Benefits needed: Staying healthy during long term travel.
Concept/Takeaway: Eating different food is great! But not getting enough vitamins can leave you with lasting problems. Now, there's a super easy way to make sure you stay healthy while trying whatever foods you like.
The Story: Her face transforms from a cheetah to a lion and back into a person. She’s on all fours, racing into the jungle with gracious ferocity through thickets of bamboo, out of my line of vision.
My eyes stay put on the very spot where she entered the jungle. My body follows my eyes up the stairs and into the shooting mounds of bamboo to the very spot I had seen her last. Whatever she was doing, I wanted to be a part of it.
I try to enter where she had, hoping to find a pathway. But as I approach, the world starts turning. The bamboo around me stays put but everything else grows and twists above me, forming towers that block the entrance and enclose above me. Suddenly the bamboo flickers and opens. It reveals lush greenery growing in shapes not native to nature but rather mankind. A doorway forms through the thicket and I try to push my body through it.
Light suddenly hits my face and bounces off. The human world is combining with the animalistic one and it’s enthralling.
Deep noises enter my stream of consciousness. There's a loud base with the trumpeting of elephants, the growls of tigers, and the terrible cries of their prey. It’s horrifying and wonderful and it’s filling my ears and reverberating through my skull.
My body is laying against the greenery of the door. I want so badly to feel the jungle against my skin. I forget completely that I came here for the lion woman.
“Excuse me! There’s a line.”
I look over, more bewildered at the English than at the thought of following a morphing fairytale of an animal through a transcendental jungle palace.
“What?” I manage.
“A line.. Right here?” She motions to herself and two others following suit behind her.
“Oh, uh, right,” I say, just as confused though no longer speaking in the tone of a question.
I head to the back of the que and wait a minute. Then it dawns on me. I don’t actually know why I’m standing here.
“What’s this for?” I whisper to a different girl in front of me.
“To use the lou,” she whispers back.
“Oh, yeah. Right. Thanks.” I sway back and fourth, spot my friends down the stairs, and eagerly accept my getaway plan.
“You were gone a while,” says the boy.
“Oh, yeah. I got lost,” I say, awkwardly looking down.
“Haha yeah, so did we all,” he replies with a chuckle. Everyone else we’re with laughs so I follow suit.
The night continues, we dance and dance and the music never stops, and the only thing brighter than the lights around us becomes the sun.
As it starts to rise the boy and I follow it away from the stage, out of the jungle and on to the beach. We stop following it before we reach the water, then we turn back to look at where we’ve just emerged from after so many hours. The bamboo architecture of the club that disguises it with the jungle looks cool from the outside. I like it.
We find a stone wall a little ways down the beach and sit. We talk for a while and some more friends come up and join us as the sun turns from purple to pink.
We laugh and make up stories about everyone on the beach, we dance through the sand, roll around in it, and as everyone fades back into humans and the suns light is too much for our tired eyes to capture any longer, we decide to go home.
Thank goodness uber works in Goa. Hailing a cab would have been far too much for any of us to bear in those moments.
We all make it home and everyone sleeps but me. That’s okay though. I’m reliving the night and it’s alright with me. A few hours later, the sun is still shining and everyone starts to wake up. By this time I’ve spent so long awake in my bed, that I’ve begun to go a bit mad in my head. I don’t feel good and it’s making it worse.
“You gonna come to breakfast?” The boy asks.
“I’ll meet you guys there.”
He can tell I’m not right so he offers to bring me back some toast if I don’t find it myself first.
“Coffee, too,” I add, now more confident in my decision to stay in the dorm.
‘Sure,” he laughs, “coffee, too.”
Everyone walks out and I head to the bathroom to throw up. I go back to bed and continue feeling terrible.
The boy brings me coffee and toast. I drink the coffee, look at the toast, and let out a pitiful cry-moan.
“Aw, there-there. You’ll feel better tomorrow,” he assures me.
Three days later, I’ve drank six gallons of coffee, still barely slept, though the caffeine is the only thing keeping me feeling alright, and eaten one street dumpling that a girl brought back for me.
Still anxious, but now legitimately sick, of course the only thing I want to do is, you’ve guessed it, watch Netflix. Too bad I don’t have a VPN and Indian Netflix doesn’t have any of the shows I like. (Even when you use your account, you get the Netflix of whatever country you’re in. There’s still tons of American shows, just not the ones I’m into.)
