Nobody Knew My Name

I'm going to say this directly right now. You didn't find a truer self on that trip that you keep thinking about. You built one. It may feel like it was an accident, but it actually happened on purpose.

And it actually happens somewhere between your trip to the airport and the second or third stranger who asked for your name that week. And here's the hot take and the part nobody wants to say out loud: you probably liked that version of yourself more than the one you went home to.

I used to think that meant something good. I'm less sure now. My name is Kiara, and I'm your host of Put the Guidebook Down.

Travel changes you is the most repeated sentence in the entire travel category. And I'm sure you've seen it everywhere, from social media to the cheesy travel quote printed on those throw pillows you probably saw in Home Goods last week. However, it's never once been asked to show its work. You should be asking: travel changes you into what? And more importantly, changed by what, exactly?

Here's my answer, and it's less romantic than the version we usually get sold. You don't become more you abroad, and you don't become this whole new person that didn't exist before the trip. You're just becoming less observed and put into different situations and circumstances that bring out parts of you that already existed.

And it's very easy to confuse them with each other. At home, almost everything about who you are is being held in place by people who've already decided who you are, and by the routine you've shaped for yourself: coworkers, family, friends, the version of you from ten years ago that your college friends still expect to show up.

Abroad, none of that scaffolding exists. You're in the unknown, with a fresh blank page waiting for you to write your story. So what shows up isn't some deeper, realer self waiting to be unlocked. It's whoever you can build with no one around to correct you, or to call out that you're acting differently than how you usually do — when in reality, that was always you. That's not discovery. That's construction.

And there are three separate, well-studied psychological mechanisms behind why that construction happens, why it feels so good at first, and why it can quietly turn into one of the loneliest experiences you'll have.

I didn't realize this until I returned home from my years living abroad, with plenty of time to reflect on my new stories and versions of me. I most certainly didn't understand these concepts until I took a trip that I still think about more than some of my other ones — not because it was one of the best ones, because it wasn't, but because it's one of the trips that put all three of these psychological frameworks on display, back to back, in the space of three to four weeks.

The first psychological framework we're going to cover today is self-expansion theory. Why reinvention feels good before it feels like anything else. There's a well-established idea in relationship psychology, developed by researchers Arthur and Elaine Aron, called self-expansion theory. The core claim is simple: people are motivated to grow their sense of self by taking in new experiences, new perspectives, and new relationships. Novelty isn't just enjoyable, it functions as a kind of growth mechanism, and the research shows it's one of the most consistent drivers of excitement in both new relationships and new experiences generally.

That's the part nobody warns you about when they say you'll meet so many people traveling. They're right, and it feels incredible, because you're not just meeting people, you're expanding rapidly, over and over again, in a way that almost never happens once you're settled into an established life. For some it can be intimidating if you're more shy or introverted. It can be socially draining, having to constantly start over with every new person you cross paths with. However, it can also lead to unplanned connections and conversations that you end up remembering the most. It's the true unknown.

This is exactly what the first stretch of a Scandinavian tour I took felt like. In 2022, I'd just landed in Denmark, still early into my living abroad in Moldova, and I had joined a Spanish and English-speaking tour group. After solo traveling around Copenhagen for several days, catching up with friends from different threads of my life, this was my first holiday season abroad by myself, and I didn't want to be alone.

On this tour, there were a lot of couples, a lot of families, and only a handful of us solo travelers. And this one was a unique tour because people joined and left at different stops, so the group itself kept changing and evolving throughout the entire duration of the trip, which meant I was introducing myself constantly, over and over, to new people: new versions of "so where are you from, what do you do."

The interesting trend I saw is my story grew and evolved as I slowly began to step out of my shell and try new things as we moved through the different cities and countries of Scandinavia. It was my first time solo traveling, and I was watching new layers of myself unfold as I learned more about the world we lived in. By the logic of self-expansion theory, through the tour I was growing my self-identity and broadening my perspectives. Looking back on all of it, my real self-expansion started the minute I accepted my Fulbright to Moldova, but this trip to Scandinavia was another layer of it, because it was my first solo trip. I was learning new things and growing without my awareness.

The next framework we're going to cover is construal level theory. Why the self that shows up abroad feels more true. This second concept explains something a little different: not why connections feel exciting, but why you start to feel like a different, often better version of yourself. Cue the Eat Pray Love concept, as many of us have heard about or may know, and I've spoken about this in a previous episode.

This concept, construal level theory, was developed by psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman. The main theme of the theory is that the more psychologically distant something is from you, the more abstractly and idealistically you tend to think about it, and that shapes our mental representation, the foundation for understanding decision-making, self-control, and persuasion.

Up close, you think in specific situational terms, such as deadlines, routines, the small daily compromises that make up an ordinary Tuesday. However, at a distance, that specificity falls away, and what's left looks more like who you want to be than who your context has been quietly shaping you into, without your awareness. That's the entire mechanism behind "I felt more like myself abroad," a sentence I've said, and you've probably said too. It's not that you found a truer self waiting underneath. It's that distance strips away the situational detail that normally keeps you tethered to a narrower version of yourself.

