It probably has an actual name, but there's a factor I think of as 'travellers angst' which I sometimes wonder about it this case.
I used to travel an awful lot for work - sometimes based away from home for quite long periods of time. Although I really enjoyed that aspect of the job, and am fortunate to possess pretty robust mental health, I myself used to have the odd minor episode. I would describe these as little moments of fracture, or fleeting dissociative states, where your own actions, and those around you, and the environment that surrounds you - even time itself - appear as a series of disjunct elements, resulting in a kind of loss of equilibrium; as if your mooring line has snapped and you are floating out to sea, without power or sail. I wonder if it’s actually the very same process that can create a sense of freedom in relation to travel, but somehow contaminated by other elements, creating a darker version of that same loosening of bonds.
This still happens to me occasionally – but I know what it is, I know that it’s fleeting, I know how to deal with it. But, when I think about the Elisa Lam case, I just wonder if – when someone has significant underlying mental health issues, or is maybe suffering extreme stress in some other way – whether the thing I think of a as a passing mood can lodge itself far deeper in an individual's consciousness, and have a potential for much more devastating consequences.
Granted, the urban west coast of Canada is maybe not so very culturally different to the urban West Coast USA – but I’m not convinced that actual obvious differences in culture, language and environment are at all necessary factors in the phenomenon I’m trying to explain.
I often wonder about this - not just in the case of Elisa Lam, but also in other stories of individuals who seem to become somehow untethered when alone and far from home.
I wonder if anyone else knows what I mean, and recognises the thing that I've tried to explain?