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.
From my first backpacking trip to Latin America after graduating from university more than a decade ago, I have often travelled alone. For a while, I was with someone who wasn’t inclined or able to travel much, and then I was on my own for several years, so travelling independently became the natural—and honestly, very rewarding—mode for me.
When I met W.C., very serendipitously, three years ago at a cafe in Berlin, it was during a solo extension of a trip that I had begun with a close friend, and I was still lugging my backpack from hostel to hostel, trying to stretch my budget as far as it could go in order to stay longer. I made plans only as far as one or two days ahead because I wanted to be free to follow my whims, but this meant I had to move every couple of days when beds ran out where I was staying.
The conversations W.C. and I started in Berlin intensified when I travelled to other places and when I returned home, and months later, we became, I guess, a thing. Covid hit shortly after, but we managed to stay together despite how new we were to each other when we were forced into a long-distance relationship for the first year of the pandemic: Germany would have let me in, but Malaysia, my country, wouldn’t let me out, nor would it let anyone in. When we finally succeeded in reuniting in Berlin after some truly tedious—Kafkaesque, really—paperwork, we were reluctant to chance being separated again by the vagaries of border controls.
For about a year and a half, we went everywhere together: his country, a third country, my country. Some days, we would leave our lodgings at separate times and take different paths into whatever city we were in, before meeting again at the end of the day, but those days—still in the thickets of the pandemic—were rare enough that they felt novel, slightly laced with the intentionality of an excursion. Then, this autumn, we had to go our separate ways for a while: for our individual pursuits, for family and friends, for the places we call home.
The day after I landed in Sabah last week under the cover of darkened skies, I was still steeped in melancholy, feeling alone and cast away from everyone I know and love and want to love more, though at the same time, I was gratified to find that simply the thought of W.C.—just knowing he was existing somewhere else, no matter how far away—made me feel like I would always have an anchor back to where I belong, no matter how far I wandered. How had I gone off on my own all this time before to foreign, remote places and dwelled among perpetual strangers without this comfort, yet felt perfectly content? (Family and friends, of course, but a partner amplifies this.) I wanted that feeling back; I want never to lose it.
I guess the hotel room I had initially booked, located midway between the airport and the central commercial area and which didn’t afford even a glimpse of the sea in what was a small coastal city, probably hadn’t helped. I had booked it upon a friend’s recommendation and hadn’t bothered to look up other options in my pre-trip scramble. It felt too sealed up, too hushed, too business-like. It almost felt like its own little island—you had to order a Grab to get somewhere else.
So I did, and headed downtown. And there I walked, nowhere in particular: a coffee here, a meal there, sidestepping vague solicitations, smiling politely but moving swiftly on. It’s the simplest thing, walking, and stride by stride, my feet felt surer and my body more taut, and I felt that familiar confidence return. When I spoke to W.C. on the phone that night I told him, not without a little elation, “I went walking in the streets, and I felt like my old self again.”
Days later, returning to the city after having been further habituated by my trip to the mangroves, I moved to a different hotel: right where the waves break against concrete (and where schools of plastic trash are, unfortunately, accumulating), near the stinking central fish market. The room is also clean and well-equipped, but the furnishings are dinkier—a Spider-Man: Far from Home poster is stuck above the bed—and the windows don’t completely shut so when a big wind comes it whistles so violently through the gaps it sounds like the mother of all storms has come to claim the place.
I realize again that I prefer this porousness, this reminder of other people and goings-on playing out simultaneously outside—the live music that kept me up, the morning chatter that stirred me from sleep—even if I am not part of it, even if I don’t always have the desire to be part of it.
For now, from the mangroves, two postcards:
I loved being in the thick of these root-y trees ❤️
P.S. I never did send out my last letter—an update of what I’ve been up to during the two months I went quiet here. If you’re interested, catch up here.
