Did a one-way flight solve all my problems?
No. But it was the problem I needed to solve.
My flight to Bangkok took off from Heathrow Airport at 21:35 on the 8th of January 2025. The UK was experiencing a frigid winter, and two days after I left, it saw the most significant drop in nighttime temperature in fifteen years. Fifteen years ago, in 2009, I’m reasonably sure my small town in southwest Leicestershire saw snow. I remember this because it is the only time I have ever seen a white Christmas. At nine, it was one of my favourite winters. Filled with sledging, hot chocolate, and days off school, it was the kind of winter which could allow a person to fall in love with winter (especially if you are, of course, nine). This year, however, I wouldn’t be sticking around to find out what a new year’s season of chill would have in store. I was sitting at the window of a Thai Airways plane, with a one-way ticket in my hand and a year of open opportunity ahead.
I took a small sigh of relief, revelling in the knowledge that England’s harsh-edged season of decay could not touch me 40,000 feet in the air. Winters only seemed to get harder after the age of nine, it seemed. I was skipping over the worst of the season this time. Suspended where there was only sky, I craned my neck out of the oval window and bore witness to something utterly foreign to January at home: the sun.
Hello, old friend. It’s good to see you again.
To say that I was totally relaxed and excited for this trip, however, would be a complete and utter lie. I was a hotbox car of nerves, desperate for someone to roll down the window. Solo travelling through Asia for 6 months! I’m so ready for that, right? On the 8th of January 2025, I can confidently say that I felt anything but ready. I distinctly remember sitting in the departure lounge at Heathrow, completely frozen to my seat, incapable of the thought of speaking to another person.
But I was at a juncture. A moment in my life where I felt like it was now or never. I needed to escape the life I was in, but I had no idea what the next life would look like. In an attempt to put something into action, I scoured the archive in my mind of long-lost dreams and settled on this. Solo travel, long term, no set end date, just go. That thing I had always imagined, but secretly never thought could happen. I wasn’t brave enough. I didn’t have enough money. Who was I to believe that it was for me to undertake this crazy endeavour? Leave it to the social media influencers and TV hosts. Maybe? But hey, tell that to the girl sitting in the departure lounge. I was there now, on my way to Asia for the first time in my life with absolutely no idea what lay ahead of me.
I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘travelling to find yourself’ narrative. I think a lot of us can agree it’s a bit tired at this point. The millennial rose-tinted glasses of the 2010s, which paraded Balinese rice terraces and Bolivian ayahuasca retreats as the answer to all our woes, have cracked in 2025. A lot of Gen Z pokes fun at the ideas’ general vapidity and complete disregard for the cultures and communities they profit from. However, I would be a hypocrite if I did not concede that part of this trip was a somewhat desperate attempt to feel better. I was struggling with a brutal bout of anxiety and depression in the months running up to my departure, combined with the feeling that a hundred of life’s stresses had hit me at once, and I had been seeking something that might help for a while. I tried journaling, I tried therapy. It helped, but I knew I needed to do something more radical for once. I needed to know what it was to finally fulfil an ambition that no one but myself had placed upon me.
When the breaking point arrived, the moment I booked my flight, I knew that what my life was lacking in this moment was not love, nor was it success or independence. It was self-fulfilment. It was the trust that I knew what decisions were right for me and that I could make them. I had a good job in a big city. But the problem was, there was always a part of me that felt like those things were the plot of someone else’s dream. My heart wanted something wildly different. It wanted adventure, experience, uncertainty and new connections. Every decision I had made in the year leading up to this trip had ignored that beating desire and prioritised normative societal expectations. Something which perhaps can not be avoided forever, but should, in my experience, be exercised with real intention and caution. Only when the beat of my heart got so loud that I could no longer ignore it, suppress or convince myself I didn’t need it, did I listen. Briefly but intently. In a split decision, I sold my car, saved my last month’s salary, moved home for a bit and then left. There wasn’t a massive build-up, there wasn’t a going-away party. My confidence wavered frequently, but I felt relieved to have made the decision, which guided me forward. One day, my life looked one way, and the next day it looked another. It was up to me now to rebuild.
