It’s early morning in Puerto Viejo, and I’m sitting on a threadbare couch in a hostel, cradling a cup of strong black coffee. The rain has just begun to fall in the jungle outside, and somewhere not too far away, howler monkeys greet the day with their low, resonant calls. This place is new to me—new sights, new smells, a language still clumsily rolling around on my tongue.
Yet, curiously, I feel at home–here and in myself.
People often ask me whether I am searching for something, whether I have found “myself,” as if the self were a misplaced item lurking somewhere under a palm tree. I never know how to answer that.
I felt like I knew myself when I was 18 on my way to university with a very rigid plan for my life. Then again, I felt like I found myself when I was 21, walking the oak-lined streets of Stellenbosch with Brontë’s and Sartres and Le Guins piled underneath my arms. And now, too, I have the sneaky suspicion that I am not, in fact, lost, despite living in the Costa Rican jungle with nothing to my name but a suitcase and a tattered passport.
If I measure the distance between the me I once was and the me I am becoming, I can’t ignore the space that’s opened up. Was I lost somewhere in the in-between, though? It didn’t feel like it. I felt wholly like myself even though I’m a completely different person now. I believe different things, move differently in the world, see less rigid lines and more undulating waves of possibility. Yet the people I were are not strangers to me. I think of them more as old friends. We grew apart, but I still remember them fondly.
Undoubtedly, a year from now, maybe even a month, I’ll have partially lost touch with this version of me. And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe it’s less of a finding and more of a letting go, releasing beliefs handed down without question, shame we’ve unknowingly carried, definitions of success that don’t fit our own shape. It’s a continual process of peeling back layers. In that sense, the self we’re searching for might indeed be “lost,” but only because it’s buried beneath the noise of everything we’ve inherited along the way.
Travel peels away the familiar. Without your usual routines and benchmarks—no job titles or school schedules or neighbourhoods that define you—it’s easier to see what remains. In a foreign place, each day is rich with tiny revelations: the colours of a local market, the gentle hush of dawn, the murmur of strangers sharing stories in a hostel common room. These moments can feel like an unveiling. You notice small flickers of truth about yourself that might have stayed hidden in the day-to-day busyness of home.
Yet, there’s no neat, once-and-for-all revelation. The self isn’t some immutable core at the bottom of a metaphorical sandpit. It’s more like a shifting tide, a state of constant uncovering, meeting, and flowing into new forms.
One day, you might be peeling an orange, and the late afternoon sunlight hits the kitchen counter in a certain way, or you’re smelling incense with your eyes closed in a strange new place, and the realisation will flutter in you that you are, in this moment, truly yourself. Slow down then. Welcome that person in. Because it’s only a moment. Soon enough you’ll be someone entirely different again.
I’ve come to see this process not as a perpetual losing or a single dramatic finding, but as something gentle and in between. We stumble, we learn, we become. Letting go of old beliefs or outgrown identities doesn’t mean those past selves didn’t matter; they were stepping stones on the way to where we stand now. Each self is an old friend, remembered with affection, recognised for the role it played.
If you find yourself travelling, don’t worry about a grand discovery. Instead, pause to feel your teeth sink into the sweetness of a cold watermelon, feel the drizzle on your skin, notice how your heart lifts when you smell the spices drifting from a corner café. That fleeting awareness might just be the closest we come to truly finding ourselves. And the next time we look in the mirror—whether in Costa Rica, India, Italy or Stellenbosch—we might be someone entirely new, carrying pieces of all that we were and everything we’re yet to become.
So, next time someone asks me if I’ve “found” myself on my travels, I might just smile and answer: I’m learning how to let go. Because maybe that’s what it really takes to catch a glimpse of who we truly are—accepting that we’re always in the midst of a constant becoming, flickering in and out of view.
Never lost, but always already on our way.
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