On the Various Insecurities of the Perpetual Traveler

Through the smoke machines, bodycon dresses, and defiantly superior Soviet cheekbones, I was reduced to feeling like a terminally uncool American tourist with a cheap halter top and no rhythm. It was not the first nor would it be the last time I found myself fortunate enough to be invited but not quite cool enough to belong.

When I was younger, the main source of my international insecurity came from fellow travelers. In youth hostels and bars, the conversation would always dissolve into something akin to a dick-measuring contest. Who has been the furthest and suffered the strangest: I hitchhiked from Cape Town to Cairo with nothing but chewing gum and steely resolve, I invented dubstep with a deflecting Buddhist monk I met in Bristol, I lost my virginity to Jacques Cousteau’s grandson, the ONLY way to see Vietnam is on the back of a vintage hand-built Indian motorcycle, yeah my necklace was made for me by a local shaman using the teeth of his enemies, Poland is the new Prague, this tattoo is Sanskrit for “be here now”…and so on in a loop of one-upmanship anchored by snot-nosed rich kids trading passport stamps like baseball cards, smoking clove cigarettes, experimenting with alternative hair and life styles.

I’d be lying if I told you these perennial boner wars didn’t cause me my fair share of self-doubt. The question was always where are you going and where have you been, and I came up short on both lists. Slowly though, through enough miles and subjugation to terrible expat bars and even more terrible expats, I realized that if I wanted to hear obnoxious people talk about their own exploits, I didn’t have to leave home to do it.

Nowadays I am unmoved that Malcolm from South Africa has swallowed a cobra heart and been to more countries than me. I just pray I don’t sound like him. My fear now is in the way I’m perceived by the people who belong to the places I visit, my insecurities as a traveler just a hyper-realized version of my standard uncertainty. I’m worried I appear unworldly, over-privileged, uncouth, and white to a vulgar degree.

Watching cliff jumpers in Brazil, I have never felt paler or less graceful. How do people even look like that? So elegant, sinuous, and sun bleached like a mermaid gave live sea-foam birth to them. In a gypsy orphanage outside Prague, I listened to a girl with crooked teeth like tarot cards play the piano in the asbestos bones of a living room. It sounded like turning wheels and when all the visitors clapped, I hoped she knew mine was from awe not pity.

In the Kibera slum of Nairobi, I wanted to choke on the price of the sunglasses hanging around my neck. In Nicaragua, watching field after field of cattle, blinds of bone pushing through their skin, I felt my own stomach sick full with a 2-star continental breakfast. In Rome, I was turned away from St. Peter’s for showing too much skin and had to buy a shawl from a scowling nun. Same halter top. In a favela in Rio, under the veins of electrical wires and corrugated roofs, clothes lynched and pulled like unanswered prayer flags, I thought of my Pinterest board dedicated to interior design, cheekily titled Rustic Rooms, and wanted to punch myself in the face.

I felt the warm bloom of shame in a crumbling Argentine graveyard; a woman in black shook her hand at my camera and yelled in fast angry Spanish that these were not my ghosts. In Saigon, after a sobering lesson in alternative history at what was once called the Museum of American War Crimes, I wanted everyone I met to know that I knew, that I wasn’t another thoughtless tourist eating pho and posting artful pictures of amputees on mopeds and the weathered faces of old women to my fucking Instagram.

The more I travel, the less I care about the story I could tell about a place, and the more and more about the one they would tell about me.