A Year of Being Grounded Taught Me Why Traveling Is So Important

I’ve been in love with exploring new places for as long as I can remember. My whole family loves traveling, so I had visited numerous continents on adventures that included safaris, scuba diving, and sky diving all before I turned 18.

My favorite part of traveling is the idea of doing something completely new, of challenging all of my comfort zones. Something about the unknown, and the possibility of what new experiences it might bring me, has always thrilled me. There’s nothing like the feeling of excitement when a plane touches down on the tarmac of an unexplored city or the joy of stumbling upon a hidden art gallery or coffee shop while aimlessly wandering the city’s streets.

I moved to London from my home country of Pakistan for university in part because of its proximity to all the places in Europe I had always wanted to visit. I took more plane and train rides over the next three years than I had ever taken in my life. Between traveling back and forth between my home in Pakistan and London, visiting friends across the U.K., and planning trips elsewhere, I had never lived a life that fast-paced before. And while I was always on the go, I never stopped to really ask myself why I love traveling so much.

Being grounded over the last year has given me the time to think a lot about my travels and about what made those trips so important to my own inner journey. Ultimately, I’ve realized that I love traveling because the moments I’ve felt closest to being my full self have come when I’m as far as possible from the places I know well.

In particular, I think I’ve become very aware of my gender while traveling. Maybe that’s because I, like all Pakistani women, had restricted mobility in public spaces and was taught that male chaperones make leaving home safer. These restrictions only made me more determined to explore as wildly as I could.

In March of 2020, just before the pandemic hit, I traveled to five different cities in five days with one of my closest friends. I came back more physically exhausted than I had ever been in my life, but had never felt better emotionally. Leaving our physical home behind also meant leaving the expectations and norms imposed upon us there, and I realized just how many pressures we faced daily, especially as women — from what food we eat, to the invitations we accept. Traveling allowed me to rid myself of those pressures and find out how I would act when I felt able to do whatever I wanted, in an environment where I was unknown and invisible to most.

Another thing that stood out to me was how traveling changed the dynamic of my friendship with my travel companion. I grew up not having a lot of girl friends and valuing alone time, but on this trip, the awkwardness that I had often felt about saying the right thing didn’t seem to exist anymore. My friend and I found ourselves relying on each other in ways we never had before, and that vulnerability allowed both of us to be a lot more comfortable and at ease with each other. Over the five days we traveled together, we became increasingly comfortable sharing what we were feeling with one another. When I felt tired after a long day of exploring, I allowed myself to admit that I needed a break, whereas previously my concern about how such a request would be perceived by a friend may have prevented me from doing so in any other situation. When we crashed in our hostel room at night, we allowed ourselves to talk about the concerns we had about our lives, relationships, and studies that, at least for me, had been swirling around in my head for months, unable to find a way out. By the time we got back to London and went our separate ways, it felt weird not being in each other’s company.

I now realize that so much of my need to be alone didn’t come from not wanting to be around other people, but rather from the constant expectations of always having to be a picture-perfect girl, of never being too vulnerable because it wasn’t “cool,” and of maintaining a certain social image. Those expectations felt like they were weighing me down so much that I opted not to engage with them at all.

I can’t wait until I can start exploring again, but until then I’m allowing myself to look back on my journeys with myself with fondness and love in the hope that the ways I learned to love myself and get to know myself on my travels will continue with me regardless of where I am in the world.