On that tour, there was no job title, no established friend group already deciding who I was allowed to be that week. What surfaced instead was more idealized, more unfiltered — a version of myself where I wasn't defined by the societal labels that a resume would try to define you by, or how to explain your life pathway. It just felt more like discovery, and it wasn't. It was closer to construction. It felt more freeing to define myself how I wanted to define, with no one there to say "that's not what your resume says."

And this leads into the third framework: identity process theory. Why the same trip that felt freeing could also break you a little. This third concept is the one that actually explains the part of the story that's a little less upbeat, and one that social media influencers don't cover. It's more real.

It's called identity process theory, developed by psychologist Glynis Breakwell. It explains the core process of identity change: identity assimilation, fitting new experiences or changes into existing self-views without changing the core itself; identity accommodation, altering one's self-concept and beliefs to adjust to new information or major life changes; and identity balance, maintaining a steady, positive view of yourself while being flexible enough to change when necessary.

The theory holds that identity is regulated by core principles — things like self-esteem, continuity, and a stable sense of who you are — and when something disrupts those principles, a person experiences what Breakwell calls identity threat. Her research also documents specific ways people cope with that threat, and one of the most common is something she names directly: self-isolation.

This trip to Scandinavia happened to fall over Christmas, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day — my first major holidays away from home ever. My colleagues in Moldova already had plans, most involving paying a $2,000 round-trip plane ticket to go home to the States for the holidays, which I couldn't afford. That's what led me to book this group trip, ironically cheaper than a trip back home, so I wouldn't be entirely alone, even if it meant being surrounded by strangers instead of being alone.

Throughout Scandinavia, most businesses were closed or running on a skeleton schedule. The couples and families on the tour had each other for the holiday celebrations, while we solo travelers didn't have anyone but the other solo travelers to talk to, and if you didn't like some of them, you were still stuck in that group together.

And that's exactly when the trip stopped being about reinvention and started being about how alone you can feel while surrounded by people who are being friendly to you, while somewhat still holding onto that feeling of being alone. If you've heard my previous episode on the loneliness paradox, this situation is slightly related, but it's more related to identity process theory.

Going back to the story, I didn't have a name for what I did next at the time. I pulled back in some moments when the celebrations and the dates of the holidays were near or on the day of. I let the loneliness sit instead of reaching out to the other solo travelers to create a space where, as a group, we could celebrate the holidays together and avoid the loneliness. That's not a personal flaw I'm confessing to. It's a documented, common coping response to identity threat.

Put all three together, and here's what they explain that no single one of them can on its own: the excitement of constant reinvention, self-expansion; the feeling that the self doing the reinventing was somehow truer, construal level; and the isolation that followed, when the same lack of scaffolding that enabled all of it — no one checking in on me during some of those holiday seasons — is identity threat and coping. Three different mechanisms, one trip, the same absence of our normal social scaffolding back home driving all three, pointing toward this feeling of "travel changed me and I found my true self."

So here's the uncomfortable question I couldn't avoid once I actually sat with the trip instead of just retelling the fun parts of it. Because many travel influencers, and just humans in general, like to only tell the positives of an experience rather than the negatives: if the version of me that showed up when no one knew my name felt truer, what does that actually say about the version of me that goes home?

Because the easy story is that the abroad self is the real one, the authentic one, the one worth chasing. But that's not quite right either. The abroad self wasn't more real. It was unanchored. It had no one checking in enough to notice if I disappeared into a hard week alone over the holidays, or if I wasn't acting how I normally would by my college or work standards.

The same absence that let me try on a freer version of myself is the absence that left me with no one to sit with on New Year's Eve, leaving me to find a solution to the loneliness by immersing in the crowd, ignoring the feeling or reflection that was surfacing. Reinvention and isolation turned out to be the same door. You don't get to walk through one without the other standing right behind it.

That doesn't mean the trip wasn't worth it. It means "travel lets you become who you really are" is a half sentence being sold as a whole idea. The other half is that it also removes the people who would have tried to bring you back to your normal self, the one you created in your framework back home. But it also removes the people who would have noticed if the new version of yourself needed help. This is the whole side of the travel industry we're missing content about, and this is why we're talking about it.

So I'm not going to tell you to go find yourself somewhere no one knows your name. That version of you is already there, hidden deep under layers of societal norms and people unknowingly pushing you into your daily framework and routine. Here's what I'd actually ask you to sit with instead: think of a version of yourself that only existed somewhere far from home, and be honest about both halves of it. What it let you become, and how that version of you came to the surface. What experience brought it out, what were you doing, and how would you find that pathway back?

This is Put the Guidebook Down. Guidebooks tell you where to go. We're here for why you went. Thank you so much, everyone. Bye.