Travel As A Practice In Self-Care
A Bisexual Man’s Perspective On Going Beyond Physical Borders to Access Resilience
“We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes…the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”
― Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
My journey into the vast, colorful expanse of the world began in childhood as I watched my father return from distant lands, including Iceland, Ghana, China, and Peru, each time adding a red pin to the large world map that decorated a wall in my home.
As a young boy, this ritual, along with our pastime of watching planes take off and land at LAX, nurtured my adventurous spirit and deep curiosity about the world.
My parents fed this sense and at eleven years old, I went on my first homestay exchange program to Japan for eleven days as the only black boy in the group. Travel has since become a conduit for healing, fulfillment, and empowerment, reshaping my sense of self…and in many ways trying to obtain those “dispassionate eyes,” Doris Lessing writes about.
