Why I Had to Leave So I Could Stay
On healthy separation and finding yourself again as a solo traveler.
My Aunt Kathy is my travel inspiration.
She closes emails like, “Ok byeeee, I’m going to Fiji.”
She sees her husband maybe 100 days out of each year. (It’s one of the healthiest relationships I’ve seen, honestly.)
She is known to drop into your city just to meet you for “lunch,” flying out just a few hours later.
She constantly bids me farewell with the brutal sage advice, “Write thank you notes and keep your dick in your pants!” (Needless to say I fail at both.)
Aunt Kathy works at a few Las Vegas hotels as a sommelier and previously worked for a major airline. Because of this, she is able to stay and fly super low-cost all around the world. She has built her work life around her travel life, rather than the other way around.
She lives life boldly and doesn’t make any excuses for her choices. One of those choices changed the course of my life forever.
Break Away
When I was 16, Aunt Kathy entered my life via ambush. You see, I was adopted at birth because my biological parents couldn’t raise me. Down the line, I would eventually find much of my biological family, but I had to leave them first, find a healthier home, and then reconnect.
In other words, my very arrival into this world, was a departure.
I’ve been traveling since Day One! I joined Remote Year, in part, to write a book about that whole experience. I hope you’ll read it one day.
Back to our story. I wasn’t connected at all to my mother’s family…until Aunt Kathy showed up. Being my mom’s oldest sister, she just took it upon herself to literally knock on our front door one random Saturday afternoon and introduce herself when I was in high school. My two Dads, who adopted me, were beside themselves. Despite her kamikaze-esque approach, Aunt Kathy opened a new world of warmth and family for me, all by going against the conventional wisdom.
That’s all a lot of throat-clearing to say this: Sometimes you just have to break away from the herd (mentality) and find your healthiest path forward.
So in our ninth month, I did just that. I opted out of our group’s month in Lima to rediscover myself as a solo traveler. I (re-)experienced what it meant to plan things out on my own, the vulnerability of struggling in a foreign language (mi español es mejorando), and generally managed through situations without the soft cushion of gringodom. Which brings me to my next point…
A Particular Style of Travel
In January 2017, I found myself in Bali with a big group of us who defected from Kuala Lumpur for a few weeks. Every instinct was pulling me away from people with whom I had experienced untold worldly wonders over the past 8 months.
Not because of them, but because of me. I scooted around the island on my moto, met new people, damn near fell in love, surfed, lazed in the sun, and made myself miss out on most cohort things. My body was rejecting the group-travel and I went along for the ride. Here’s my theory on why:
Remote Year is a special mode of travel. Don’t get me wrong, I love paying them to handle the logistics and that’s basically the point. It’s their major value-add. But progress is always a double-edged sword, amirite?
The danger — the thing Remote Year has to watch out for as it grows — is in creating little “Americas” wherever they go. Imagine these bubbles of comfort in which we all hover through different countries never stepping outside of our literal and figurative comfort zones along the way. Yet we still get to brag to all of our friends about how supposedly cosmopolitan we are.
While there’s no single best mode of travel — we shouldn’t worship at the altar of “authenticity” (whatever that means) — we should also be careful not to shroud ourselves so utterly and completely in familiar comforts (that includes attitudes as well) as we pass through unfamiliar lands.
I saw this most viscerally in Morocco. It was the place that it was hardest for Remote Year to develop and secure that bubble. People either loved it or hated it, based on the deeply-unscientific data I gathered from our group. My suspicion is that this has much more to do with people being novice travelers, being relatively young and mostly white, and being rather unfamiliar with majority Muslim/Black/Brown/POC communities/cultures rather than the specifics of the creature comforts present or absent that month.
The discomfort was (mostly) about difference, not amenities.
And I wish we had a better way to process that as a group. Even one conversation would have been swell. But that would have required us to stop “doing” travel and instead “reflecting” on it, something we do not excel at in RY. It’s just not built into the program, yet.
Some more desirable aspects of travel (cultural immersion, language acquisition, intimate exposure, etc.) are difficult to accomplish when traveling with such large groups of mostly Westerners. They operate like big, dysfunctional families (save for the hooking up, which hopefully isn’t happening among your family members).
The natural segmentation happens. You find the ones you like, you hang out with them more. You tolerate the ones you like less because you’re moving in unison as a group and occassionally must show good face. You mingle with the ones in-between because it’s the polite thing to do. There are social morays and norms that you attend to in the name of group harmony.
At some point, everyone needs a break from this perpetual motion. It’s hard to stay “on” like this for a full year.
You start to lose yourself in all that us.
A Preview of Post-RY Life
During my opt-out month, I traveled with non-RY friends, ventured solo for a bit, and met up with three other RY groups along the way. Visiting other cohorts was a way to gain a broader perspective about the Remote Year experience, and to simply meet cool people and see how others are doing this thang. Each group has a unique collective personality, full of their own characters and idioscyncracies.
While away from the group, I tasted the familiar and bittersweet solitude (notice again that I didn’t say “loneliness” because that’s very different) that is solo travel. I had missed it. I appreciated being mostly anonymous in a new city, but also having access to an impressive network like RY, if/when I wanted it. This was a wonderful sampling of post-RY travel life and the aspect of the future about which I am most excited. A global network at your beckon call.
I also re-learned the importance of traveling with friends on the same “travel wavelength” as me. Luckily my companions and I were old friends, so it didn’t take much to learn each others’ cadence and preferences and adjust accordingly. It made me grateful for travel companions who are flexible, adventurous, but also know the accommodations you both need to make the journey work.
The Other “Leave” Campaign
I’d like to advocate for opting out as an opportunity (that RY should continue to offer) and a practice (that you should take advantage of). Do it before (or just as) you find yourself growing tired of well-worn social dynamics in the group and eschewing gatherings with people you’d otherwise love spending time with.
Cater to your inner traveler and get what you need. Recognize the hard reality that while you loooooove your group and will always have a special place in your heart for everyone who went around the world with you, you’ll likely retain meaningful connections with somewhere in the range of 5–10 people in your group (max) beyond Remote Year.
Remember how high school seemed like the center of the freaking social universe…then it suddenly wasn’t anymore because you moved beyond it? RY is much the same.
Taking the time for yourself helps you stay balanced and keep perspective about who you are versus who the group is. It helps you realize how big and small the world is, relative to the fleeting drama (and comedy) within your special snowflake cohort.
If you’re lucky, by leaving at just the right moment (so you can stay), you’ll be an even better you at the end of this wild adventure.
