What Traveling Means to Me

Two years ago, I had no idea that when I left my beautiful little undergraduate campus, I’d be turning down a path blooming with travel experiences that would challenge me to ask myself what traveling means to me.

I think I started rediscovering myself in Peru, my first destination post-grad

Volunteering as an English teacher in an international organization with a majority-women population introduced me to new ways of thinking, while the Peruvian women I met in the small rural town I worked in completely changed the trajectory of my priorities.

That’s what happens when you cross paths with people from different worlds—they leave imprints on your preconceived notions and challenge you to ask difficult questions, like whether your decisions are truly serving the life you want to build. Many older adults exclaim “You have so much time!” and in some ways they’re right, but in other ways not so much.

Mid-to-late twenties is when our personalities, habits, and quirks largely solidify for life

This renders time irrelevant if we don’t challenge ourselves to engage with the finer details of the adult we’re becoming. I don’t want to “wait until later” for anything that I could conceivably accomplish before the viscous intangibility of “later.” But then, what is it that I really want to accomplish? What value do I bring to my own aspirations? These questions arrive with the steady pulse of an ocean current, eroding both confidence and fear in equal measure, though at different times depending on my mood. Ultimately, you’re faced with a question for which there is no right answer: “What do I want my life to be about?”

Traveling, volunteering, and working jobs around the world gives me the breathing room to be reminded of the importance of this question

If I’d simply followed the arrows marked “this way” after college, I don’t think these questions would have manifested as insistently as they did. That said, wandering has its drawbacks, particularly for an anxious perfectionist, and there have been times I dearly miss having rote stability and a regular community of people to interact with. But, the reality is, I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for, or perhaps I just don’t know yet. In my experience a miscalculation wherein you feel like you’re misspending your time is far more exhausting than, say, sitting at a table of people speaking a language you don’t understand.

Traveling helps you to discover the parts of yourself that make you unique, and to really believe in those parts

It also helps you accept yourself as you are, because with understanding comes empathy. If we understand why the less likeable parts of ourselves exist, then we’re halfway to finding healthier means of expressing them. Traveling puts you under enormous pressure to be honest with yourself far more often than when you’re in a comfortable environment, buffered and distracted by many things that don’t really matter. The essence of travel is a feeling of displacement and uncertainty, while the result of travel are feelings of confidence and clarity.

Travel also teaches you to manage the overwhelming amounts of emotions that come with being an adult. I swear, I’ve cried more in the past two years than I did my entire life beforehand. Travel has a habit of putting you in situations that you’ll never find yourself in again, where in an instant you have to choose: stay still and miss the moment or step forward into uncharted waters.

I noticed a consistent, surprising theme in certain people I met while traveling

I noticed that different personalities will come across in different ways, but self-confidence is a key element on the periodic table of human expression. What surprised me is that there doesn’t seem to be a singular personality that is inherently self-confident; rather, trying to change yourself to fit the mold of a preconceived idea of what it means to be self-confident will only ever make you feel like an imposter. Because, duh. You’re not being you! When the notion of “be yourself” feels like a character you need to interpret, you’re not doing it right.

For me, travel has become inextricably linked with my sense of self. Traveling is and has been a way for me to give myself time in a world that continuously reminds all of us that we don’t have enough of it. Ultimately, time is the paradoxical gift of travel (given that you have to take time to experience it). However, its dividends are paid when you take the courage you’ve accumulated from seemingly tangential experiences like not understanding anything that’s being said around you and transpose that feeling of frustrated helplessness into one of resolve. And then you take that resolve to practice mindfully occupying your space in the world, whatever that looks like to you.