Facing My Trauma With Solo Travel

How to say ‘table for one’ in Italian?

“Table for One in Italian.”

I type this somewhat humorously into Google from my cafe table as the waitress places my cappuccino.

It’s a bit of comic relief — but my hands are shaking and a panic jumps around my ribs like a rabbit in a cage.

I wasn’t supposed to do this alone. Not yet. On the first morning of the two-week vacation I planned to Italy with my sister, she woke up with food poisoning and homesickness to boot. And just like that, my queasy kin and safety net flew on a red-eye back to America.

The next morning, I swallow the big pill of solo travel while happier tourists snap photos and eat croissants all around me.

Tavolo per uno.

Mental health is hard to talk about.

I’ve been through several extremely traumatic events in my life. Even typing this out now elicits sweaty palms. It’s taken me two years of therapy to admit that some memories — which I’d rather leave in a closet at home — classify as trauma.

But we don’t get to choose what follows us around the world. In fact, one of the most poignant quotes I’ve heard comes from the TV show “The Leftovers”: “Wherever you go, there you are.”

From moment one of my impromptu solo trip, I realized that running from my mental health with an airline ticket in hand was not an option. That suitcase is bound to burst open and litter the tarmac with dirty laundry eventually.

I acknowledged the hand I was dealt from my trauma, and I had identified names for its effects: anxiety, complicated PTSD, and depression centering on neglect, abandonment, and inadequacy.

My biggest trigger, in layman’s terms? Being alone.

Now, I don’t mean the “I’m spending the night home with some tea and Netflix” alone (although that one even took me a while). Or even the “Taking some ‘me time’ this weekend” flavor of alone.

In fact, I’ve always been independent when it came to finances, big life decisions, and climbing career ladders. I was single for the first time in years, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan — perhaps one of the loneliest places on Earth.

Alone was having no words for my childhood trauma, no peer-friendly vernacular for my pain.

Alone was no one to pick up the pieces, to reassure, to understand.

My fear of being alone became an eating disorder in grade school, and immense phobias of losing control — of broken arms and the stomach flu. My fear materialized as night terrors and frequent impulses to run away, stomachaches and OCD.

But to the outside, I was a normal, happy kid. We took Disney vacations, sent nice Christmas cards, wore matching red-white-and-blue on the Fourth of July. We got straight As. We played little league. We had survived our problems, thank you very much. In fact, we didn’t talk about it at all.

And because we didn’t talk about it at all, I became an adult crippled by childlike trauma, sitting alone in a cafe outside of Venice, Italy.

I’m a firm believer in the power of following threads.

In my years of therapy, in which I invested serious head-space to understanding my pain every single day, I recognized that every irregularity in my life traced back to some deeper cause.

See, every anxiety has a root. I wince when I realize that it took me a decade and a half to connect my ongoing trust and control issues with my dad’s affairs. My abandonment was worsened by my dad’s sudden death five years ago. It’s a process to see even the most obvious threads in front of us.

The little brainwaves that popped up and made my heart race, that made me a bad daughter or sibling or girlfriend or friend, had seedy little footprints tracing back to trauma from my childhood.

Following the threads had helped untangle them altogether.

And thankfully, those years in therapy were the only thing keeping me in place once I realized that, yet again, I was wracked with false nerves and apprehension.

I could have booked a ticket home. And I will be honest that I considered it. But I had already learned that the only way out was through. So I sipped my coffee, gripping my mug like a rock at sea, and carefully unfurled my map of Venice.

The next few weeks in Italy unwound as if in slow motion, a montage where the heroine finds herself over Neapolitan pizza and Roman ruins. My crippling panic became a thrumming anxiety, became a quiet nudge, became a barely-there whisper — only because I threw myself in wholly with no other options.

At night in my hostel room alone, I cried. I shuddered with the pain. I poured out my trauma to my therapist in a sad series of rambling text messages. I dusted myself off, then somehow became a tour de force for striking up conversations with strangers and drinking foreign beers. First a tremor of bravery, then a rumble.

I made friends on bus rides. I chatted people playing the ukulele. I got used to the absence of phone notifications, and took comfort in the smiles of strangers.

One night I ended up with a new friend navigating the Roman Forum. We hopped on a moped, ate spaghetti, and marveled at the layers of history in the city. We questioned why certain events make the historical record, and why some places become footpaths for the future, trampled on and built upon and forgotten.

We toasted Saluti to overcoming grief, pain, and lost expectations. My friend gave me a serious look and implored me to see myself more lovingly, more clearly.

“I’ve only known you for a few days,” he said, “but I know you have a good heart.”

Some days, I snoozed on rocky beaches, hitchhiked windy Amalfi Coast roads, and once, woke up in a castle with a bottle of red wine and three new friends from Glasgow.

It was adventure, but it wasn’t all Instagram filters and Italian sunsets. My insides knotted the second I’d say goodbye to anyone. I felt the first six hours of each day like a dagger twisting in my gut — the time difference when everyone at home, my protectors and confidantes, were asleep or out with other friends at the bar.

The quiet, the darkness, was deafening at times, and I realized how much the Manhattan hum had been a stopgap for mental silence and mindfulness.

Italy punctuated a moment when I couldn’t smother my anxiety with long-term boyfriends, or nights out with friends, or 50-hour work weeks. Italy became a nauseating, exhilarating example of me, grabbing back the life and confidence and terror that was mine.

When I came back to my normal life in New York City and the fear set back in, I knew immediately that I needed to bite off and digest pain, and give myself time for more healing.

As I write this, I’m in a hostel cafeteria in King’s Cross, London. I’ve put my full-time job on hold, ended the lease on my apartment, and bought a one-way ticket directly into the hurricane’s eye of my deepest fears.

I had planned to do this, and saved money to do this little by little, each paycheck for years.

But I always wanted to wait until I was, you know, done with the anxiety thing. I had envisioned years and years chiseling away at the invisible brick wall in my path.

It’s raw as hell, but Italy taught me that I have unattended baggage to deal with. It doesn’t fit neatly in my 9-to-5. In fact, it falls aside on a subway platform and dissolves in a weekend night drink.

Beginning now, I am taking my loneliness in stride from this moment on. I’m confident I’ll be freed from the pain through feeling it — adult me, uninhibited me, taking ownership and caring for myself. I want to embrace loneliness, from the other side of the world, in irrefutable boldness, and come out strong.

So here I am.

I scribbled a quote on my travel journal this week from James Thurber, and those words I’ve whispered to myself when I wake up with a pounding heart in the midst of morning depression.

It goes like this:

“All men should strive to learn before they die. What are you running from, and to, and why?”