You know, like camping in Alaska by yourself for a month or something like that.
Or, climbing some mountain in Asia, or whatever.
How awesome (or not) was it? Did you feel changed by the experience? Did you go with others or by yourself?
I moved from the Seattle area to a tiny Native village on Kodiak Island, Alaska. I brought my two young daughters, ages 7 and 4. There were many moments of awesomeness, as well as many moments of awfulness. It completely changed my life, for the better.
An adventure, in Alaska anyway, is a horrible, life threatening experience that you live through and have great stories to tell about.
I never tried to find myself in case there was noone there.
I always knew who I was, so there was no need to get physically uncomfortable to find anything out! That much I knew very, very well.
Can you give more details? I want to hear some of those great stories.
About 8 years ago I lost my job due to downsizing, and received a pretty good severance pay. I didn’t know what to do with my life at that time yet (I was 24), had a butt load of cash I didn’t know what to do with and always wanted to see some of the world. The day after I got laid off, I booked a ticket to Australia and two weeks later I was on a plane. I hadn’t planned anything, didn’t know what to expect, and was completely inexperienced in travelling alone.
It was great. All the freedom in the world, no one to tell you what to do. Stay in one place if you want to, move to the next if you get bored. The best time of my life until then.
Of course, there were also pretty bad moments. 10 minutes before departure was one such moment: “do I really want to do this?”, “what if I get lost?”. Then there was a time when I hitch hiked with a couple of other travellers and the car broke down in the middle of nowhere, and I had to stay a full week in some back water town, 46 degrees centigrade and no aircon. That was probably the worst time of my life until then.
Still, all things taken into account. I learned a lot about myself. I learned to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, a bit more confident. And I learned that travelling on your own is the only way to travel. I’ve since been to Asia, Afrika and the best part of Europe, all because I decided to ‘discover myself’ in Australia.
When I was 24 I had not yet started my career and was working in a liquor store. I occasionally played the Pick-4 lottery and one day I hit for $3300. I packed up my old beater Datsun and drove across the country for 6 weeks alone. I went south from Jersey to New Orleans, than up the river to St. Louis and back home. I stopped wherever I wanted, saw some old friends, met some new ones. That much time alone driving gives you plenty of time to think. I kind of figured out what I wanted to do with myself on that trip.
Spent a summer touring North America in a quest for the best pastrami sandwich.
I’ve done it, kind of a few times. Indeed, I seem to have made a full time thing out of it. I can’t say I’ve entirely found myself, but I’ve found a hell of an interesting world. Probably my biggest “find yourself” trips were a SF-NYC trip on coach via Amtrak, and a three month semi-solo trip to India. Both were whims, and both changed my life.
Here are the biggest things I’ve learned about myself from travel:
[ul]
[li]Who I am without my context We all define ourself by so many external things- our jobs, our friends, our hobbies, etc. It can be hard to imagine who you are without that. But when you travel, you are stripped away of these things. It’s just you and a place. It’s amazing how much you learn about what it is that you really care about. And it’s a good reality check that puts the rest of your life in perspective. [/li][li]My own self sufficientcy Travel can be hard. But it’s a hell of a thing to know that you can get by even when you don’t speak the language, understand the culture or know what you are doing. Travel has made me much more confident in my ability to deal with unknown and even uncomfortable situations. After some of the stuff I’ve done traveling, I pretty much feel comfortable anywhere and have a great amount of confidence in my ability to get by. [/li][li]What it’s like without obligations Obviously when we travel, we are obligated to be respectful and all that. But really, travel is one of the few times in our life when nothing is really expected of us. When our only goal is to experience- to live. It’s a hell of a thing. [/li][li]About a billion things about the world around me I can’t even start on this. I feel like the world is a big dark map, and every place I visit gets filled in a little. I start out without a mental picture of things and I end up with some kind of understanding. Watching the news takes on a whole new aspect when you actually have a mental picture of the places and people they are talking about. Not to mention all the history, culture, etc I’ve been exposed to…[/ul][/li]
Personally I think travel is the lazy man’s form of self-improvement. You buy a ticket and get on a plane. After that, it is almost guaranteed that you will come back a more capable and more interesting person. Pretty freaking amazing.
The summer after I received my undergraduate degree I went to Mexico to do some volunteer work. I went alone, having never been abroad before. I stayed for one month in Guadalajara volunteering in an orphanage and then I took a bus about four hours southwest, to a tiny ranch up in the mountains, and taught English there for about a month. I did the lessons for everyone in the community, from kindergarten to adult, in a tiny schoolhouse. I would walk the cobblestone path every day to that school house, passing the odd chicken or cow roaming the street, saying hello to all the locals downtown. Once school was canceled and we spent the day in the plaza goofing around. I’d never done anything like that–I was not a risk taker or someone willing to jump into the unknown. It was a transforming experience in that I became willing to try almost anything.
