For most of my 20s, travel was my whole personality.
I wasn’t just someone who liked vacations, I was a traveler — the kind who lived out of a backpack, prioritized destinations by how far off the beaten path they were, and said yes to just about anything that felt like an adventure.
So, when I started feeling a little stuck last summer at almost 29 years old, I did what had always worked before: I packed a bag, booked a one-way ticket, and left.
My first few weeks in Costa Rica were perfect. Misty jungle canopies. Beachside cafés. That particular kind of freedom that comes from not knowing what the next day, or even hour, might hold.
But then, one afternoon, hiking through the jungle, watching scarlet macaws flash across the sky, I felt it: nothing.
No awe, no wonder, just a dull, creeping awareness that I’d seen this all before, that I could be anywhere, that none of it was touching me the way it used to.
I wasn’t having fun. Worse, I wasn’t feeling anything at all.
Travel had stopped feeling like discovery and started feeling like escapism
In my early 20s, traveling alone was exhilarating. It forced me into the present moment.
Every day was a crash course in self-reliance: figuring out bus schedules, trying the most adventurous street foods I could find, and meeting strangers who felt like old friends by sunset.
Now, travel just felt like I was running away. I wasn’t discovering new things about myself. I wasn’t growing. I wasn’t even particularly interested in where I was.
I’d spent years convincing myself that the next place would hold all the answers. But here I was, in yet another breathtaking destination, feeling completely numb.
I started to miss things I never used to think twice about: familiar faces, a favorite coffee shop where baristas know your order, and plans that stretch beyond the next flight.
For the first time, I wondered if this way of living had an expiration date, if maybe what once felt expansive now just felt empty.
It turns out the hardest thing isn’t leaving — it’s staying
When I came back to the US, I expected to feel relief. Instead, I felt restless in a way that travel couldn’t fix.
Although my trip wasn’t fulfilling, I still found myself refreshing flight deals at midnight and itching for the next destination.
For years, movement had given me solace. As long as I was in motion, I never had to sit with the harder questions: What do I actually want? What kind of life am I trying to build?
Travel had given me so much, but it had also become a distraction.
The hardest realization was that what I actually needed — the thing that scared me the most — was staying in one place long enough to build something real.
A deeply meaningful life isn’t found in constant movement, it’s built over time. It’s in the friendships that deepen over years, not days. The sense of belonging that grows from showing up again and again. The purpose that comes from committing to something, even when it’s not thrilling every moment.
Travel will always be a part of my life, but I no longer see it as the answer to everything.
My next real challenge is learning how to stay, and sometimes that takes even more courage than booking a one-way ticket.
