Solo Traveler: The Risk and The Reward
In 2016, I moved across the world to Egypt as a solo traveler to perfecting my Arabic. At the same time, through transforming my environment I was convinced there was something grander I would find if I left. An intelligible enigma that I could never quite describe because we’d never met, but knew I would recognize. If it put its face to mine, I would be able see.
As a solo female traveler, I was cognizant of the fact that perhaps I wouldn’t find what I was looking for here. Because it was less about Egypt, less about the location and more about coming together with myself more tenderly, more completely. In a way you can’t do from the comfort and protection of familiarities. In a way that causes reflection, and forces you to stare back at yourself uninhabited in all your beautiful, ugly rawness. Your pride and your shame.
I wouldn’t say that when I left to find that something, that I did so and it changed my life and all those sweet nothings. But what I will say is this: traveling solo across the world was a provocation. It caused me to see the components of myself more transparently. Because around the world everything is presented through the lens of personal and social identity. That of race, that or religion, of gender, of ethnicity, and that of social class.
Thus, I had to come inside my house and examine my own components: black, woman, Liberian, Guinean, woman, Fulani, Kpelle, Christian, American and so on. How these all lap together inside me like water. Indistinguishable- unable to be separated from one another.
I am still uncovering what it means to be all of this at once and there is nothing more self-discovering then being apart of the women who travel around the world to create a life even more beautiful than the one that was given to them. To create of life that’s all their own.