Today's episode is a reframe for your perspective on your breakup. Your breakup is not a tragic ending but an exciting new direction in your life story. In this episode, I discuss how to use travel as a tool for healing and stepping into becoming the main character of your story.
Come on over to instagram @sarahcurnoles and follow along for more stories, tips, and support to get over your breakup. Message me your plot twist energy story, I want to hear from you! https://www.instagram.com/sarahcurnoles/
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah Curnoles, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk, to heal your heart. Let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Breakup Pep Talks. This is Sarah Curnoles your breakup bestie. And today we're talking about one of my favorite topics and I hope to put a new spin on it for you because I also think it's really misunderstood. Today we're talking about breakup travel, and we're talking about this because I'm on a bit of an international adventure, if you will. It's not after a breakup necessarily. It's something I've wanted to do my entire adult life is learn how to do the digital nomad life of working and traveling at the same time of being able to explore new places, new cultures, new people and new ways of living, while also continuing to make an impact on the world. And that's what I'm doing. So if you're following me on Instagram, and if you're not, whatcha doing, we need to be friends on Instagram because I'm posting all my travel pictures and I feel like I am learning so many lessons about how good travel can be when you are going through a major change.
(02:06)
And I'm sharing those consistently over on Instagram. And it's just my name, Sarah Krons, which is spelled for you in the show notes. So you can go find me and we can share stories together. But today I want to talk about travel in a different way. I want to start thinking about travel after your breakup as the ultimate plot twist energy. What if your breakup isn't the end of your story, but it's the best plot twist yet? So I remember I have done a lot of travel, I should say. I've done a lot of travel solo and I've done a, and some of it has been a disaster. I've definitely had those experiences where I go away for a weekend or a week or I even did a cross country road trip trying to clear my head and I spent the whole time thinking about my ex.
(03:15)
I remember I did a beach weekend crying about my ex thinking he was the one that got away. I remember writing him this long letter and I thought I was doing the right thing. Write the letter and then you're going to burn it and you're never going to send it. But instead, I ended up typing it and rewriting it over and over and over again sitting on the porch of this cute bed breakfast. And I ended up sending it and I never heard from him. So I have no idea how that went. I'm a little embarrassed if he ever listens to this. I'm very curious what you thought when you got my email where I think I actually told you you were the one that got away. I'm sorry, not my finest moment, but fast forward to my last breakup and he and I had been together off and on for four and a half years.
(04:15)
I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with this person. We were talking about getting married and buying a house and having children, raising a family together and growing old together. And he changed his mind and decided that the life with me was not the life that he wanted anymore. And I was crushed, absolutely devastated. And I was two days after that breakup when I remember sitting on our couch, we were living together at the time, and I was looking for open apartments. I was looking on Craigslist even. And I was checking my email and there was this email from the alumni office of my college with an invitation to join other alumni on a trip to Cuba. And I immediately hit reply and said, what do I have to do to sign up? I'm going on this trip. And that trip was less than three months after the breakup, and I went feeling a bit broken, still sad.
(05:28)
And I came home a new person. Now why did that trip? Why did that trip change me and not all the other trips I had done? Why did I come home feeling more alive, more vibrant, more connected to myself? It wasn't the location, although Cuba is amazing, and if you have an opportunity to go, please go check it out. They're the kindest, most lovely people. They're so welcoming and so vibrant. The dance, the music, the art, all of that definitely soothed my soul. But what happened on that trip was I actually decided I was going to give my breakup purpose. I was going to figure out how to get through my breakup in order to help other people. So that trip gave me distance from my life and distance from that relationship that I had, new perspective that I saw the way I wanted to live my life with more clarity than I had been able to see when I was sitting at home or when I was complaining to friends over one too many glasses of wine.
(06:46)
The travel gave me such a break in my routine and so much exposure to new things that I saw everything differently and decided to seize that opportunity and really change it up. So I want to talk about breakup, travel and breakups with a brand new lens. I want to start talking about this. It's a movie and this is the plot twist moment. So let's look at the plot twist energy, right? You think the story is going one way, the couple is headed towards their happily ever after, and we think when it's happening in our own life and that relationship is ended and we're breaking up with our partner, we think game over. I am going to get stuck in grief. I am going to be depressed. I am going to blame this all on myself and I'm never going to get out of this. That's the mindset that keeps you stuck.
