Lifestyle

While travelling, I’ve met dozens if not hundreds of other solo female travellers. Through the blogging community, I’ve also met loads of inspiring women who live the solo travel lifestyle and share their experiences online. One of the women I’ve met is Kristin Addis, author of Be My Travel Muse, who has travelled on her own for three years. I remember meeting her for the first time – it was at a pub in London two years ago, when she was in town to attend WTM (World Travel Market). We talked about Burning Man and Southeast Asia and she showed me a couple of her gorgeous tattoos. I’ve since met up with her at a few other blogging events, and we were even both listed on Buzzfeed’s recent list of women who will inspire you to travel solo.

A few weeks ago, Kristin emailed me with some very exciting news – she wrote and has just released a book on solo female travel, called Conquering Mountains: How to Solo Travel the World Fearlessly. I had a chance to read the book last week, and I can attest that it is a fantastic resource for women interested in travelling solo, or even for experienced solo travellers.

London is a city that gets a bad reputation from time to time. It’s crowded. It’s expensive. It rains a lot. I get it – and sometimes I feel it so strongly, this weight of the city.

But most of the time, nearly all of the time? I love it. It’s a city that speaks to me, that excites me, that motivates me. In London I’ve found a fulfilling career, a lovely flat, and a great group of friends; in London I’ve found a home. Over the past few months, after going through a bit of a period of stress, I have made a conscious effort to enjoy every single day in London, and to fill my time here with as many museums, cafés, parks, shows, and outings with friends as possible. I’ve been very open about my love for London, writing a post about why it deserves all of that love and even why I felt strongly about settling here permanently.

And then something happened: my master’s program finished.

Stress with my book, my degree, with money… none of these things are all-consuming or life-changing. None of these things are even that bad. Taken individually, I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and chalked whatever it was up to, you know, the ebb and flow of life. But for whatever reason, the combination of these things made me reach my boiling point. I just got kinda sad.

And here’s what I decided to do about it…

I’m always a little bit wary of people who say they have no regrets. Really? Not one? There’s not one thing you would change about your past, not one decision you made or sentence you said that you’d like to take back? I used to be one of those people who said “no regrets!”. I used to write it in my high school journals after asking a boy out and getting rejected, or missing out on a party because I felt uncomfortable with who I was. In my fifteen-year-old mind, these were all the regrets that I could possibly have.

Yesterday was my birthday; I turned thirty-one years old. As much as I love my life and feel proud of (most of) what I’ve done, I still have regrets, some big, some tiny. Instead of banging my head against the wall in shame, however, I’m trying to take those regrets and learn from them. If those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it, I’m going to try to do the opposite. Here are some of my regrets, and why I’ve learned to embrace them.

I’ve been sighing a lot in London lately. I often talk about how much I love this city on this blog; I wrote a whole post about why it deserves every bit of that love, just over a year ago. In that post, I cited the things to do, the galleries, the people, the restaurants, the markets. And I still stand by every word of that post. From Broadway Market to Saatchi Gallery, to afternoon tea and early morning raves, I’m more in love with this city than ever.

But we all know what love is like. It starts off like fireworks, all oohs and aahs, lust and passion. If we’re lucky, that feeling stays for a while. If we’re really lucky, that feeling stays forever.

Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving. It has been a bit of a tradition to write on this blog every Thanksgiving; I did it here, when I had just moved to London, and in 2012, when I was in Peru, and in 2011, when I was on a road trip across North America. Yesterday’s Thanksgiving was my quietest one ever, with no visits from friends or family, and no traditional turkey dinner. With many texts and a few phone calls, I was still able to connect with these people, and, sitting alone in my flat eating a very ordinary dinner (albeit a “traditional” Canadian one, and by that I mean a box of Kraft Dinner mac and cheese), I realised that I didn’t feel sad or lonely. I felt quite the opposite.