Solo Travel and Being Brave
On solo travel, identity reclamation, and why going alone is the bravest thing you will ever do
Here is the fear nobody says out loud before booking it: what if I come back different? What if I discover I like being alone too much, and the life I return to feels smaller than I thought? What if I get there and realize I have been performing my own preferences for twenty years?
That is the fear. Book the trip anyway.
The Surprising Thing That Happens
The first night I spent completely alone in a foreign city, I sat at a small table by a window and ordered dinner for one. No one to negotiate with. No one to manage or perform for. I ordered the thing that sounded most interesting, not the safe thing. It took me until I was sitting alone in another country to do that.
It felt like meeting someone I used to know.
What It Actually Is
Not the Eat Pray Love version. I am talking about the Saturday you drive three hours alone and spend the day eating what you want, wandering into whatever interests only you, sitting at a bar at 3pm because you feel like it and nobody needs you home by six.
I have a married friend who takes one long weekend a year. No husband, no kids. She stays in a perfectly average hotel, orders room service, and sleeps until 9am without a single small person climbing on her face. She says she has to have it. That one weekend is how she comes back to her life with something replenished that nothing else touches.
Solo travel, in its truest form, is not about escape. It is about return.
Start Here
You do not have to book a flight to Portugal tomorrow. Book a hotel two hours away. Order room service. Eat it in the bed, in silence, at whatever time you feel like eating it, with no one asking what is for dinner.
Notice what happens in your body when nobody needs anything from you. Then go a little farther. Keep going.
The woman you have been trying to get back to is not in Bali. She is in whatever room you are finally alone in. You are allowed to go find her.
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