(07:50)
It keeps you stuck in the breakup and the sadness of it way longer than you need to. Instead, I want you to try this mindset on for size. What if this is just your life story going in a new direction? What if this is a surprise plot twist that nobody saw coming? So think about it. The energy behind they dumped me is really heavy, right? That's a big lift. It doesn't feel fun and it feels like a giant weight, honestly. But if you say pull out twist, they ended the relationship. Suddenly it has this energy of suspense, of curiosity, of opportunity, of an implication of there's something coming next, something that's probably even better than what came before. The plot twist. It makes you wonder, I wonder what's being set up for me next, right? This a total mind shift, and I want you to play with this for yourself.
(09:00)
Now, why I love talking about travel in this way too is that I think sometimes people look at breakup travel the way that I used to. We look at it as a way to vacate our life, have a break for a little while, distract ourselves and kind of hit the pause button. Or maybe you don't hit the pause button. Maybe you try to hit the fast forward and you're going to skip over all the feelings and all the grief and all the morning and all the hard stuff, and you're just going to jump into hooking up with random strangers on vacation and being happy go lucky all the time, which I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But the problem is when you get back from vacation or when you come down from the high of being on vacation, even if you're one of those people that you totally leave your life and you're like, I'm moving to The Bahamas, eventually you're going to come back down to homeostasis, you're going to come back down to normal and it's all going to catch up to you.
(10:06)
I don't say that as a threat. It did sound a little threatening as it came out of my mouth. I mean that as that's the way that reality works. Nobody gets to escape the healing. You don't get to escape the grief for the morning. It will catch up to you in one shape or form, even if it feels like you're carrying the weight of a past relationship with you for years and years and years of thinking. That's the one that got away, or that one that haunts you, that ghost in the back of your closet that just seems to linger. We all have to do the work. Eventually going on vacation and thinking that you can skip out on the work is thinking about your vacation in the wrong way. It's actually not serving you at all.
(10:57)
Here's how I want you to think about a vacation or any kind of travel after a breakup. Let this be your fuel for your plot twist energy so that you can discover what is coming up next. So travel can be your invitation to step into something new, not necessarily maybe a new relationship that might not happen when you're on vacation, but you have this opportunity to shake up your routines and shake up your environment and the normal cast of characters that are in your everyday life. You get to change all of this and be around something that's totally new, and you can either choose to interact with it the way that you would with things at home and show up in the same energy or embrace plot, twist energy and step into the main character of your life and decide who do I want to be in my life? If I'm the main character, how do I want to harness my energy right now and step into becoming my favorite version of myself? So it really, I feel like this shifts us all out of autopilot mode where life is happening to us. And instead, you take ownership and responsibility for your life and you get in the driver's seat and you say, I'm not waiting for someday anymore. I'm going to start creating the life that I want now, and what do I want that to look like?
(12:44)
And so your plot worthy travel experience might look like you maybe go back to a place that you once visited with an ex and you want to reclaim it for yourself. You want to make new memories in that place and make it special just for you, or which I've definitely done that by the way. Or you take a trip that you've always said that you would do someday, which is what I did with Cuba. I always said I was going to do it someday. He never wanted to do it because it seemed too dangerous, which is a myth. And so as soon as I saw that email, I knew that was an invitation for me to do the trip. I said I would do someday, and that someday was today. Or maybe you book something that makes you feel the way you want to feel. Maybe you want an experience where you are taking exceptional care of yourself. So you book a spa weekend, or maybe you want to be bold. And so you book a surfing trip where you learn how to surf or you do a jungle exploration or something that feels like the experience, the travel location is going to be in alignment with the quality in yourself that you want to develop.
(14:08)
So what if this was your moment that you were being invited to do it for the plot? Let's shake up the plot of your life. Let's change the energy out of the stagnant and let's say yes to something different or new that moves you in a forward direction. It doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, travel rarely is perfect. Travel I feel like is a lot of making mistakes and figuring out along the way and solving the problems as you go. But all of that is still forward motion and it is showing yourself how capable you actually are. Because I think one of the things a breakup robs us of is it robs us of self-trust. It robs us of feeling like I can handle my life. Instead, we sometimes turn that narrative into like, what's wrong with me? I'm broken. Why doesn't anybody want me? Why can't I make it work? And travel is this wonderful opportunity to show yourself, oh yeah, I can make it work. I can make a lot of stuff work. I can figure this out. I don't have to have every bus route solved for, I'll figure it out when I get there.
