it’s no secret to anyone who knows me—especially if you follow me on social media—that i love to travel. i itch to be across oceans, boarding flights and scouring every inch of a city.
i recently returned from a two week trip to visit a friend in london. we hopped around the uk, taking trains to different areas and rode the tube all over the city. some days it felt like we were on the tube more than anything else.
when i’m there, the constant motion of every day doesn’t bother me. it vibrates through my bones, humming through my body in a way that feels right, like this is what had been missing from my life all this time. the way i feel about traveling reminds me of what people say about tattoos: once you do it you can’t stop.
but i haven’t always felt this way. for a time, i started to feel quite disillusioned with it, actually. it was always a dream of mine to travel, though I can’t say exactly when that started. all i know is that at some point as a kid, when someone asked what i wanted to be when i grew up, the only thing that came to mind was an image of myself in a cobblestoned city at sunset.
when i was in chicago this last winter though, i could feel the disillusionment creeping up on me. i saw it in the people passing me by on the street, in families and couples posing for pictures. i turned all those feelings outward, thinking it was some distaste for the social media age of travel. i scowled at the tourists with their phones at the ready, the ones that stopped in the middle of the street to get just the right angle and shuffled through their poses so quickly it seemed more like a rehearsed dance sequence.
but the more i watched them, i realized i actually didn’t mind all that. it’s sweet to watch people attempt to capture the perfect picture to remember their trip by. it’s sweet when you remember how impermanent everything is, so why judge someone for wanting to take a little picture they can hold in the palm of their hand. no, it was something more than that. it swirled around me until i felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me and i couldn’t breathe. all i could see was this dark cloud of discontent. bitterness. anger.
it’s why i rarely mention my travels. i don’t want to contribute to a conversation that, in some ways, feels like a pyramid scheme. i hate how beautiful and easy they always make it look in those travel reels on instagram. it feels like a lie for me to talk about everywhere i’ve been, everything i’ve seen and done, without at least mentioning the less appealing aspects: the loneliness. the instability. the way you can somehow feel both like a fish out of water and as though you’re drowning, the entire world burning your throat like salty ocean water as it fills your lungs.
however, i’m sure this isn’t the case for everyone. it’s definitely more of a me problem, and yet i can’t seem to stop. for the longest time i thought it was because i was running away from my problems. i laughed along to those videos on instagram with captions like “going to a different country won’t solve your problems” while the person runs through the airport in the background. i’d dm them to my friends saying “me” or “us” while trying to ignore the aching in my chest.
it definitely doesn’t help that this is how travel is always portrayed on social media, as though it’s some one and done cure or an experience you’ll wistfully look back on when you’re older and haven’t traveled in years. it makes people feel as though this is how they should be spending their time. anything less simply isn’t living.
the last thing i want is for something i write to come across that way. i’m grateful to be able to travel as much as i do, but there’s more to life than weeks long trips to london and spontaneous nights out in prague. it also just isn’t as glamorous as all that. i mean at one point i was eating my tesco meal deal (i spent a lot of time at tesco—a popular shop in the uk—during my trip) on the subway because i was so hungry and couldn’t afford to eat at another restaurant.
however, those are the moments i love and miss the most. ever since i got back, i’ve been aching to run off again. i can still feel everything within me vibrating to london, though i’m now starting to feel as though i’m tuning back in to my life in san diego.
but this is what i mean. i hate how easily i slide into the life and rhythm of a new city. how perfectly this life of rootlessness fits over the contours of my body. or at least, i used to hate it.
i recently watched a movie where a guy tells his love interest—it was a rom-com, of course—that he doesn’t have a home, he simply goes where the work is. her only response was: “isn’t that lonely?”
i feel as though i’ve been asking myself the same question for the past three years. “isn’t this lonely?”
