I stopped counting countries somewhere around 25. Not because the number didn't matter, but because the counting had started to feel like collecting — another form of accumulation in a life I was trying to empty. I've been to 30-something countries now. The number tells you nothing. The questions I brought back tell you everything.

My feet hurt. This is the first thing I remember about Singapore — not the skyline, not the humidity, not the culture shock. My feet hurt because I'd been walking for nine hours in cheap sandals, trying to exhaust myself enough to sleep. Insomnia had followed me out of Korea and across the South China Sea, and the only thing that worked was making the body so tired it overrode the brain.

I was 25, newly arrived in a country where I knew no one, carrying a bag that weighed less than my anxiety. The plan was: find freelance work, stay alive, figure out the rest later.

The rest took years.

Here's what people imagine when you say "I traveled to 30 countries": Instagram. Sunsets. Beaches. Digital nomad lifestyle with a coconut in one hand and a MacBook in the other.

Here's what it actually looked like: hostels that smelled like sweat and mildew. Coworking spaces with internet that dropped every forty minutes. Arguing with landlords in languages I barely spoke. Getting food poisoning in Koh Samui and spending three days on a bathroom floor wondering if this was how the story ended — not dramatically, just pathetically, in a rented house in the tropics.

The glamour was intermittent. The discomfort was constant.

Travel is not a vacation when you're doing it because you can't go home. There's a difference between choosing adventure and having no fixed point to return to. I looked like the first kind. I was the second kind. Every airport departure gate was both a beginning and a confirmation that I still didn't belong anywhere.

The lessons didn't arrive as lessons. They arrived as accumulated discomfort that eventually rearranged something.

In Bali, I accidentally lost my phone and spent a month with a $50 burner. No social media, no messaging apps, no reflexive scrolling. I checked email once a day on a laptop. That month was the happiest I'd been in years, and I didn't understand why until much later: the phone had been a leash, and I'd been calling it connection.

In Portugal, I met people who'd been traveling for a decade and had nothing. Not in the romantic minimalist way — in the stuck way. They'd optimized for freedom and arrived at emptiness. Their days were structureless. Their relationships were temporary. They talked about freedom constantly, which is how I learned that people who talk about freedom the most are often the least free.

In Thailand, I watched an economy run on tourism that bordered on exploitation. I wrote about this in a different piece — the sex tourism, the expat hierarchy, the way certain Western men built little kingdoms in countries where their money made them gods. It made me sick. It also made me examine my own position — was I any different? I was a Korean woman moving through Southeast Asia with my laptop and my freelance income, and the line between "finding myself" and "consuming cheaper countries" was thinner than I wanted to admit.

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What 30 countries actually taught me:

Freedom is not the absence of obligation. It's the presence of choice. I learned this in Berlin, where I finally stopped running and started choosing. Choosing a city, a routine, a direction. Not because someone told me to — because I was tired enough to be honest about what I wanted.

Comfort is the enemy of self-knowledge. Every country that made me uncomfortable taught me something. Every country that was easy taught me nothing. The discomfort was the curriculum.

You can't outrun depression. I tried. It works for a few weeks in each new place — the novelty distracts the brain, and you think: this is it, I've found the answer. Then the novelty fades and you're lying in bed in Lisbon at 3am with the same thoughts you had in Seoul at 3am. Geography changes the scenery. It doesn't change the script.

Home is a thing you build, not a place you find. I looked for home in 30 countries. I didn't find it. I eventually built it — slowly, in Berlin, by accident, through the accumulation of small choices that didn't feel like building at the time.

I wrote about that accidental building process in "I Left Home With -$2,000 and No Plan." The leaving part. And the moment the leaving turned into something else — that's "The Day Mark Rothko Saved My Life." The through-line between all of it is simpler than I want it to be: I had to exhaust every escape route before I could sit still.

I don't regret the traveling. I regret the expectation that it would fix me. Travel is a magnificent tool for dismantling assumptions and a terrible tool for building a life. It's the demolition phase. Without it, I wouldn't have known which walls needed to come down. But demolition is not construction, and I spent too many years confusing the two.

What are you traveling toward? And is it possible you've already arrived?

Thread: The Lost
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