On Solitude: Westward to Japan
I started my journey seeking solitude.
I started out from San Francisco and arrived in Tokyo sleep deprived gazing into the frigid sea out of the flight window on a crystalline day. The airport in San Francisco had been the easy part. I’d rolled through the motions, checking in at the China Airlines counter before shuffling through security amidst a crowd of international travelers bound for various home parts, catching snippets of conversation in a collage of languages to their family members in tow. I’d purchased a sparkling water to rid myself of the final quarters and dimes in my wallet and then stood in the impossibly long line to board my flight.
I like the motion of traveling. Sometimes I think my favorite part comes in navigating a crowded station, finding the flow of winding through a new terminal. In the daily motion of travel, there’s both anonymity and constant distraction. It’s the comfort of movement, the sense of blending in on public transit — headphones in, lost in thought — married to the novelty of new places. In SFO’s international terminal, I found a rhythm. I skipped the walking ramps and power walked myself to my flight out of the country. But as soon as I boarded the plane, settled my backpack underneath the seat in front of me, unlaced my hiking boots and leaned back, my mind turned on. I felt the panic creep.
The flight suddenly felt less like a passage to Japan and more like the abandonment of the life I’d carefully constructed for myself. And why was I leaving anyway? For months, I’d wrestled with the instinct to depart, to leave behind the comfort of my daily life. I hadn’t been able to work out why I want to abandon the things that bring me the most joy: my work, my partner, my pets, my hometown.
Sitting on the plane, spinning into anxiety, I reminded myself of advice a stranger had given me when I told her about my upcoming trip. She said, “I did something like this once. I knew I was turning my life upside down. But I just…” and then she mimicked holding her nose, squeezed her eyes shut tight and jumped.
Many times on this journey already, I’ve taken a deep breath as if to plunge into some unknown water. I took one walking into the chaotic Chinese rail station in Chengdu to buy an overnight ticket using sign language. I took one walking to a guesthouse, alone at night, down an unlit dirt road in rural Laos where the public bus deposited me without further instruction. And I took one sitting on that first flight contemplating the leap I was about to take.
A few minutes into the flight, I slipped into the airplane bathroom and turned to my reflection in the full length mirror. The veins in my cheeks reflected back a dull rust tone in the viridescent neon light and the wrinkle across my forehead splayed dark and shadowed, crowning my face. I like the slow appearance of wrinkles. It gives my face the look of being lived in, and I enjoy the enduring shadow of wonder written into my brow. As the tears started to pour down my face, I had a little talk with me. I reminded the woman standing in front of me that I am here for her, that she is my favorite person, that I am her best friend and that she can do this thing alone. Following my self-directed pep talk in the dimly lit capsule, I walked back to my seat, sat down and gazed at the miniature plane on my screen, venturing over open sea.
One of the first questions most people ask when you tell them you’re going on a trip is, “Alone?” It’s less a query and more a means of expressing their disapproval. Women should not travel alone. If we do, we should expect terrible things to befall us at every turn. Folks range from mild disbelief to personal affront.
There’s a particular kind of cynicism at play here that troubles me. Our fear of foreign places is ultimately a fear of foreign people — in particular, the kind that don’t look like us. Here, I’ve learned paternalism is alive and well. Folks are particularly worried about my safety in Muslim countries. White men have a really intense fear of brown men touching me. I’m not exaggerating when I say this. Nearly to a person, white men (particularly those in generations above me) have warned me about rape — some going as far as saying I’m asking for it.
Let me just take a quick moment to say: I’m fucking sick of being condescendingly warned about men by men. PSA for the men reading this: women know men are dangerous better than you will ever understand. You don’t have to explain it to us.
In a cafe in Luang Prabang, an older gentleman in John Lennon glasses and white linen pants bristled over his pho when he learned I was traveling by myself and then preceded to tell me that I should not travel alone and that the place I was in wasn’t safe. He was warning me about the people he lives alongside every day. They’re far from being his community despite proximity. And that distance — or rather, lack of it — is why this fear is so insidious. Fear of place inhibits our connection to people, limits our ability to empathize, and creates narratives in which those who are foreign to us become enemies of ours. When people question whether it’s safe to travel alone to a particular place, what they are actually questioning is whether or not it’s safe to interface and connect with the people in that place. There’s a mistrust of others coupled with a disbelief that I would want to confront a hostile world solo.
