So I’m currently three months into my trip around the world, and to be completely honest, I feel kinda bad – or should I say in the dumps. I’m currently in Thailand, and while Thailand is nice, it isn’t as welcoming or exciting as I was expecting. I’m not treated poorly per se, but rather I feel as if I’m treated the same way Thais treat other Thais, which isn’t the worst, but certainly isn’t the best. People normally treat me as if I am as wealthy as the average Thai, and that obviously because of the color of my skin. This mainly happened in Bangkok, but I also felt in in Chiang Mai and a bit here in Phuket. I’m told that Thais are still very feudal when it comes to skin color, and the idea is that the lighter you are, the wealthier you are. That’s why you’ll see many Thais, who are a tropical people, with heavily bleached, ghastly skin even when it’s 95 degrees and the sun is high. I hear darker Thais and other SE Asians have it worse because at least I’m exotic here, but it’s still a terrible feeling to be treated worse than your white tourist counterparts. I suppose it was naive of me to think that Thailand wouldn’t have a colorism problem when the African American community still doesn’t have it all the way together, and we’re much wealthier with far more leisure time to think introspectively, yet here I am. That’s not to say that I want to be treated like a white person in SE Asia. They’re literally either ultra venerated to the point of pitiable obsession, or they treated like a much despised but needed ATM, almost like a wealthy occupying force whose presence is tolerated due to economic necessity – I see the looks Thais give white people behind their backs, and it’s not especially pretty. I feel like many places in Asia place white people at the top of a self imposed racial hierarchy with wealthier Asians in the middle and everyone else at the bottom (including me with the exception of when people find out I’m American). I’ve never heard of a group of people who wish to believe in racial hierarchies while concurrently not placing themselves at the top, but rather near the middle or even at the bottom, but that’s a thought for another time.

Well, maybe not for another time as I also haven’t been able to write as much as I thought I would be able to. While I don’t have much alone time, I still figured that I would have some sort of tome of my thoughts by now, and in hindsight that was probably just hubris talking. I do travel quite a bit, and I also have an autoimmune disease that has been keeping me from being as active as I would like to be. Don’t get me wrong, I go out plenty and I have tons of fun, but the reason why I was in Bangkok so long was because I became a bit ill and needed to take a break. I got my first hotel room while traveling which was nice, however.

In short, I’ve just been feeling rather bad. Initially I thought it was just travel fatigue, and I still think it is, but I think it’s more so I realized that I miss home. I went to Bangkok’s gay district for New Year’s Eve, and while it was nice, the mood and theme was almost a carbon copy of a gay street in America. While I thought it was cute watching Thai, and shy Chinese dudes attempt to vogue and twerk, I found myself missing the real thing a lot more than I anticipated. I’m currently on an island called Phuket in a lovely Airbnb after catching a really bad cold in my last hostel and I was feeling pretty low. I’m sick, I’ve gained fat and lost muscle, Square is way down, and I feel a bit lonely. I used “was” in the past tense because my mood has come up a bit, and I think it’s kinda funny how. I’m catching up on the new season of RuPaul on Netflix and that got me watching clips of Pose on Youtube, particularly the scene when RJ Rodriguez and Billy Porter sing “Home” from the Wiz. The lyrics of the song basically capture my feeling to a tee. While I don’t necessarily want to go back home to the States, I just miss the feeling of home. I miss America, I miss black people, I miss not being stared at (my last article withstanding), I miss the black LGBT community, I miss my culture and not some water down Asian version, I miss the lifesaver that is Walgreens, I miss my friends and family, I miss home. It’s taken me a while to pinpoint my exact emotions over the past few weeks, I only started to feel this way in Bangkok, and I think it may just be me missing home is all. It’s not to say that I’m not making friends, but it’s also a lot of goodbyes. (Plus I can’t really talk about how I feel with friends because I am literally traveling the world and I know no one wants to hear that.)

I’m not returning to America anytime soon. I actually plan on going back to Chiang Mai for a few weeks to actually catch up on writing. I found a decent Airbnb there for $15 a night and you really can’t beat that, and after that I plan on going to India to start Phase 2 of my trip which includes India, Dubai (cheap Dubai), East Africa, Egypt, and Israel/Palestine. My friends have told me that maybe I need a change in scenery, and I think they may be right.