saw in every mirror.
Travel was supposed to fix me. All the Instagram accounts said it would. Go find yourself. Lose yourself to find yourself. All that poetic nonsense that makes solo travel sound like therapy you can photograph.
And don’t get me wrong, travel gave me so much. Confidence in so many ways. The ability to navigate impossible situations. Languages I’d never have learned. Friends from seventeen different countries. A life I’m genuinely proud of.
But it didn’t fix the fundamental problem: I still had to look at my own face every day. And every day, I liked what I saw a little bit less.
The Night I Finally Googled It
After Tokyo, I spent two weeks in a small town in rural Japan, staying in a guesthouse run by the sweetest elderly couple who spoke zero English. It was peaceful. Quiet. The kind of place where you have no choice but to sit with your own thoughts.
One night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I finally let myself research what I’d been avoiding for years. I sat on the floor of my tiny room and typed “droopy eyelids” into Google like I was searching for something shameful.
That’s when I learned the actual term: ptosis. And that there was a surgery for it: blepharoplasty. I stayed up until three in the morning reading everything I could find. Medical articles. Reddit threads. Blog posts from people who’d had it done. Before and after photos that made my chest ache with something between hope and grief.
I cried again that night. But different tears. Relief tears. Tears that came from finally naming the thing that had been haunting me. Tears that came from realizing I wasn’t vain or broken for wanting to address it.
The Impossible Logistics of Staying Still
Here’s what nobody tells you about being a digital nomad: it’s really hard to have medical procedures when you don’t have an address. When your plans change based on visa runs and cheap flight deals. When the whole point of your lifestyle is flexibility and movement.
I couldn’t exactly have surgery in Japan and then hop on a flight to Vietnam three days later. Recovery takes weeks. Stability. Somewhere safe to heal. None of which I had.
For the first time in four years, I felt the weight of my choices. I’d built this beautiful, free life, but it came with limitations I hadn’t fully considered. Like not being able to take care of my own health without completely dismantling my entire existence.
I spent the next month bouncing around Southeast Asia, supposedly enjoying myself, but really just spiraling about what to do. Every hostel mirror was a reminder. Every photo opportunity was torture.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
I was in Chiang Mai when I finally called my older sister, Emma. It was two in the morning her time in Manchester, but she answered anyway because that’s what Emma does.
“I need to come home,” I told her. “Not to visit. To actually stay for a bit.”
There was a pause. Then: “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
And I just lost it. Told her everything. About my eyes. About feeling trapped between the life I’d built and the thing I desperately needed to fix. About feeling stupid for caring so much about something cosmetic when I was supposed to be this enlightened traveler who’d transcended shallow concerns.
She let me cry for a solid five minutes before saying, “Babe, you’re allowed to want to feel good about how you look. That doesn’t make you shallow. It makes you human. Come home. Stay with me. We’ll figure it out.”
That conversation saved me. Gave me permission to need help. To admit that my carefully constructed independent life had a giant hole in it, and I couldn’t patch it alone.
Coming Home Felt Like Failing
I landed at Manchester Airport on a grey Tuesday in October. Emma picked me up, took one look at my face, and hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. “We’re going to fix this,” she whispered. “I promise.”
The first week back was brutal. I felt like I’d given up. Like I’d failed at the nomadic life by needing something as mundane as healthcare. All my travel friends were posting sunrise photos from Bali and mountain hikes in Nepal, and I was sleeping in my sister’s spare room, researching surgeons.
I searched for blepharoplasty surgeons near me and felt overwhelmed by how many options there were. How was I supposed to choose someone to cut into my face? I’d agonized less over which country to visit next.
Emma helped me make a spreadsheet. We read reviews together. She came with me to three different consultations, asked questions I was too nervous to ask, and held my hand when I felt overwhelmed.
The third surgeon, Dr. Patterson, was the one. She was maybe fifty, with kind eyes and zero tolerance for bullshit. She looked at my eyes, asked how long they’d bothered me, and when I said “years,” she shook her head.
“Why did you wait so long?”
“I was traveling. I didn’t have time to deal with it.” She looked at me hard. “You didn’t have time to take care of yourself?”
I started crying right there in her office. Because she was right. I’d had time. I’d had four years. I just hadn’t given myself permission to stop long enough to deal with it.
Surgery Day Was Terrifying and Perfect
The morning of the surgery, I threw up twice from nerves. Emma made me tea and braided my hair and told me about her own surgery years ago when she’d had her deviated septum fixed.
“You’re going to be okay,” she kept saying. “And when this is over, you’re going to look in the mirror and finally see what everyone else sees. Someone beautiful who deserves to feel beautiful.”
The surgery itself was a blur. Local anesthetic. Pressure but no pain. Dr. Patterson talking me through every step in her calm, steady voice. At one point, she said, “You’re doing great, love. Almost done.” And I started crying again because kindness during vulnerability just destroys me.
Recovery was hard. The first three days, I looked like I’d been in a bar fight. Purple and swollen and scary. Emma brought me ice packs and watched terrible reality TV with me and never once made me feel like a burden.
By day five, the bruising started turning yellow. By day seven, I could see hints of what was coming. By day ten, I looked in the mirror and gasped.
My eyes. I could see my actual eyes. They were open. Bright. Alert. I looked like myself but better. Like someone had turned the lights on in a room that had been dim for years.
What I Learned About Home
I stayed with Emma for two months total. Long enough to heal properly. Long enough to realize I’d been running from more than just bad eyelids. I’d been running from vulnerability. From needing people. From admitting that the independent traveler life, as beautiful as it was, couldn’t give me everything I needed.
Those two months taught me that home isn’t a place. It’s people who show up for you when you’re swollen and scared and feel like you’ve failed at the life you built. It’s sisters who take time off work to drive you to appointments. It’s mums who make your favorite soup even though you’re thirty two and shouldn’t still need your mum.
Back on the Road with New Eyes
I’m writing this from a café in Lisbon. I’ve been back to traveling for three months now, and everything feels different. I take photos now. Lots of them. Selfies even. I look at them and see someone who looks healthy and awake and present. Someone whose outside finally matches their inside.
But the bigger change is internal. I don’t run from hard things anymore. When something needs dealing with, I deal with it. I’ve learned that taking care of yourself isn’t giving up on adventure. It’s what makes adventure sustainable.
The local experience I never expected wasn’t finding the best street food or the hidden beach. It was finding my way back home, admitting I needed help, and learning that sometimes the bravest journey is the one that takes you inward instead of outward.
My eyes are open now. In every sense that matters.
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