The bravery of being your true self

“You’re so brave!”

I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve said this to me since I made the decision to give up my home and most of my worldly goods to go travelling last year.

Interestingly, the people who’ve said this to me have all been women. My male friends have cheered me on and been super supportive, but none of them have mentioned bravery, which I think says a lot about the fear women feel about travelling solo - whether that be to another country or even in our home town when it’s late at night and the shadowy streets suddenly seem rife with potential danger.

But in all honesty I don’t feel brave at all, living as a nomad, because the truth is, solo travelling doesn’t frighten me - on the contrary it makes me feel powerful and free.

What was scary to me was staying in my former life in the aftermath of the pandemic - in a town I hated, in a job I hated (a job I’d taken on for a year, on top of my writing).

That life had felt like a vice, pressing in tighter and tighter, shrinking my world, shrinking me, until I’d lost all sense of who I truly was and how I wanted my life to be.

When I look back on that year now I see how much bravery it took for me to get through each day - no longer feeling that my life, or I, had any real meaning or purpose.

I see how much courage I needed to keep treading the water of my growing loneliness and depression.

Looking back now I can see that I never would have found happiness in the town I moved to during the pandemic. I’ve since heard from other people also who tried living there and found it acutely depressing. I also recently read that a newspaper survey had found it to be the third unhappiest place to live in the UK and I felt vindicated. There wasn’t anything wrong with me after all!

As soon as I thrust the keys to my old flat back into the estate agent’s hands and hotfooted it out of that town and that life, pulling all my worldly goods behind me in my trusty orange suitcase, I felt the vice loosening. I felt my happiness returning.

And I felt my need for bravery lessening.

Rocking up in a new town or city in a new country doesn’t scare me, it excites me. And most importantly my life of solo travel has given me the greatest gift of all… 

… it’s helped me remember who I truly am and what I need to be happy.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s not been all sunshine and roses. I have had some tricky times to navigate in the past ten months.

In fact, just the other week I confided in a friend that I wasn’t sure whether to keep travelling as I’d been missing my loved ones. 

‘I could never, ever live the way you are,’ she said to me emphatically. ‘I would be so lonely.’

The strength of her reaction was a jolt to my system. 

But I love the way I live, was my instant thought. And ironically, over all, I’ve felt far less lonely this past 10 months travelling solo than I did in my last couple of years in the UK.

I’ve made new friends in almost every country I’ve been to and I’ve had fun times with them that I’ll never forget.

The difficult times I have experienced as a nomad have felt character-building rather than depleting. And that’s an important difference.

So, if you currently feel that you need a shed-load of bravery to get through the loneliness, stress, boredom or gloom of your day to day life, I really get it.

And I urge you to do what I did and take some time to think about how you could change things for the better.

It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as getting rid of everything and leaving the country. 

It could be as simple as asking yourself the following questions…

• Who am I really?

• Where and when do I feel my truest, happiest self?

• What is something that I love to do?

• How could I do more of it?

• How can I create a life that feels expansive rather than oppressive?

Meditate on your answers to these questions on a long walk, or free-write them in a journal.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to change your life overnight - it took me many months to figure out that I wanted and needed to go travelling - just allow yourself to get curious and see what happens.

Here’s to finding the bravery to allow our true selves to shine!

Siobhan