I grew up very socially isolated.
Social anxiety was the name of the game for me – I did not enjoy the day-to-day realities of my childhood, and I closed off at a very early age.
Small nuclear family, as many friends (or less), almost no extracurriculars (and none for any extended period of time), but started to open up after high school a bit.
When I started traveling, I was meeting new people as a matter of course.
Part of it was just some vestiges of comfort/familiarity in a totally alien world, and another part was that in those days, I literally could not afford the traveling I was doing, and that lead me to stay in/around cheaper places which by virtue of being the lowest common denominator meant there were just a lot of people around – so if/when I wanted to socialize, there were plenty of opportunities.
After I started earning a lot more, I, for various reasons, started to shut myself off socially again.
Money made it reaaally easy to do – you get a tiny bit of social contact from the people you pay (even the clerks at the store, delivery drivers, etc.), or the ones who pay you, and that may be enough. For a while it became a bit of a vicious circle.
To make quite a long story (I am starting my 10th year of continuous travel in 2021) very short: recently, as I started to open back up socially (spurred by internal development, instead creating its own positive feedback loop), I noticed myself enjoying my life of travel all the more for it.
It began to add a lot more depth and breadth to my experience, enriching it with way more of that variability that makes travel so interesting in the first place.
Like What You See?
I actually thought literally until this year that I was an introvert.
It wasn’t until I began to work through some things inside (still working on them) that I discovered actually the opposite was true.
Can you imagine – decades believing you’re an introvert, then discovering that actually, it’s really enjoyable to socialize?
The first encounter I had with this idea was a games night I attended, where, when speaking with someone afterwards, I mentioned this idea to her that I am an introvert, and, quite plainly, she responded with “I don’t believe you.”
The bottom line
In no way whatsoever – beyond just socializing – does travel “have” to be one way or another. That is one of the best parts of it. How long you go for, where you go, what you do when you’re there – that’s all up to you.
That includes socializing.
Obviously there is a minimal level you have to deal with – i.e. if you’re going to do anything interesting, there will be people involved at some stage of the process, even if it’s just taking your money at the gate for admission.
These days, the other necessities of life are made so much easier thanks to the contactless options that have arisen recently, which COVID has only accelerated – and this is the same vein in which having money can help to isolate.
But beyond these basic transactional things, well, that is up to you, and how you choose to travel.
Now I am not saying everybody with social anxiety will realize they just shut themselves into a protective cocoon and are living in their own Plato’s cave.
This happened to be the reality for me and it took a very long time for me to realize it – and it is not like I was looking.
I had accepted my reality as an introvert, then at some point thinking I may have “traces of occasional extroverted tendencies”, to finally realizing: yeah, I love interacting with people when I’m not making the process into my own living hell.
It was never a goal of mine to realize – or even look at – things in that way.
Traveling your way
What I was doing, though, all the time, was traveling according to what I wanted to do.
I did not try and make my lifestyle more instagammable, or hype it up on YouTube, or anything like that – and I completely ignored that kind of influence of what this “should” be for me; perhaps even rebelling a little, and actually preferring those kinds of places at times where I was usually the only visibly identifiable foreigner in sight.
There is nothing wrong with not ziplining every week, nothing wrong with sitting in the corner while everyone else is laughing and having fun, nothing wrong with literally “doing nothing” for a week or whatever during your travels.
One of my favorite activities is just walking around, alone, in a new part of a new place, perhaps with a destination in mind to create a direction – but no actual need to get there, and perhaps not even something of particular note (e.g. a restaurant that was interesting to me, or not-a-famous river I want to see).
Do this for you.