The Loneliest Thing Nobody Tells You About Travelling the World

There's a version of me that exists on the internet.

She's in Cartagena, golden hour, laughing at something just off camera.

She's hiking in Bolivia, altitude be damned.

She's at some rooftop in Medellín looking like she belongs there, like she's always belonged everywhere.

She looks free. She looks full. She looks like she has exactly the life she wanted.

And she does. That part is true.

What's also true — and what I've never said out loud in any caption, any blog post, any “my travel story” reel — is that I've sat in more beautiful places than most people will ever see in their lifetime, completely, gutturally alone. Not alone-and-loving-it. Not the empowering kind of solitude the wellness industry wants to sell you.

The kind where you finish dinner and walk back to your room and the silence has a texture to it. Where you lie there in the dark and think: there's not a single person on this earth who knows exactly where I am right now.

And some nights that feels like freedom.

And some nights it just feels like what it is.

I grew up in Singapore. If you didn't grow up there, here's what you need to understand:

It's a place that is extraordinarily good at producing a certain kind of person. Efficient. Hardworking. Grateful for stability. Wired to look sideways at what everyone else is doing and calibrate accordingly. There's even a word for it — kiasu — this fear of losing out that runs so deep it stops being fear and just becomes the water you swim in.

You buy the flat. You get the job. You hit the milestones in the right order. And you do it because that's what love looks like there — security, provision, not rocking the boat.

I understood that. I still understand it. My family didn't build the life they built so I could go be uncomfortable on purpose in countries they'd never heard of.

But somewhere underneath all the understanding, there was something in me that kept saying:

This isn't it. This isn't the whole thing. There's more, and you know there's more, and if you stay, you'll never find out what it is.

So I left.

The thing about leaving that no one prepares you for is that it doesn't solve the loneliness. It just relocates it.

In Singapore, I felt lonely in rooms full of people I'd known for years. There was always this invisible glass between me and everyone else — I could see them, they could see me, we could have perfectly pleasant conversations about perfectly reasonable things, and I would walk away feeling like I hadn't said a single true word all evening.

I thought it was me. For a long time, I genuinely believed I was the problem. That I was too much, or not enough, or wired wrong somehow.

Then I got on a plane.

And then another. And another. And I started meeting people — in hostels, on hikes, at dinners I stumbled into, at events I showed up to alone — and something strange kept happening.

I'd meet someone, and within hours we'd be talking about things I'd never said out loud to anyone. The stuff underneath the stuff. The real fears. The grief you carry quietly. The questions about who you actually are versus who you've been performing.

A stranger whom I attended the same event with Koh Phangan once told me things about his experience becoming a new parent — the frustration, the rage, the love so overwhelming it scared him — things I'm fairly certain he had never told his closest friends back home. We'd known each other for 4 hours. We were sitting on a local stall somewhere in Koh Phangan, eating something cheap and unremarkable.

I remember thinking: why's this so easy?

And then slowly understanding: because neither of us was performing. Because we had nothing to protect. Because when you're transient, when you both know the window is short, something drops away and you just — talk. Actually talk.

I had spent my whole life in Singapore, wondering why I couldn't form the kind of deep connections I craved. Thinking the problem was me. And then I travelled and found out I was completely capable of depth — I'd just been in the wrong rooms.

But here's the part I haven't figured out how to say cleanly, because it isn't clean.

Knowing that doesn't fix it.

Because those connections — the kerb conversations, the strangers who saw me more clearly in a night than people at home did in years — they recede. You move on. They move on. You follow each other on Instagram and sometimes send a voice note and mostly just carry the memory of a version of yourself that felt fully alive for a minute, in a city you no longer live in, with a person you'll probably never sit next to again.

I was talking to a friend about this recently. Late night, the kind of conversation where the good stuff comes out, and he told me:

One thing he didn't quite enjoy about living transiently is how much he craved deeper connections. He'd meet people so different from me, people he was so curious about, and it takes time for some people to really trust and open up. And if they saw you as transient, they mightn't even bother.

I said something back, which I feel strongly about:

But if the place itself thrives on transience — Bali, Puerto Escondido, Bansko — there's also a magic to it. It forces you to live in the moment.

