Why You Should Travel Solo (At Least Once)
I've lost count of how many times this exact conversation has happened to me.
“Wait, you’re going by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“But… how?“
I buy a ticket. I get on a bus. I reach. That’s the whole trick.
I’ve had this exact conversation roughly nine hundred times, and the look is always the same the slightly squinted “are you okay” look, like I’ve just confessed to fleeing the country. I haven’t. I just figured out something most people are too scared to test: travel hits completely differently when there’s nobody else in the photo.
Here’s the pitch in one sentence: a solo trip is one of the very few times in adult life you actually get to meet yourself. No job, no group chat, no version of you that everyone back home expects. Just you, somewhere unfamiliar, finally with enough quiet to hear what you actually want. The second you bring a friend along, you drag a chunk of home with you. And the old you climbs right back into the driver’s seat.
“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready.” — Thoreau
Let’s also kill the world’s most popular excuse: “I don’t have anyone to go with.” That’s not a reason. That’s a comfort blanket. Bus stations aren’t selling tickets in pairs. There’s no buy-one-get-one on bus seats. You don’t need a co-pilot. You need a tolerance for a few uncomfortable days.
And yes, those first days are rough. My first solo trip, I lay face-down on a hotel bed for five hours staring at the ceiling, genuinely too anxious to walk outside and find dinner. What if I got lost. What if I couldn’t order. What if people stared. So I didn’t eat. I just watched something on my laptop and went to sleep hungry and slightly ashamed of myself.
It got better. But only because I forced it to. Nobody was coming to rescue me from that room. There was no friend to fill the silence at lunch, no plan to fall back on. The only person I could lean on was me so, awkwardly, I started saying yes to things. Yes to strangers. Yes to invitations I’d normally have ducked. And somewhere in all that yes, a different version of me walked in. The kind who actually liked not knowing what the day would hold.
By the time the trip ended I didn’t want to leave. I’d arrived a nervous wreck and was going home as someone who could chat with total strangers and laugh about it. One trip. That’s all it took.
“We cannot expect to grow if we are too afraid… to face challenges.” — Ashley Ormon
People still ask, but couldn’t you just bring someone? Sure. I’ve done it. It’s fun. It’s also a completely different thing. With a companion, every decision turns into a negotiation… where to eat, where to sleep, what to see, how long to stay. When you get scared, you hide behind them. You end up learning a lot about them and almost nothing about yourself. Every shared trip runs on compromise, and compromise is just a polite word for settling.
So do it once. Just once. No committee, no compromise, no excuses. Three promises if you do: you’ll never forget it, you’ll come back visibly different (people will comment), and you’ll immediately start plotting the next one.
“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” — Terry Pratchett
Solo travel is, hands down, the most useful thing I’ve ever talked myself into. I trust myself now. I run toward awkward things instead of away. Failing barely scares me anymore, it just means I tried something real. And I can sit in complete silence, completely alone, and feel genuinely fine. The whole world looks different from here.
So. Have you ever traveled alone? Loved it, hated it, cried in a hotel bathroom at 2am? Tell me in the comments, I want the messy version.