sometimes i wonder if i actually think that though, or if i just feel this way because everyone else assumes it must be. it can be hard to distinguish between your true thoughts and feelings and everyone else’s preconceived notions of the world. when your mind has already been imbued with core thoughts and values, planted from when you were a child by adults and media, where do their wants and needs end and yours begin? or am i just a tangled mess of all of them? of everyone.
maybe that’s not so bad. just like it’s not so bad to be twenty-four and so unattached you feel as though you could start your life anywhere. i used to think that made my life empty, but after being in london, i no longer feel that way.
it was overwhelming at first, being in a city as densely populated as london. it often feels as though everyone knows exactly where they’re going and how to get there, and you’re the only one that has to look at their phone on the tube every two minutes to make sure you didn’t just miss your stop. it can even feel as though the city itself wants to break you when you’ve been walking all day and not a single shop has what you’re looking for, or you get splashed with rainwater by a double-decker bus. but i still loved it because at night, while i rode the tube back to my friend’s apartment with her as we laughed and eavesdropped on other people’s conversations, it felt worth it. every struggle, every mistake. i didn’t mind all of it when i had the love of my friends to go back to.
it reminds me of what i saw in a country bar one night while out with friends in san diego. it felt so out of place—this country bar on the edge of downtown—that i thought i’d fallen through a crack in my coastal girl reality. there were posters of jack daniel’s tennessee whiskey and american flags tacked to the walls. it screamed country in a way that made it feel more like a caricature, like it was caught between mockery and appreciation. and yet, men in tight jeans and cowboy hats filtered in with girls in flannels, all of them laughing as they walked through the doorway.
in my sappy, sentimental mind, i like to think they knew each other. that they were all regulars at this bar, seeking some semblance of familiarity in their new surroundings. i spun this narrative in my mind as I watched them, imagining that they came here for work or college and ended up staying even though their hearts ached for their hometown. and in the trenches of their loneliest nights, they wound up here, in a place that seemed to be calling to them like a beacon leading them home.
and in the few moments that i watched them, i fell in love. just like i fell in love in pubs and on tube rides and during late night gossip sessions in london. and with the L train and the waitresses laughing as they joked with each other behind the counter of a pizza shop in chicago.
my life is so open, i can’t help but fall in love hard and fast everywhere i go. i thought my twenties were a time of uncertainty and emptiness and it used to terrify me, but now i love this not knowing. i could end up anywhere, falling in love with the life i could have, and maybe that means i’m only in love with the idea of it, but for now that’s enough. for now, i want to bask in the warmth of not knowing instead of worrying my days away. for now, i want to fall in love over and over again, and i’m so scared that one day it might stop. i hope this never stops.
i don’t want it to stop.
🇬🇧i would love to know…🇬🇧
have you been to london? what did you think?
what’s your favorite place you’ve been to?
what’s your biggest travel pet peeve?
do you like to travel?
I was in London (for but just a weekend) likely the same time as you!! Different vibes, as I had three small children with me, but we also took the tube and explored the city on the double decker bus and are our way around. It was so much fun. We visited Liberty London (myself and my second son are big Cruella fans) and took in a musical. Big cities are incredibly alluring because where else can we get a delicious ramen bowl and a churro within an arm’s reach but I also feel like they can seem so lonely to live in. Everyone is rushing, I don’t see the slowness of life, and nobody seems to know one another. Perhaps those are the necessary byproducts of everything being within reach! Cheers to your London trip! So loved ours ❣️ (also just wrote about it.. we traveled up north to Leeds and Chatsworth house!)
this came at the perfect time! I just booked a little trip for myself to Columbus—only a couple hours away lol—to push myself to start traveling solo more and it got me thinking about loneliness. I’m so lime green jelly you went to London! It’s definitely on my list. So far my favorite place I’ve been to is NYC. I haven’t been in over 10 years and I’m itching to go back. Your paragraph about falling into the rhythm of a new place reminded me of that. In NYC I was up from 6am to 11pm every single day, walking everywhere and taking so many trains and buses. It was so different from my regular life but I loved every minute of it.