And I do believe that. I've lived that. There's something extraordinary about the forced presence of it all, the way impermanence makes everything sharper and more vivid, and that's how I want to live life.

But I also know what it costs.

I exist between worlds. I've accepted this. Most days, I've even made peace with it.

My core is Singaporean — I feel that in my bones, in the way I was raised, in how much my family matters to me even when I frustrate them and they frustrate me.

But there's another part of me that was shaped by everywhere else.

The precision I absorbed in Japan. The ease I found in Hawaii. The pura vida exhale of Costa Rica. The 1.5 years I spent in Latin America during the pandemic — Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru — watching real local life happen around me while the rest of the world was frozen.

Sitting with families in Bolivia while pet-sitting their animals. Learning what it looks like when people have very little and are somehow more alive than anyone I knew back home with everything.

I carry all of that. It's made me who I am. It's also made me someone who doesn't fully fit anywhere.

Too different for some of my Singaporean circles. Not different enough — or different in the wrong ways — for others. I have Singaporean friends and expat friends and travel friends and I love them all and sometimes feel, quietly, like I'm not entirely enough of any one thing to be fully claimed by any of them.

I adapt. I've always adapted. I shift registers and reference points and conversation styles depending on who I'm with, and mostly I do it naturally, with love. But sometimes I go home after an evening and feel a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with the hour.

The tired of having been slightly not-quite-yourself all night.

My friend asked me how I could be so confident in who I am.

I said: travel. And I meant it. But what I meant by travel wasn't what most people picture.

I didn't mean the pretty parts. I meant the parts where I was genuinely scared. The moments where I thought I don't know how I'm going to get through this and then got through it. Quietly. Alone. On my own terms.

When you do that enough times — when you throw yourself completely out of everything familiar and survive it — something settles in you.

Not arrogance. Not certainty about what comes next.

Just this quiet bedrock knowledge of: I know who I am. I know what I'm made of. Because I've seen myself when no one was watching, and no one was helping (like the time I got robbed in Playa Del Carmen and the only people I knew ganged up against me), and there was no script.

That's not something you find in a place you already know. You find it in the friction. In the wrong bus, the language you don't speak, the city that doesn't care about you, the night where you have to figure it out because there's no other option.

I didn't go looking for myself. I just kept going and eventually ran into her.

The loneliness is still real. I want to be honest about that because I think the travel content world is full of people performing freedom and I don't want to be one of them.

Some of this life is genuinely, achingly lonely. There are days when I'd give anything for a person who knows my whole history to just sit with me and not need anything from me.

Someone who has known me long enough to hold all the versions — the Singapore version, the Latin America version, the version that cried on a floor in Mexico, the version that felt most at home at altitude in Bolivia with dogs she was watching for strangers.

I don't always have that person in the same city. Sometimes I don't have them in the same timezone.

But here's the other thing — the thing that's equally true and that I've also never quite known how to say:

I am more whole than I have ever been.

Not despite the loneliness. Not in spite of the rootlessness. Because of it. The not-belonging forced me to figure out what I actually believed, separate from what I was taught to believe.

The impermanence made me stop waiting for my real life to start and just — live the one I was in. The strangers who saw me clearly taught me what it felt like to be seen, so I stopped settling for less.

I know who I am in a way I don't think I would've if I'd stayed. If I'd done what was expected. If I'd let the glass wall stay up and decided that the loneliness I felt in the rooms I grew up in was just how it felt to be alive.

It wasn't. That's not how it has to feel.

I used to think I was the problem.

I wasn't. I was just in the wrong life.

I'm building the right one. It's messier than it looks on Instagram. It's lonelier than the photos suggest. It's also more mine — more fully, completely, irreversibly mine — than anything I ever could have inherited.

And most days, that's enough.

Some days it's everything.

This is one of the rare times I've written about my personal accounts. If it resonated — if you've ever felt that particular kind of lonely in a room full of people who are supposed to be yours — I'd love to know. Not in a metrics way. In a real way. Drop it in the comments or send me a message. Some conversations are worth starting.