People watch me do this — land in a city where I can’t read a single sign, find dinner, sort the taxi, sleep fine in a room by myself halfway around the world — and they assume I’ve solved something. That I’ve reached some enlightened state where I don’t need anybody.
They’re half right. I am comfortable alone — genuinely at ease in it, most days. Whether I’m any good at it is a different question, and I’m honestly not sure of the answer. But comfortable and wanting are two different things entirely. From the outside they look identical. From the inside, they’re opposites.
How I got comfortable with it
I didn’t pick this up the way you pick up a hobby. Being alone arrived, the way it arrives for a lot of people — a life I’d built with someone in it, and then a life without her. Grief hands you solitude whether you asked for it or not.
So I made my peace with a thing I never wanted. I learned to travel by myself, eat by myself, get dropped into a foreign place with no one waiting on the other end and not come apart. Call it comfortable, call it functional — it’s a genuinely useful place to get to, and it has carried me through sixty-four countries. I’d wish it on anyone who’s had solitude handed to them without a choice.
But here’s the part I’ve only recently let myself say out loud. I never made peace with being alone because I wanted solitude. I did it so that being alone would never again be the thing that stopped me. The comfort was never the destination. It was the price of admission.
Admission to what
To the people. Always, it turns out, to the people.
Look at my own stories and the pattern is almost embarrassing once you see it. The trip to Iceland I actually remember isn’t the glaciers I skipped — it’s four nights in a hostel common room with college kids from all over Europe, showing me how different the world looks from where they each stand. The Bangkok I love isn’t a monument; it’s a breakfast place where someone starts making my order before I’ve pulled out the chair. I wrote a whole novel about a closed-off man getting claimed by a family a world from home, because I know in my body exactly what that feels like — to be absorbed by people who’ve decided, without consulting you, that you belong to them.
Not one of my best days was a day I spent alone. Every single one was a day I got found. I feel more like myself in those rooms than anywhere else — being found is, if I’m honest, close to the thing I live for. Solo travel was never the point of any of it. It was the vehicle — the thing that kept me out in the world and available for the finding.
The part I don’t usually say
So let me just say it, because I think it’s the truest thing I’ve got: I don’t want to be alone. I’ve only made myself comfortable enough in it that I can keep going until I’m not.
That’s a bigger admission than it sounds, and I’ve spent a couple of years talking around it — dressing it up as independence, as wanderlust, as being low-maintenance and easy to travel with. The independence is real. But underneath it is something plainer and less flattering and a lot more human: I’m a person who got left alone and would rather not stay that way. I don’t travel to get away from people. I travel to run toward the chance of them.
The freedom I’m actually chasing was never freedom from anyone. It’s the freedom to stay open — to sit at the long table, take the shared van, choose the hostel over the hotel, leave a door propped that someone might just walk through.
Why the difference matters
Because “comfortable alone” sits one small, quiet step from “alone,” and the step is easy to miss.
The same competence that frees you can wall you in if you stop watching it. Get good enough at needing no one and you can accidentally build a life where no one gets in — a fortress you’ve mistaken for freedom. I’ve felt the pull of it. It would be so easy to let the skill harden into an entire personality, to become the guy who’s fine. Always fine. Fine forever, alone.
I don’t want to be that guy. I literally wrote a book about that guy. So I keep choosing the room full of strangers on purpose — not because I can’t afford the quiet version, but because I refuse to let comfortable calcify into closed.
Where it lands
I’ve gotten very comfortable being alone. I hope I never get so comfortable in it that I forget it was only ever meant to be a means.
The point was never to need no one. It was to be able to go anywhere — and to still be soft enough, when I get there, to be found.
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