My feet are itchy. They’re itchy for new ground to walk on for new hills to climb. I want warm air and exotic smells and something for my eyes to cling to.
I can feel it – that fire in my stomach is surging and swirling around. It doesn’t know where it wants to go, there’s no pull on my inner compass.
Just somewhere, anywhere but home.
Solo Female Travel
There’s definitely a stigma about people who consider themselves a citizen of the world.
When it comes to travel, holidays are, of course, acceptable and if you’re eighteen years old taking off on a gap year but sure to return to the real world and get back to where you belong, then that’s okay too.
But a woman in her thirties, jetting off to live with monks in Menorca then taking a one way flight to Chiang Mai and Eat-Pray-Loving her way through Myanmar?
She must be escaping reality.
The typecasting of a solo female traveller, or any traveller for that matter, comes down to the perception that they’re physically removing themselves from life as they know it in the hope that the distance will make their troubles disappear.
But what if these assumptions are false?
What if this judgement stems from a distorted view of what reality actually is; a reality that somehow glues us down to one path, binds us to one geographical location and dictates our every move in the confines of a social construct we inherited without choice.
What if wanderlust and escapism can coexist as two independent concepts?
The Explorer
If we see reality as a construct of the mind, a view of the world that is determined by the way our thoughts work rather than our societal surroundings, then it doesn’t really matter how many planes we hop on or how many passport stamps we collect, we can’t escape it.
And some of us are just born to be Explorers.
We don’t just feel most comfortable with uncertainty, we thrive in it; we embrace it with both arms and smile at the idea of our future being a misty haze of opportunity.
We dread monotony.
We cannot get our heads around why you would want to stay in a life and a routine you’re not happy with, or go to the same hotel in Ibiza every summer with the same people to do the same thing, or why you’d never want to live anywhere but the place where you were brought up.
We know that spontaneity is where great things happen and actually, you’ll often find that we’re not running away from anything at all. In fact, we’re running towards something.
We’re running towards a world of opportunity, diving headfirst into the unknown for the thrills and gasps of adventure – because that’s what excites us. We’re dopamine junkies getting our highs from the sights, sounds and smells of somewhere new.
We see the world as a playground, as a gift to be grateful for. We want to meet people from different cultures, we want to taste their food and learn their words. We want to watch the sun rise and fall over things we’ve never seen before.
Our soles seek out pavements they’ve never kissed before and our souls seek out the magic of exploration.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
Saint Augustine Hippo