(15:29)
Or maybe you try an activity that you'd never do at home. You say yes to a dinner invite that you wouldn't normally if you were at home. You introduce yourself to somebody that you don't know or you just are open to synchronicities. So what if you looked this as an opportunity to keep readers or watchers of your movie or your book of your life? If your job is to keep them hooked, what would you do? What would your next step be? And it might be fun to think on that and let your mind wander. Let your imagination be sparked again, man. When was the last time you let your imagination out to play? How much fun would that be to think about it, of where would I like to go? What energy do I want to cultivate? Or what quality in myself do I want to cultivate and how can I pair energy with that?
(16:34)
And then I also feel like part of your responsibility, you go on this trip, you tap into this new version of yourself and how do you want to integrate it and bring that version of you home? It doesn't have to stay on vacation. That version gets to come home with you. So we want to talk about what's the integration of main character energy when you come home. So your travel may end, but the energy gets to keep going. How do you want to keep this quality that you cultivated while you were traveling? I brought some art home from Cuba. I brought art home and hung it up so that I'd be reminded of a certain interaction that I had with an artist in a way that I felt so inspired. Or another piece of art. Oh my gosh, did I bring home? I think I brought home four pieces of art good for me.
(17:26)
And I have another piece of art that was just so colorful and vibrant that it reminded me to bring that level of vibrancy into my life. And I had another one that was just full of love, energy, and it was sexy, and it reminded me I'm still a sexy, attractive woman. Even after my ex decided that we weren't going to be together anymore, there is someone else that is going to find me sexy and attractive. So I decided to bring home art to keep that cultivated for myself. You don't have to bring home anything. You can decide to keep journaling about your future self. You can decide that you want to be interacting with people with the same openness and curiosity that you had when you were traveling. You want to say yes to random things, whatever that might be. But I think the key here is to remember your story isn't over. The travel actually isn't the point. The travel is like an access ramp that you can tap into something new, that you can spark something new, that you can cultivate something new, and then you get to bring it home and integrate it into your life.
(18:44)
So I want to play with this and I want to hold it in the energy of play. Your breakup doesn't have to always be so serious. It can feel heavy and serious without even trying, right? But what if we bring this level of play, creativity and imagination to it, and we look at this like a story. Think about your breakup as the plot twist moment. You, the hero of your story are being called to an adventure. How are you going to answer the call? Are you going to accept the call and this invitation into a bigger life where you get to take ownership and responsibility and decide who you're going to be and how you show up? Be the main character where you're going to reject the call and keep going the way you have been and keep getting stuck and keep pining over your ex. There's no right or wrong answer here because obviously I've done both.
(19:46)
I did both for a long time and eventually I got tired of my own story where I was always stuck on my ex and I was always sad over a boy. I eventually got tired of that and decided, what if I try to accept the call? What if I try a new way of being? What if I try a new way of showing up in my life? And I'll tell you, everything changed when I accepted the call to the adventure. So I want to hear from you. I want you to come on over to Instagram, Sarah Kernels, and I want you to DM me your plot twist story. Even if you just DM me. I used to think that the breakup was the end of my story, and now I'm playing with the idea of the relationship ended plot twist. Even if that's all you tell me, I want to hear from you and let me know. Are you ready to accept the call to adventure? Yes or no? You don't even have to know what the adventure is yet, but are you willing to accept the invitation? Are you in yes or no? Let me know, my friends, I want to hear from you. And if this one resonated, please feel free to share this episode with a friend. Maybe they'll become your travel buddy. Maybe they could become your mentor along the way or your travel. I said travel buddy. But I'm thinking kind of like Frodo and Sam.
(21:24)
Well, I'm in Oxford, and that is where the Lord of the Rings was written. So maybe the hobbits are on my mind more than they need to be. But anyway, share this episode with a friend. Come on over to Instagram. DM me your plot, twist a story, and if you are accepting your call to adventure, okay, my friends, take care of this.