Being sick is no time of exploration for shows, so I complain to my insta followers a little and go back to covering my face with a blanket.
A week and a half later, a hostel-job quit, a wild personal runaway story to a different village, and a few nights spent in a shack on the beach later, I’m crying frantically at the airport saying I need to get to America. The nice woman at the counter is telling me she wants to help me but she can’t put me on a plane nor find me a ticket for one when I’m in such a state. So, as you can imagine, the situation isn’t great.
I was so physically drained, mentally sick, sleep deprived, nutrient deprived, full of viruses attacking my immune system (probably from the sweet jungle rave), that I just could not get it together. I’ve never felt so terrible. I was finally put on a plane to Delhi, and from there on a plane to New York. In Delhi, I fell asleep on the runway and woke up three hours later. The woman next angrily rolled her eyes and told me we still hadn’t left because there was issues with the aircraft. I nodded, closed my eyes, and stayed asleep for the next SIXTEEN hours until she then woke me up to tell me we were landing.
I spent the next two months recovering. That’s when the world started to shut down so I ran as fast as I could halfway across the world to Bali before I was actually better. The world closed so I lived there, still emotionally, and physically, a mess.
But that event, that week and a half long downward spiral in India, which happened after 7 months of solo backpacking, changed me. I thought about it all of the time. Less so now, but only for one reason (which I’ll tell you in a minute). This became one of the worst times mentally of my life, and 100% lead me to make poor decisions for the next six months of my life, all impacted by my brains inability to think clearly. I literally could not get it together. Couple that with how alone I felt and it was truly a mess. (You meet the most amazing people in the world backpacking and then they’re gone forever and it happens over and over - I wrote an article about it.) So yeah, I was a mess. I kept thinking about how someone as, in my opinion, put together as myself could fall so hard. I never wanted to feel like that again. And honestly, more than anything, I never wanted anyone else to ever feel like that again.
This instance, this night that turned into a week and a half that turned into two months home that turned into a mentally horrifying 10 months +… it’s the true inspiration for Co-Pilot’s travel supplement. Of course there was research and polls and blah blah bah else to consider when deciding what the supplement should do, but to begin, I just thought back to this week and a half. To when it all went wrong. To what lead up to it and what it became. It was loneliness, viruses, improper nutrients, horrible anxiety, probably a bit of depression, lack of sleep, a scattered brain, and a lack of both motivation and energy to do a damn thing about any of it.
What I wanted to do was simple, make sure no one ever felt like I did again. So, I found the best ingredients from around the world that could tackle each of these problems, and combined them. I made a super supplement. I figured, if this could have helped me feel EVEN 10% better than I did, maybe my next 10+ months wouldn’t have been the absolute chaotic dumpster fire that they were. And trust me, Co-Pilot makes you feel a heck of a lot more than 10% better.
In fact, it preemptively alleviates all of the issues I had.
Full Daily Multivitamin
Immunity Booster
Anti-Stress (using ingredients that are great for anxiety and depression)
Digestive aid
Energy enhancer
More restful sleep
Mood booster
And help with focusing.
The only reason this supplement exists is to work. It’s always been about not feeling like I want to die. Honestly..
Oh, and the reason I don’t think about this India story as much anymore? This terrible time? It used to consume me completely and make me tremble. The very thought that this could pop up again made me cautious. The only way to avoid feeling like this would be to stop traveling. And for someone like me, that’s worse than the alternative, how badly I felt, even if it killed me. Which trust me, it very well could have. Telling me I can’t travel is like putting me under water but letting me breath every minute just one breath of air. Enough that I can survive, but barely.
So yeah, I thought about this story all the time because it ultimately left me with only two options: facing this mental hardship again or slow suffocation.
But now, I very rarely ever think about it… because it’s no longer a fatal decision. There’s a third solution that has never existed before. And it’s literally just making sure that I take my supplements every day. Two pills, once a day. And I know they work because gosh darn it I made them myself. Just knowing I have Co-Pilot (in and of itself) provides me with that 10% better feeling, and actually taking it gives me another 50%. Co-Pilot is designed to be exactly what it sounds like. Your Co-Pilot. There for you no matter what you’re going through, when you need a friend most. And there for you when things are great! To elevate them that much more! So yeah, I personally have my solution for remaining a lifelong traveler, and now you do too. Enjoy, happy travelers.
