Solo travel -- because someone tried to tell me I couldn't

Cummari House, Catania, Sicily.
07/06/22

When I travel solo, I’m going after a very specific feeling. It’s a particular brand of triumph that I don’t get from doing anything else. When I drove from Atlanta to Santa Fe in 3 days; when I landed in Mexico City; when I took a boat to Comino off the coast of Malta, I was overcome by an “I did this!” and “All by myself!”

At the New Mexico state line, on the border of Texas, I had to resist the urge to get out of the car and throw my arms up in the air as if I had just dismounted the uneven bars at the Olympics.

I’m starting to figure out where that came from. I was once married to a man who made it his job to take the wind out of my sails, to make me feel weak and small, to make me feel that what mattered to me was stupid and unimportant, to make me feel that I somehow lacked the same savvy and know-how to get through day-to-day life that he and the rest of the world had.

One way he made me feel weak and small was to try to convince me, in various ways at different times, that I was clumsy and accident-prone and didn’t know how to navigate new situations on my own. To put it simply, that I couldn't do anything without quite literally falling on my ass. This was never an impression I had of myself before being in a relationship with him, but over time, he worked at it, and eventually I saw how it might be true (It was not true).

When we split up, when I was 30, I took my first international solo trip. Ironically, my first such trip was supposed to have been to Brazil 7 years earlier when I was 23. I planned the trip before I met him, but by the time the trip rolled around, he and I had been dating in New York for several months, and he (a Brazilian) went with me. Over the course of that year in Brazil, he worked hard to convince me that I could never have done it without him.

When we split up in 2006, I spent 5 weeks in Europe (Portugal [pictured below], Spain and France) on my own.

In Portugal, during a 2-day stay in a beach town called Albufeira, I took a walk down to the beach, and in my red Havaiana flip flops, I ventured out on a large bed of boulders that stretched a ways out into the water.

And then I started to hear his voice.

Had I been with him at this moment, he’d have been repeating over and over, in a tone that clearly communicated an utter absence of faith in me, “Ó! Cuidado pá não cair!” (“Hey! Be careful not to fall” but the tone said “I just know you’re going to fall and ruin everything,”) as he’d hop blithely from rock to rock while I tiptoed slowly behind him, carefully choosing the spot to place my foot for each and every step, lest I fall and prove him right. As you might imagine, the fall hazards were not objects in my path. What put me at risk of falling was the way he made me a nervous wreck.

He often used the purported fact that I was clumsy, accident-prone, and lacked international savvy as an excuse not to bring me on trips with him so he could go on his own. I had dreamt of being a world traveler ever since I understood what a country was; of being a polyglot ever since I knew that there were other languages to be spoken! It was after reading The Sun Also Rises in high school that I decided I'd spend a year abroad when I finished college. (That's what the year in Brazil was about.) I had always been attracted to relationships with foreign people. My friendships in New York and my job teaching English as a second language had facilitated that. And though it wasn't the reason I married him, I had made an assumption that being married to someone of another nationality than my own came with the keys to the world. It didn't. I didn't know I held the keys all along.

On the beach in Albufeira, Portugal, that day in 2006, though I heard his taunting voice in my head, I wasn’t at any risk of falling. I didn’t teeter, wobble or flap my arms as I stepped from rock to rock, sure-footed and further out into the ocean, nor as I raised my camera (a real camera, not a phone!) at an angle above my face to take a picture of this triumphant moment.

Since then, the triumphs have come at a much lower cost. I haven’t had to venture alone across a bed of boulders (in flip flops!) as waves crashed against them in order to chase that high. In Morocco (pictured below), it was successfully acquiring a carton of milk all by myself from a corner store that wasn’t really a store but more like the kitchen window of a private home.

In Malta, it was finding myself on that boat with a group in the middle of what is easily one of the most beautiful places on earth as I thought, “I did this. I got myself all the way to the middle of the Mediterranean.” (Sure, I wasn’t the captain of that ship, but you know what I mean.) In Barcelona, it was making myself perfectly understood in Spanish so that the person with whom I was talking didn’t default to English. In Sicily, it was about language, too. I felt the rush when I walked out of my first Italian lesson on Monday and immediately used what I'd learned to buy gum at the shop next door.

It’s been 16 years since my walk on the rocks in Portugal. As time goes on, I feel the need less and less to find new ways to prove that I can do things all by myself. And never again did I feel the need to spend time with people who tried to tell me that I couldn’t.