At a Christmas party the week before I departed, I was having the standard conversation. Yes, I’m going on a long trip. Yes, I’m going alone.
We were just heading into the series of ‘Alone? Are you sure about that? Shouldn’t you go with someone? I don’t think you should do that. You don’t understand how [insert country here] is. That’s just not a good idea.’ when the woman standing next to me interrupted my conversation partner.
“If she’s going on this trip alone, perhaps she wants a journey by herself. She chose this; she must have a reason.”
I set out seeking solitude, but I encountered loneliness first.
A partnership of many years becomes the water you swim in. In love, I lost my talent for being alone. The first few days in Japan were jarring. I felt as though I was looking at the place from underwater. Nausea made my eyes blurry. Worry turned a dimmer on the sky. I went through the motions of enjoying sumptuous dinners at ryokans in a fog. I got in the shower at night and sat down and wept, biting my knee to quiet the sound. I was incensed at how quickly the thing I spent years building could seemingly vanish. It was like absently tugging a stray thread on my favorite sweater one day and finding myself standing naked in the cold. Love unraveled in a flash.
But, although striking out on my own made me feel suddenly exposed, it’s also true that loneliness doesn’t merely happen when you’re alone. Loneliness can occur in a crowd, in a relationship, or even while traveling with someone. There is nothing so acute as the loneliness of crying yourself to sleep next to a gently snoring partner who has swiftly drifted off to sleep after a fight. It’s far less lonely to spend the night by yourself.
In planning my trip, I thought I would be relieved to have a travel buddy those first few weeks in Japan, but many times over, I discovered that the presence of someone else only amplified how desperately lonely I felt. Each morning, I dutifully pulled on my personality like a well-worn sweater. Being in relationship with others, friends and lovers alike, fundamentally requires the presentation of a certain version of ourselves. Whether we’re navigating with a travel companion, or navigating a long term relationship, we shape our self in accordance with another. And often this requires that we show up less than authentically in the interest of social nicety, particularly when it comes to negative emotions. Mourning and confusion, after all, make people uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s best to be alone when you’re lost.
At times, Japan made it easy to be lonely. Respect and decorum — designed to maintain appropriate interpersonal contact — felt like an enclosure. Navigating new social interactions insisted on a bifurcation of feelings and outward expression, on politeness married with restraint. Given my state of mind, perhaps I should have embraced this happy divide, but the insistence on propriety only magnified my loneliness. On trains, people around me stared into their phones. Those walking in parks looked the opposite way as we crossed paths. The people ringing me up for coffee studiously avoided my gaze. I missed eye contact. In Japan, I ached to be looked at, to be seen.
When we set out to new places alone, we invite the companionship of the individuals in those places more readily. When we travel, we can easily put ourselves in the way of interactions that challenge our assumptions, ideas that reframe our very sense of self. The cynicism I’ve encountered so many times with this question of “alone?” is the flip side to the open vulnerability of encounter. In the act of venturing out, there’s an inherent hopefulness and belief in connectivity. This seems particularly relevant given America’s current political climate.
But encountering others with empathetic curiosity requires that we first meet ourselves with that attitude. I have spent a bulk of my life contemplating my relationships with other people and less time laboring on my relationship with myself. This was the ultimate intention of my journey. My therapist reminded me time and again as I agonized over the decision to leave, “This is your time. You with you.”
Loneliness, then, is an opportunity to practice reacquainting with our self. Loneliness is the forge for self-reliance and self-relation. It’s the practice of learning to be with oneself in discomfort. Only through meeting ourselves in the potentially painful space of loneliness can we arrive in the peaceful realm of solitude. Loneliness is the sentiment of fear, of thinking we are not enough, and of thinking that we’re fundamentally disconnected from humanity at large. Solitude is where the faith in connectivity and the hope of connection converge. And I finally started to find that faith and hope on my last day in Japan, biking perfectly by myself down a quiet street in Kyoto with my best friend from the mirror.
Author’s note: I’m currently making my way westward on a 6-month circumnavigation of the globe. This piece is the first in a series of musings from the journey. They’re informed by place — though more reflection piece than travelogue. You can find photos from the trip on Facebook and Instagram using #ParzyWalk
