Out on my own again
It's been a while since, and it took me just a bit of time to feel like my old self.
Hello, I’m Emily, and this is a newsletter about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a rapidly changing world & our personal and collective place in it.
Greetings from Sandakan 👋,
In the days leading up to my trip—my first proper field reporting assignment since the pandemic—I was disconcerted to find that after everything I had done to make it happen (the preliminary research, the pitches, the grant application, etc.) I wasn’t absolutely raring to get going in the days leading up to it. Was that a creeping dread I felt? How strange! The leaving is usually exciting for me. I love the planning, the packing, the sheer anticipation of landing in a different place, of being able to see again with new eyes. What was going on?
I’d half forgotten that I’m always a little nervous on reporting trips, half afraid that my desk research will have led me astray somehow and I won’t find the shape of a good, or necessary, story. As someone who experiences a little social anxiety, I also worry about keeping up a journalistic rapport on immersive reporting trips, where I am spending all day or living with my sources or subjects. Had the trip purely been for travel’s sake, I likely would have been more relaxed.
But that aside, I think it also had to do with travelling alone again after having a partner in hand through the whole pandemic. It’s as if I felt a little rusty, not in terms of the logistics of moving around, but in claiming that deep-seated psychic comfort of just being in my own body, wherever I am, whatever my surroundings. When you’re travelling with company, there is always someone with whom you can share in your discomfort or worries, someone to whom you can deflect any apprehensions. When you’re on your own, you have to shoulder it all.