By Lauren
When you’re somewhere you’ve never been, you arrive without a reputation. Each new person you meet gets a blank slate that you get to fill with details of who you are. For the majority of my gap year, I was moving locations every three days. This meant every few days, I became a complete stranger again. No one knew my habits, sense of humor, past mistakes, embarrassing stories, or even what I was like the day prior. I got this bizarre opportunity to introduce myself from scratch. Without a pre-existing definition of who I was, I could create one.
I loved being a “stranger.” The feeling that ‘who I am is who I decide to be at this moment’ became addicting and freeing. Each day, I got to decide who I wanted to be. I didn’t come home with a completely different version of myself. I didn’t discover some secret version of myself hiding underneath. Instead, I became more sure. I got to try new things in an environment where I was unknown, and ego and embarrassment felt irrelevant. I came home with new pieces to add to my identity. Still the same person, just with more.
Being anonymous wasn’t always liberating, sometimes it was awful. You can walk into a room and realize literally nobody knows you. No one is going to know your favorite joke, understand why something is funny to you, know when you’re having a bad day, or notice when you’re acting differently. Sometimes being unknown felt incredibly lonely. I had spent months enjoying the freedom I thought I gained by being unknown until I realized being unknown also made me alone. Introducing myself to every single person I met from scratch became exhausting. If I didn’t make the effort to get to know people, I wouldn’t have anyone to lean on.
Suddenly, my gap year was over and I was back in Oklahoma, surrounded by people who knew me before I left. Can I still be a stranger at home? Everyone knows me. My friends, family, and teachers all have memories of me. I have a reputation and a version of myself that I’ve been playing for years. I had built expectations for myself. Coming home from my gap year, I needed to figure out which parts of being a stranger I wanted to keep. Was I still allowed to be the Lauren who spontaneously talked to strangers in Guatemala? Who wasn’t worried about looking stupid? Who said yes to things?
Travel gave me an ‘identity vacuum’ to figure out new things about myself (how outgoing I was, how spontaneous I was, how to balance independence vs companionship, new interests, etc). None of these things created a new version of me. The anonymity gave me an outlet to develop my personality further. I finally understood that I didn’t need anonymity to give myself permission to be myself. Travel didn’t remove embarrassment or ego from my life. I let those things go. I realized that I could continue to try new things at home. I didn’t have to live according to what others expected from me.
