Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

you’ve got mail.

A little over two weeks ago, I found myself sitting in the window seat in the thirteenth row of a Delta airplane in Boston. While I’d had this trip planned for months, it was finally hitting that I was traveling solo to a place I hadn’t ever expected myself to go.

I’ve been known to book things on a whim. I’m the type that believes money can return but time can’t, and it’s sort of become a practice. I will go to that concert, on that trip, to that museum, because I’d rather fill the time that I know I have rather than hope it’ll still be there later. With that said, I promise I thought about this trip for a minute longer than I usually would.

This time, it was about what the trip would do for me. I didn’t want it to be a “for the plot” trip. I thought that it could mean something.

I wanted to learn about myself. I’ve been living at home for a year and a half now, and I hardly interact with anyone my age. I start slipping into the habits I had as a kid because I’m under the roof of my parents’ home. I graduated, but I’m not sure yet if that degree had any point to it. I fell in love and lost love, and I spent half of this year picking up my pieces and leaving some behind.

But I’ve always found parts of myself while traveling. I first learned to solo travel by heading to school from Maine to Savannah. I learned how to be confident in Savannah. How to be myself while I was on my own. I learned about my own willpower in Charleston after a long day of travel and a failed hotel check-in. I learned about my need for a slower-paced lifestyle while studying drawing in Florence. I gather these experiences like trinkets and display them with every interaction.

The Puerto Rico trip was a group retreat. It was for surfing, yoga, and adventure — three things I found myself wanting this year, set just south of the tropical city of Aguadilla. But I had no idea who was going to be on the trip, let alone how it would go. But I was excited when I paid the deposit in mid-July, right after I returned from a family reunion in Oregon.

My flight was direct from Boston to San Juan, and I expected to have the middle seat empty, as it had looked on the seating chart in the app. Alas, I was wrong, and a man in a hoodie sat next to me.

I am not a talker on planes. I put in my headphones or earbuds and play music at the highest volume to drown out the growl of the motors and plane sounds that will give me anxiety if I think about it too much. But this guy started to ask me about where I was going and why. He had already explained that he’s from San Juan, but his father had passed, and he and his family were in the area for a funeral. I felt bad to explain that I was traveling to where he was from for a more positive reason.

“You’re going by yourself?” he’d said. “So you don’t know anyone?”

I told him that I didn’t.

“You’re really brave for that. I couldn’t do what you’re doing.”

Once the plane took off, he left me alone, and I was stuck thinking about what he had said. Bravery is not what I thought I was harnessing to be where I was. I was desperate to escape and hoping the escape would benefit me.

I still think about my resistance to his perception. He called me brave, and I kept pushing back, fighting him almost. I didn’t think it was courageous to travel by myself. People are out there curing cancer, protesting, caring for those who don’t care for them. I wasn’t doing any of that. But accepting your own humanity, and having compassion and empathy for others, is brave in a world that wants to divide us.

When the plane began its descent, he asked me if I had seen land yet. When I did, he welcomed me to Puerto Rico. He said that he hoped that I’d have a good time.

I met most of the women at the airport. I saw the group of them outside and knew who they were immediately, without having to know them personally. It was the backpacks, the forearms of permanent art, the bandanas. In the following week, I’d get to know them beyond their astrological signs and realize that the guy on the plane was right. We were brave. And as the days passed, I saw how much we were all carrying.

The women I met were the most impactful part of the trip. We were all showing up in our own ways. There are the obvious things — the painful memories and experiences that make you stronger. The type of strength that is seen on the other side, once the pain is no longer active. But the silent type of bravery is what I witnessed each day. It’s showing up. Admitting one’s faults and mistakes. Speaking up. Being vulnerable. Having conversations. Letting go.

There was an exercise we did when we found a secluded spot given to us by a man we met at a bar (a Puerto Rican native who coincidentally worked in New Hampshire before retiring and moving back home). We climbed over rocks and balanced upon them while others sat in the water by this cavernous waterfall. And we started going around and talking about things that we permit ourselves to do. Then we talked about things we want to let go of, the things that were weighing us down. And we left it there in the jungle with a scream.

I think that’s what the trip meant to me. We were all there for different reasons, but we were all showing up. We were all carrying things that had brought us to where we were, things that we were trying to understand or move past or leave behind. And maybe some of us were there to escape, too.

I think I had this idea that bravery meant knowing what you were doing, being confident in your decisions, and moving forward without looking back. But I didn’t feel brave when I booked the trip. I felt like I needed to get away. I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t home, somewhere I could exist outside of the life I had fallen back into.

But maybe those things aren’t so different. Maybe sometimes you have to leave what you know to figure out what you need. Maybe showing up when you’re still trying to figure it all out is its own kind of courage.

We were all going through something. We were all trying to make sense of our lives in whatever ways we knew how. And for a week, we got to do that together. We got to be strangers who listened to each other, who shared things we might not have shared at home, who fell off surfboards and tried again, who admitted what hurt and what we wanted to leave behind.

I went to Puerto Rico thinking I needed to get away from my life. Instead, I met people who reminded me that everyone is carrying something, that none of us has to carry it perfectly, and that sometimes it helps to let someone else see it.

We were strangers when we arrived. We left knowing pieces of one another that we might not have otherwise shared. I think that’s one of the most incredible things about leaving home: you never know who you’ll meet, or what they’ll leave you with.

The kinds of people brought together by a need to migrate occasionally. How incredible it is to be able to go wherever and meet whomever, and I am so grateful that I am able to do so. I hope I get to meet more of them.

Where to next?