traveling alone
traveling alone
📍 New York, United States 🇺🇸
Virginia Woolf said the famous quote: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she wishes to write fiction.”
A hundred years later, I’m reaping the fruits of the seeds that she and other women planted so we could have individual space, financial autonomy, and perhaps other freedoms.
Being able to travel alone and maintain my living costs by working in programming is something I dreamed about for a long time, but didn’t really believe I could achieve.
What kind of things would await me out there?
It was all so unknown that it was impossible to even conceive.
Unknown also because, from my previous travels, I’ve already realized that I don’t go much for the Instagram-worthy spots, I like exploration — struggles included — chatting here and there until I end up in random experiences like:
- at a small party in a studio apartment in Slovenia, I asked ‘where’s the bathroom?’ and discovered it was in the apartment hall, shared, in the building’s corridor — I’d never seen that before.
I go for the adventure, but I make a loose plan or already have an idea of some things that happen frequently, like the local yoga teacher taking me to discover the nearest vegetarian restaurant (love it).
And if I go abroad, I know they’ll teach me how to cook something, or we’ll play some card game that everyone knows but calls by different names.
I also go thinking about new Brazilian expressions and references to spread our good humor soft power and, well, paradigms will be broken about nationalities-cultures, I’ll give and create lots of laughter out there, I’ll Shazam lots of songs…
I love these exchanges; for me, putting a backpack on and hitting the road is an enormous pleasure.
I’ve always liked going around, however, there’s always been a moment of fear: from my first solo trips to Guarujá as a teenager, to the trips to Atibaia, including that train I took across India, to the LSD I took at a club where I only went with male friends — which, to some extent, counts as traveling alone — it seems like the shadow of femicide is always lurking.
I’m friends with security cameras and digital records: taking a plane to China, okay. ordering an Uber in Rome at dawn, okay. staying alone in an Airbnb in rural Peru, okay. I feel increasingly more vulnerable outside these places of digital controls, records, documentation…
I’d love to have even ‘more authentic experiences’ than the ones I already have — would that be romanticizing travel? — staying at a hole-in-the-wall place in the center of any city, spending the night drinking and playing pool with strangers at a pub in the middle of who knows where…
I also dream of hitting the road by bike, hiking alone, long periods of landscape contemplation, surrendering to nature with no set end time, my body in motion as the driving force of locomotion.
I know many women do these things, but I don’t intend to, not alone.
I’m affected by the recent death of the nomad clown, Julieta, all colorful carrying thousands of trinkets. Where does the desire to kill a woman alone on her bike come from?
This edition might seem somewhat choppy, because it is, it was half written when this tragedy happened, it was supposed to be ‘logbook #2’, but it was difficult to continue, I mourned for the woman, even without knowing her.
I had even included a Patti Smith quote in the text: “what better time to talk about problems than when nobody wants to hear about them?”
I couldn’t elaborate much at the time to talk about the problem when nobody wanted to hear about it, and look, I’m usually inconvenient, raising contrary arguments and controversial topics in the most casual moments — I think my hobby is thinking about paradoxical questions, unbearable, sorry friends.
But thinking about it, nobody ever wants to talk about this.
This morning it rained and I couldn’t do yoga on the hostel’s rooftop, everything was wet. So I reluctantly went down to practice in the common room, where I saw a woman reading a book about misogyny — and I immediately thought ironically ‘wow what a light topic for a Friday morning’
I got on my yoga mat and was breathing, doing the poses and thinking that since Gab went to São Paulo and I hit the road, people keep asking me if I’m not afraid.
Just this week two colleagues came to ask for advice about being a ‘digital nomad’ and among the questions ‘how to make friends’, ‘where to stay’, ‘is it expensive?’ and such, there was also a touch of the topic of being a woman alone, feeling safe.
If in our daily lives in our own city we already have some paranoia, imagine while traveling.
I remember coming down from Machu Picchu mountain, I was feeling at peace, when that intrusive thought came, I imagined falling on the stairs and considered that I’d prefer to die there than have the first person to find me injured be a man who might harm me.
A bit radical, but quite common.
The other day malfeitona was traveling in Buenos Aires and tweeted that she was in an individual room and always lied to everyone saying she was accompanied for fear of someone entering there and such.
There really isn’t a magic formula, each one finds their own way to not seem like an easy target just because they’re without male company. But it’s always good to remember that the highest rate of femicide is inside our own homes. So, alone or accompanied, there’s risk. Being aware, talking about it, not ignoring it… that’s already something.
I don’t know if Virginia Woolf had to put a chair against the doorknob to feel safe and write in peace, what matters is that she shut herself in that room and positioned herself in the world and that’s how we all go, each in her own way and on her own scale, opening paths for the next ones to pass through more comfortably.
Finally, I want to speak very briefly about Virginia’s quote:
Many women don’t travel because they are constantly required to care, cook, clean, be emotional support or perform above average compared to men in their homes and jobs — to be available.
This advertisement I saw in the New York subway the other day made me think about this, look, a service that pays you to care for your loved ones. A small step for women who were never paid to care for their elderly parents or in-laws.
The whole basis of capitalism is built on unpaid housework — a good introductory book about this is ‘Caliban and the Witch’ — so there must be some catch in this scheme, especially when it comes to healthcare in the United States. Anyway, it was just to illustrate the point here in the text.
‘Having a room of one’s own’ and ‘writing fiction’ are unacceptable things, just like traveling and moreover traveling alone.
When a man is traveling solo he’s having fun, exploring… but for women it’s different, people think we’re kind of lost, trying to find ourselves in something — the other day I heard I was trying to find a rich husband in New York… for heaven’s sake.
Being absorbed in yourself and giving wings to your own imagination is something revolutionary as a woman — and it has positive consequences for you and the environments around you, breaking these prejudices in practice.
When anxiety hits me about going back to take better care of some situation I always bring up the internal dialogue that is: by default I’ve always stayed to care and eventually I’ll do it again, everything pulls me/us towards that.
Getting out of this comfort zone of staying and caring — which can also be uncomfortable, look at the coexistence with paradox — is an important exercise, if possible, even if just for a phase in life.
Go enjoy yourself, girl.