Island View: Surviving the Slump

PHUKET: Having lived on the island for three years, I have seen my fair share of people come and go. It’s easy to get in a slump when all of the friends you originally moved here with move on to new adventures, get married or become homebodies.

The mentality of ‘been there, done that’ is rather consuming. So you end up going to the same five restaurants and bars, having the same conversations over and over again with newcomers, and don’t really venture out to all of the places that kept you here in the first place.

It wasn’t until recently when all of my original crew came back to the island to celebrate the wedding of one of our dearest friends, that I started going out to do all of the things I did when I first came here.

I must admit that the thought of having everyone around me again was a bit overwhelming as I was anxious about the possibility of having to do the standard Big Buddha, Bangla Road, Phi Phi Island run-around. But once they arrived, I realized that those are adventures that they had already partaken of and we could just enjoy the small things that we loved doing together.

My three-year-slump disappeared and I began to appreciate things like sitting at a restaurant on Thalang Road watching people pass by during the Walking Street Market; trying new dishes after discovering that your usual fried rice man is no longer there; driving to the beach at 10am with a 20-baht Thai iced coffee and 30-baht fried chicken and sticky rice for breakfast, and then going to get a massage even though you have covered in sand.

Though the time has come that my visitors are now going back to their lives in other countries or starting new ones with their new husbands, I feel revitalized and lucky to live here.

My advice to anyone who is feeling in a slump is to be adventurous, even if that means laying on the beach with a book, trying a new restaurant, or taking a day off to treat yourself with a massage and coffee. The hardest part is telling yourself that you will enjoy it… and then you do.

My goal is to keep enjoying these small things and appreciate the fact that I have the ability to do them, even if it means doing them solo, because when you live in a beautiful place like Phuket, you are never alone.

— Katie P Arnold