The thing is that, despite their best efforts, by the time I touched down in Thailand, my underlying anxieties could not, for one moment, tarnish my immediate and infatuated love for Bangkok. Thrown right into the middle of it, I felt my heart fill with drunken adoration for this glorious conglomerate of old and new. I don’t think I can earnestly say that I understood what the phrase ‘a feast for the senses’ truly meant until walking around this city. In the space of twenty-four hours, I had journeyed from the four walls of my childhood bedroom, adorned with maps and books of the world, to the very streets of it, thousands of miles away. I was utterly intoxicated. My feet could barely decide which lane, path or side street to head for because my nose and my eyes refused to agree on what was more enticing: the aroma of limes, soy, chilli and sesame or the dazzling gold temple spires, that glistened both day and night. Telephone wires hung chaotically from posts, market sellers hollered and howled, and life moved along as if that was all it had ever done. The January sun, the glorious big red sun! How I had missed her. She beamed down through a polluted haze, illuminating the painted streets as though they were ripped straight from a Tarantino movie. Bangkok: a cacophonous mess of life that, despite first impressions, operates with an unassuming and impressive sense of order. My immediate infatuation was only further proof to myself: you made the right choice Ellie.
I was still terrified. I need you to know this. Arriving in Bangkok did not ‘fix’ my anxiety. Neither did the next five months of travel. However, it calmed me for a while, as it gave me the time and space to really look at it. Away from my routine, away from everything I knew, I self-reflected almost daily on how I’d gotten to that point of vast unhappiness last year. I had done a lot of this kind of intellectual work before leaving, in therapy, through my reading, and in my journaling, so it was not travelling that had taught me to do this. But now I was in a position where everything was up to me. If I wanted to make the most of this experience, I was going to have to step up my game. I was going to really address these problems and do something about them. I was forced to look at my difficulties in relative terms, against places and communities whose issues were vastly different from mine. And from all of this reflection, I was forced to make choices. Who did I want to be in the world, and what did I need to do to become that? Travelling gave me purpose again, or rather, showed me what purpose felt like, when I had preciously felt like I’d lost it.
The best part was that it wasn’t the first time I’d felt like this. During my studies, I felt a deep sense of purpose as I researched my passions, wrote lengthy analytical essays, and gained a deeper understanding of the world in which we live. My friendships always gave me purpose, as did my hobbies of painting, music, and sport. Purpose wasn’t foreign to me, but it was lacking in my life at that point, because my anxiety and depression had told me those things weren’t worth pursuing. Booking that one-way flight, giving myself ultimate freedom, sending myself off on the biggest adventure of my life: it reignited my sense of purpose not simply because it was a fun method of avoidance, but because the fundamental underpinnings of what travel is - exploratory, communicative, unexpected - are too the fundamental underpinnings of what I am. I listened to the voice that already knew who I was, and I followed it. I did not find anything new, but I reminded myself of something old and forgotten.
What reassures me as I sit on the other end of this trip is that booking a one-way flight across the world was not an escape for me. It might have felt like one at the time, but if it were, I would not have come home. I would not have understood that there was still so much to go home for. What the trip did was allow me to fulfil a dream that had been too long left unfulfilled, and it gave me space to heal from real things that needed time and space to recover from. I’d been ignoring them for too long, prioritising the constant push forward, adding unnecessary pressure onto myself, only to parade it around like some morbid achievement. By putting honest and deep faith in the niggling voice in my head, I told myself that what I really wanted was possible, and I only needed to trust myself to achieve it. I put myself back in the driver’s seat of my own life. It reminded me that I have my own back, and I’ll always show up for myself, even when things look bleak. That’s what lies behind this big trip - the reinforcement of self. It was a rather grandiose way of getting there, I must admit. But I’m a rather grandiose person. And sometimes big problems require big solutions.
The reality is, most of us can’t spend our whole lives travelling, myself included. It’s a huge privilege that I could do it all, grounded in many factors totally out of most of our control. What I did was ‘once in a lifetime’ worthy. But the emphasis in that sentence is ‘once’. I did it, it happened! I achieved something a younger version of me could only dream of. And I have truly never felt more grateful for anything in my life. My anxiety and depression have been soothed, they have been calmed. Maybe not forever, but for now. I have learnt how to manage them in the face of robberies, jellyfish stings and foreign hospital visits (yes, all of those happened), and I will hold on to that when the demands of life at home come to pick on me too.
I feel stronger now than I did when I left. Stronger and more sure. A one-way flight ticket didn’t solve my problems, but it showed me that I already have the tools to deal with them. It showed me that trusting myself to make the choices that align most with who I am is a powerful thing. And that if there is a little voice in your head telling you to make a change, you should listen to it. You never know where you might end up? :)
