What We Miss When We Call It Solo
How Self-Directed travel reframes agency, authorship and the way meaning travels outward
My first Egg Coffee at Loading T in Hanoi, Vietnam
When revisiting a younger version of myself for Tessera 43 last week, I brushed up against a familiar topic that’s plagued me since I started The Untethered Traveler this past spring. No matter the destination, the origin of the call to adventure or the time of year, this subject never fails to surface and resurface.
How much it comes to agitate me depends only on how much I elect to acknowledge and engage with it.
In the same ways that the power of travel can be dampened by generalization and transaction, so too can the mission of the unaccompanied traveler be diminished by calling her solo or alone.
When we choose to move with intention, guided by our own intuition, conviction and taste, we should be categorized based on what we carry – not on what we don’t. I would like to think I am more than someone not traveling with a significant other, a close friend or a family member.
I’m not solo. I am self-directed.
This may all sound at first like a frivolous exercise in semantics, but for me personally and for what I have come to believe about the role travel can play in our journeys of self-discovery and self-empowerment it is a critical clarification.
At the literal heart of the discussion is the premise that a solo traveler travels alone. Factual yes, but also diminutive and reductive all the same.
We don’t ever really travel alone. We travel with, among other things, our own gumption, curiosity and a longing to see and connect. We travel swept up in the communal forces of the places we visit, even when we dine, stroll, sip, shop and sightsee by ourselves.
While it’s true we may find solitude in Paris, how can we ever be truly alone standing in a room surrounded by Monet, climbing the hills of Montmartre or strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries?
I fear so many seeking the transformative benefits of self-directed travel are shut out by the language we’ve inadvertently come to stack up around it. I’m often asked, do I get lonely, bored or afraid? To the first two, no, never. To the latter, only if the circumstance calls for it just like it might when I’m back home.
When we move to our own rhythm, especially when we move outside of our comfort zones, we can’t help but catch a glimpse of our natural tendencies, proclivities and desires. So much untapped power and potential lives inside these quiet cues and realizations.
If we’re paying attention, these signals grant us carefree permission to make decisions that by no other definition just feel right. They teach us that changing our mind or forgoing the original plan isn’t wrong and that acting on impulse isn’t always either.
The more we learn to recognize these prompts, the more we see how they reroute or ground us. Each inspires that little bit of pause, so agency, not obligation, compels us to move again or sometimes not at all. This past summer, I remember agonizing over a long day trip to Gdansk, Poland. Not because I didn’t want to go but because I had to balance writing with fatigue and an escalating sense of self-doubt. In this moment, I was fiercely attuned to what I needed next from travel, and it wasn’t more.
I ultimately cancelled the day trip because Gdansk just didn’t feel right at the time and neither did I.
I took the space and traded it for a slower day in Warsaw, where I ended up finding one of my favorite little hidden gems in Poland, Bianca. Bianca is a super-chill gourmet foodie shop that served wine and lots of delicious small plates. Was it particularly Polish, no? Did I honor and trust myself in pacing out the day the way I eventually did instead? Yes, thankfully.
How many times can we recall affording ourselves the luxury of stepping back and not only observing who we really are when no one is watching, but empowering ourselves to act and move from that place?
There is something so liberating in traveling just as we are, untethered from the construct of the person we’ve created back home. This isn’t an indictment that we’re all not living sincere, genuine lives, it is an impassioned call to commit to doing that so much more.
Over the course of my life, I have found that in times of crisis and calm, nothing has raised the consciousness of my real, authentic self like self-directed travel.
I think back to lessons learned revisiting Venice with fresh perspective after twenty years and following whim and wonder through lovely Luxembourg. What all of these journeys have in common is space, grace and a longing to reveal, uncover and become.
One doesn’t have to be traveling exclusively without a companion to embrace a self-directed mindset. I remember uncovering a dimension of myself years ago during my very first trip out of the country. I was obsessed with this vintage Italian movie poster warehouse which was located an inconvenient walking distance outside of Rome’s main tourist attractions.
It was 2004, before Uber and before maps were on our cell phones. My laminated map, and more likely my trademark inability to read one, came up against rightfully defiant, annoyed travel companions, hangry and hungover. Needless to say, on the clock and without a clue of where we were or where we were going, I turned us around defeated.
But that interest stuck. Since then, poster boutiques are mainstays on any untethered traveler itinerary. Not every revelation will be mountain sized or life altering. Some, like my love of art, just coax us along, shaping our souls until they’re more chiseled and pronounced.
That poster warehouse was a small but irresistible breadcrumb that nudged me down a single pathway. One step, one journey at a time, I kept on it until I realized what marvelous meaning there is in all that comes to move us.
There is no gut feeling too small to ignore.
In a world where we come to refer to solo travelers as self-directed, we’re acknowledging and subsequently respecting that how they choose to travel is defined by so much more than their headcount. When we finally open up the aperture we fully come to see them for who they really are: independent, rebelliously curious and seeking.
And when just one more person feels invited to follow the early traces of a new passion, to lean into the tug of a persistent calling or to champion the dreams of another, the energy created and transferred is contagious. To believe this ripple and current can exist is to believe that the transformative power of travel isn’t a cosmic force we draft from but rather a well we deposit into.
It is a source of power that lives within each of us.
Where it goes from there, is anywhere and everywhere we choose to carry it.
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
