The Real Point of Traveling Solo

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot

A few years back, I took my first solo trip. It was a week-long endeavor to Ireland. There are two basic, human desires which drove me to make this trip:

1. We’re all trying to prove something. Maybe it’s that we are smart, or funny, or beautiful. I’ve spent most of my life trying to prove that I could be independent. As soon as I could have a voice in the process, I chose to attend schools farther and farther away from my home — first a bus, then a train, then a plane ride away. After college, I immediately began forking over a painful amount of each paycheck for NYC rent even though my parents live in Brooklyn, desiring not to rely on them for a breath longer than necessary. Beyonce is my idol for a ridiculous amount of reasons, at least one of them being that she does not just sing remarkably well about being an independent woman — she embodies that virtue.
2. We’re all looking for something. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes prestige, sometimes love. The one thing I have always been searching for is meaning. I am half-Asian (Chinese) and half-white (mostly of Irish descent) and fully certain that this fact has shaped my feelings of never fitting in anywhere. This is, in part, why I travel. I go to distant places and I try my best to observe with an open heart and listen with an open mind. I hold up others’ lives beside my own in a mirror, searching for strands of similarity in the heaps of difference.

Clearly, this post is not about what I did in Ireland. This is not because I have a dearth of fun-sized travel tidbits to share. I did indeed have a middle-aged beer-bellied Irish tour guide who belted the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song into the bus intercom. I made an Israeli-friend-who-lives-in-Dublin at a comedy show and swapped relationship stories with him during a personal guided pub crawl. I learned that young Irish folk use the word “craic” (pronounced “crack”) for fun. So, “That was good craic!” means an experience was fun. The young woman who taught me that also warned me not to use the term at the border in Tijuana, lest you wish to be detained by border patrol (per her experience).

Are you satisfied? Good.

After my first international run in the great city of Cork, Ireland. No, I didn’t run with the sandwich. I’m holding it for the Irishman I asked to take my photo.

Now I want to get to the meaning of it all (see point 2 above). Here are a couple of things I learned from my emerald adventures:

1. Independence can be overrated. I thought being completely on my own for a week would make me appreciate my freedom and singledom more. I wouldn’t have to negotiate with anyone about what we would see and where we would eat. I could be in my own head the entire time, not pressured to engage with anyone else. I wouldn’t be relying on anyone but myself, each and every day. I didn’t know how much I would miss these things. I missed the navigating-of-disagreement-and-offering-of-alternate-plans, the laughing/commiserating-with-someone-over-how-amazing/annoying-that-bus-driver’s-singing-is, the having-someone-to-watch-my-shit-when-I-go-to-the-bathroom. It really is frustrating at times to be alone.
2. Human connection takes courage and effort, but it is worth the risk. There were times when I failed at connecting with others on my trip, when I sat in pubs nursing beers and trying to conjure up ways to start conversations, then gave up and just spent the night watching others interact. In those moments, I was reminded that simply putting yourself in new situations is not the key to finding your place. You have to take risks, share of yourself, offer something to others. This takes courage. The courage to be vulnerable. But it is worth it. You only need to look back at my fun-sized travel bites to know that the many of the highlights of my trip involved connecting with someone else, if even only from an arm’s length. Imagine what could have become of those interactions had I stayed beyond a week. Imagine if I had invested in them.

This doesn’t mean I no longer want to be independent, nor does it mean that I will never travel alone again. Rather, it showed me that we need not make decisions just to prove something.

I do want to be independent, but never at the expense of having others in my life, of showing them how much I deeply appreciate them, of keeping myself open to the possibility that a fun-sized story — anywhere in the world — could become lifelong companionship.