Kate Wills - A Trip of Ones Own: Hope, Heartbreak, and Why Traveling Solo Could Change Your Life

You are traveling alone? asked the Israeli border guard, eyeing up my suspiciously small carry-on luggage and disheveled appearance. If the severity of the way she applied her lipliner was anything to go by, I really didnt want to piss her off.

I hesitated, even though its a question Ive been asked countless times. I was sola in Mexico City, unico in Rome, and mongwe in Botswana. Id worn a fake wedding ring in India. (Supposedly to deter unwanted male advances. It didnt work.) Id worn a real wedding ring in Amsterdam and Arizona. But this was the first time Id ever really flown solo, solo.

Although Id been a travel journalist for over ten years and was used to jetting in and out of unfamiliar cities with only my laptop for company, Id never really felt like I was going it alone. There would often be a photographer in tow or other journalistsin a particularly strange circus known as the group press trip. Even when I did embark on an adventure by myselfthree months of volunteering in India where I hoped that I would somehow find myself; a stint living in LA, which Id called a marriage sabbaticalI knew that my partner, Sam, was back at home, the patient Penelope to my Odysseus. If something exciting happened, he was the first person Id text. If Id had a tough day, hed be there on the other end of the phone to make it all better. At times I felt like he was my true north, the grounding force I always came home to. It was only now that I found myself without him that I realized how much I had relied on him. The reason I had been able to travel so far and for so long was because I had felt the strength of his support back at home.

But now we were getting divorced. Even the word sounded horrible. I didnt know anyone else who was getting divorced, and certainly not in their early thirties. I felt as if Id been prematurely pushed into a more mature age bracket, like going through early menopause. Well-meaning friends tried to sympathize: When my seven-year relationship ended theyd begin, not understanding the unique pain I felt. To have declared, in front of everyone you love and respect most in the world, that you will spend your life with a person, only to then spectacularly fail, is a shockingly singular experience.

I was now officially single. For the first time since I was twenty-one, I wasnt leaving anyone behind when I jetted off on yet another adventure. No one was going to miss me, or so it felt. Although my friends and my sister had been amazingturning up with pizza that I was too sad to eat, texting me hourly to check that I was OKthey all had their own lives and families. I was thirty-four, and I felt completely and utterly alone.

As a serial monogamist, I had been used to always having a someone. Someone to visualize in your head when you hear a love song on the radio. Someone to daydream about bringing back to the amazing place youd just discovered. Someone to show your tan line off to when you got home. But I didnt even have a home anymore. Following the breakdown of my marriageand then a passionate rebound love affair with my friend Guy that ended in further devastating heartbreakId rented out my flat and put all my worldly possessions into boxes, which were now shoved into my friend Joshs spare room. So far, so Eat, Pray, Love .

Whenever I meet people while traveling solo, the most common comment is, Youre brave. It was similar when I told people I was getting divorced. The truth is that Ive never felt particularly brave while traveling on my own. Ive felt stupid, disorientated, and embarrassingly ill-equipped (like the time I tried to hike the foothills of the Himalayas in flip-flops) but never really brave. Bravery is when youre scared of something, but you do it anyway. Traveling for me isnt scary. It can be hard, but most of the time its too rewarding and exhilarating to dwell on the fact that youre doing it solo. But going through life aloneas I was now? That felt truly terrifying.

There must have been a moment when I realized that my choices would result in the immediate destruction of everything in my life, but its hard to pinpoint when that was. It was about a year ago when the nagging buzz that something wasnt right became more of a roar. Up until that point, Id told myself it couldnt possibly be my relationship of thirteen years. We had reclaimed wood parquet floors and a joint Tate membership and had co-created a world together with all its inside jokes and nicknames and silly songs and pretending to be a ghost whenever we changed the duvet cover.

And yet something had to give. I regularly found myself crying in the shower. Lather, rinse, re-weep. Id made some big changes in my life to try and make the niggle of not-quite-rightness go away. I had quit my dream job on a national newspaper and gone freelance (another youre brave moment that didnt feel brave, just reckless). I embarked on what would become five years of psychoanalysishoping that this intense form of therapy where you lie on a couch four times a week could help unpick why I felt completely numb, like I was underwater all the time. I went on the aforementioned soul-searching pilgrimage to India. Nothing worked.