I knew I had achieved something personally significant the day I agreed to go with my host parents’ son to see them perform in a band at a local town. They loaded about 15 teens in the back of this flatbed truck with high railings, all these kids with all of their instruments, some dude literally standing in the back of the truck with a tuba over his shoulders. Then we climbed up on the rails of the truck while his Dad cruised to our destination. He drove fast and reckless on purpose, so we’d feel the dips as we sped down the mountainside and spiraled down. The view was absolutely spectacular. It was moderately dangerous but for the first time in my life I didn’t care. It was one of the single most exhilarating experiences of my life.
I came home a different person. And I do plan to go back this summer.
I travelled a lot as a child and a teenager, so while I enjoy it, I don’t really understand the concept of finding yourself through travel because no matter where I went, there I was. Not that this applies to anyone here, and I think travel can teach you a lot about yourself or life, but I shake my head at people who move consistently with the thought that it will change something about their life that they don’t like.
My sister’s ex falls into this category for me. Moved five times in ten years, and the Next Big Thing is always waiting out there, so he’s never fulfilled and always running.
I rode a bike across the US. It was with a group so it wasn’t like I was untethered from the world: I had to get up every morning and get myself to our next destination whether I wanted to or not. I saw some really beautiful places and got scared out of my wits a few times (have you ever biked on the interstate?).
The main thing I took away from the trip was an understanding of what I’m capable of. I’ve never been a very athletic person or been the type of person to push myself physically. And over the course of the trip I really did learn how far I could push myself on the hard days. But, I don’t think I “found myself” in any grand way.
No, because no matter where I go, there I am.
A more serious answer, I don’t believe you can “find yourself” by isolating yourself from everyone and everything. You find out who you are by testing yourself in new and different situations and ideally those situations should be relevant to finding your place in our society. If you don’t like how you reacted to those situations, you can decide to be a different person moving forward.
Besides, I already knew I hate camping ever since summer camp.
Nope, and most people I’ve met who went off on some great adventure and claimed to come back different people were the same assholes that they were before they left, but with the addition of spouting off how life changing it is to go off and get into an adventure.
Since I grew up in the woods, the idea of going out into the forest for an adventure is like saying you’re going to go camp in the weeds you’ve got growing in your back yard. You can die every bit there as you can in the forest if you put enough energy into trying to make it dangerous, so why not just do that?
If you’ve got a lot of books and a lot of free time to read and think, that can probably be beneficial, but getting lost in the woods is most likely going to do nothing more than make you feel good about yourself for a couple months or get you killed.
My brother (not the one who posts here, t’other) is quite a bit older than me. When he was 30 and I was 15 he arranged it that I would spend a year ('77-'78) living with him in Frankfurt, in the erstwhile West Germany. He was very relaxed about having me as his ‘ward’. At one point he sent me off to the Bavarian Alps to learn to ski, and to check out the Christkindlmarkt in Munich - by hitchhiking there. I’ll always remember spending that snowy Stille Nacht under a picnic table in a layby in Bavaria, freezing my ass off.
That summer he set me up with a Eurail pass and pretty much said - “see you in a couple of months”. It was great. I was totally alone, and on my own devices, with no reliable means of contact or bailout, no credit card, no cellphone. I learned so much about who I am, and what I can do, and how to decide whether to trust someone. I had a bunch of crazy adventures and still tell some of the stories today.
If he asked in a couple of years if Attacklad or Attacklass can go live with him, I’ll have no hesitation about saying:‘Hell, no’.
Anyway, in summary, I did go find myself. There I was.
No, or yes?
Don’t leave us hanging! Did you find it? Or was it one of those when you got back you decided, “It was right here all the time” things.
Hell no. It was great for me, but could easily have been a total disaster. Many of the things worked out through sheer luck. Plus, things are a lot different now, I have to admit. Nobody hitchhikes as there are too many crazies.
That said, I will look favorably on a similar, better conceived and planned project (drive across the country/work on a ranch/archaeology dig/ Eurail pass) that involves backup, cell phone, credit card and a responsible contact person.
I have happened upon an interesting article about a certain Christopher McCandless, who went into the Alaskan wilderness near Fairbanks, bringing with him almost no supplies and having very little training. There, he lived for many years and came back to civilization a new man.
…no, wait… he died of starvation.
This, pretty much.
I had an experience of living for two years in a really tiny town in the middle of fucking nowhere where no one else spoke English. It was lonely. I did not “find myself”. What I did find, however, was that without, you know, anything to do to keep myself occupied, I was alone with my thoughts all the time, which was profoundly…well, I don’t know, disturbing. I spent a lot of time staring at the wall next to my bed thinking about how tiny Earth is in the whole of the universe, and wondering what it will be like to be old, and how I’ll feel when my parents die, etc.
I remember thinking it would be cool to be a fire lookout, like Jack Kerouac in Dharma Bums, but now that sounds like hell. I’ll take civilization, please!
FWIW, I love traveling and I do think seeing new places improves people, but it’s not going to uncover some better, inner “you”.