Alone and Alive.

On Traveling Alone and Learning The Point.

I’m sitting here on a plane listening to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own”, unbeknownst to every adult sitting near me and loving the fact that what they don’t know is that in my head, i’m parading through the aisles like a wildly, wildly gay man giving everyone everything I’ve physically got for a dance floor.

This is traveling alone.

I was terrified when I decided to fly to Bali alone months back. I’m an odd mix of a peacock and a hermit crab: I love to show my feathers and talk about them, but I sure do love to hide with every other moment and try to find crevices that people can’t get into.

This can be conflicting.

There are probably a million things people could myers-briggs the shit out of when I talk about this. You’re a WDKGDR! You’re a YXKKF! No, asshole, do you know what I am? I’m an introverted extrovert. It’s not really scientific. I’m a man who dreams of leaving his nest and doing magical things that finds himself surprised that he’s also, it turns out, a borderline closeted agoraphobic.

So this trip, this little adventure…it was like playing truth or dare with yourself and asking yourself to go streaking. I like a world with people I know. People who, if everything went wrong, I could hide behind like a tree in an incredibly awful game of hide and seek that I’m apparently very bad at.

But it was life changing. Because, well, when you put yourself out there, when you give yourself no choice but to have no choice, you have just that: no choice.

So you talk to strangers. You talk to yourself. You listen to Robyn on full blast on an airplane and imagine parading down the aisle’s and cutting your hair like a lesbian. You just fucking…

Live.

And that’s something that maybe half of us never do. We wake up. We go to work. We talk about the mundane crap we do or do not do. We tell each other well rehearsed stories that no one truly wants to hear, and then we go home and count the minutes to do it all over again.

But for one minute. One beautiful, hot minute, I told people stories that were unrehearsed. I sang a Drake song at a Japanese Karaoke bar (and destroyed it, mind you). I took a scooter the wrong direction just to see if I could get lost and find my way home because for a second I was just alive.

And the best part is, I may never be the same. My son will receive a new man as a father when I arrive home because for once, I will have stories to tell him. And I can plead with him in his tiny ears that he can’t really understand anything in yet to go out and find your own Robyn.

Find your own karaoke bar.

Maybe buy some illegal xanax. Get crazy, buddy.

But for once, I’ll have something truly unique to tell him.

For once, maybe I’ll have something I’ve never had to tell him about, and now I finally can.

I can tell him who I am.