I Left Home With a 20kg Suitcase and Finally Met Myself.

Suhaila Atef
14 hours ago
3 min read

When I was 23, I left home on a Friday at dusk with a 20kg suitcase that contained neither my clothes nor my expectations. Twenty kilograms is all the airline allowed me to carry. The rest of me had to travel without luggage.

The moment you step out of the plane you start to ask yourself “Why the hell was I afraid of such an experience?” People like to think that taking a trip to Europe after a conflict in their lives will inspire a dramatic change; a version of themselves that wasn’t present inside of them all along.

The thing is when you travel, after multiple drinks with complete strangers you pause and realize that this is a version of you that was there all along, the change of place and the change of expecting less from people and people expecting less from you has made you realize a “foreign self” that you will crave for the rest of your life.

People say all the time that traveling in your early 20s is the best thing that you can do to free yourself, book the ticket with your last months savings post-burnout, buy a couple of swimsuits and there you are, magically expected to be someone new when you come back. The expectations are high, and then you start to face the reality checks, the couple you meet at the most famous bars in the city that will make you feel alone immediately, the loneliness that creeps in once you step out of the plane and think how I am going to manage the next few days or even weeks on my own, having fun with no outside opinions and no external judgements, learning that maybe most of the judgments were from you to you all along.

We are sold the fantasy that a plane ticket can become a personality transplant, that somewhere between the passport control and baggage claim, the heartbreak expires, insecurity disappears and we return home entirely new like a fresh designer bag out of the box.

The truth is that travel doesn’t create a new you, it removes the people who were constantly reminding you of an old version of yourself. You start dancing, letting go of all the weight you have from your home country. You start noticing that maybe people are performing differently, and maybe that you even belong to them more than you belong to those back home.

No one is expecting shit from you, your reputation is unknown, no one knows your high school self you desperately want to forget, and you become whoever you consistently choose to be.

At the end of the day, when you settle in your hotel room, you figure out you have made it, after wandering, you collect evidence that has eventually led you to the right places.

Travel and 20s have some things in common, that it is acceptable to be lost in both, whether it’s in a foreign city or in your career, you are expected to be lost before you arrive. Your 20s make you panic when you feel that everyone has it figured out, and when you travel in your 20s, you realize that everyone is just improvising in different languages.

The best thing you bring back home isn’t your brand-new self or your confidence, it’s the proof that the life awaiting outside your comfort zone isn’t as terrifying as the one your imagination created.

Maybe we romanticize traveling in our twenties because it’s the only period of our lives where both we and the journey are allowed to be unfinished.

The cool thing about travelling is that you get to start over in your adulthood without deleting your life.