Karmen Wiid

I have this tattered notebook that I’ve been carrying around for a year. If you flip through its pages, you’ll see the change in my handwriting—how joy makes my vowels loop longer, how anger sharpens my t’s. Argentina through Brazil live in messy, carefree blue ink, thanks to a cheap ballpoint borrowed from a bar and never returned. Central America, so far, has been richer—glossy pages practically licked by the indulgence of a new pen, a luxury I allowed myself on a whim while wandering through a market in southern Costa Rica.

When strangers see this monstrosity of a notebook—one that (ironically) resembles an old Bible—they’re always curious. “What do you write about?” they ask. Crazy adventure stories? Protracted soliloquies on the beauty of the places I visit? Yes, sometimes. But mostly, I write about love.

Love born on the road. Love forged with fleeting friends. Love felt in brief, intense attachments to places that feel oddly like home. And yes, that other kind of love, the kind that makes you feel like you’ve reached nirvana one moment and leaves you empty and heaving the next.

Perhaps it’s cliché. Or perhaps that’s just another way to say profoundly universal.

To be honest, I’ve recently had an old wound scratched open. Violently.

Here, on this little slice of heaven that is Ometepe Island, I had barricaded my heart behind yoga and self-development workshops, drowned my sorrows in ceremonial-grade cacao, and talked about my feelings so much that, for the first time in my life, I was actually sick of it. I thought I was safe here. Then the past showed up—literally.

One peaceful Tuesday morning, the past— all six foot three inches of it—was standing right in front of me with a big backpack and a “missed me?” grin.

For seven days, the past haunted me. Demanded reconciliation one moment and left me waiting outside a supermarket with an unopened bottle of wine the next. I lived the highs and lows of an entire relationship compressed into a single week. At 9 a.m., I was crying into my coffee. At 11, I was playing chess with the past, making gooey eyes across the table. At midnight, we were racing each other around the island on motorcycles, but by the time the sun came up, we couldn’t even look at each other. Even my friends had whiplash.

I tell this story not to give the past more space in my mind than it has already undeservedly taken up, but because of what happened after. Because of what the people I love here so unequivocally told me when it all blew up in my face, leaving me feeling like I was restarting a healing process that had been almost complete.

On the night the past—along with its out-of-place pink sweaters and backward turned caps—left the island, my friends gathered my scattered pieces by the bonfire. The moon swayed above the lake, almost full. Howler monkeys echoed the cries of frustration I couldn’t voice myself. They held me like a child and repeated, over and over again:

“You can love yourself through this.”

You can love yourself through this.

At first, the words felt like a flimsy consolation prize, something people say when they don’t know how to fix things. But as they kept repeating it—steadily, like an anchor—I started to believe them.

Loving myself through this didn’t mean pretending I wasn’t hurt. It meant sitting in the mess of it without turning on myself. It meant letting my friends pull me back into the world, letting myself laugh even when the sadness still sat in my chest. It meant not apologising for how much it all mattered to me. Some wounds take longer to close than we expect. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe healing isn’t about forcing the pain out, but about making enough space for it that it doesn’t suffocate the rest of you.

I realised that I could, in fact, love myself through this. I could hold myself through the ache, through the grief, through the moments when it felt like I was back at the beginning. Love—real love—doesn’t abandon you just because someone else does.

I want to share some of the other raw, honest thoughts about love I’ve picked up from travellers along the way—the kind you won’t find in a podcast or a self-help book. It’s messy, real, passed between people who have loved and lost so intensely that it kept them wandering. Because if there’s one thing I know about solo travellers, it’s that we’re all either nursing a heartbreak, chasing something just out of reach, or trying to make sense of who we are outside of everything we left behind.

One sweat-slicked humid night in Nicaragua, the air thick with cheap rum and cigarette smoke, I was in line to order at the bar. I found myself next to a broad-shouldered, rough-edged man with a wolf tattoo on his shoulder and a ponytail that grazed the hem of his pants, the kind of guy you’d instinctively avoid in a dark alley. But when he spoke, his voice was soft, steady, kind. We were just two people killing time in line, yet somehow, within minutes, we were knee-deep in a conversation that felt like it had been waiting to happen.

He told me about a love that nearly destroyed him. A love that consumed, suffocated, made him forget where he ended and the other person began. And then he said it—the thing that stuck with me long after the night had unraveled into a blur of laughter and bad decisions.

“Attachment is not love. Needing someone is not love. When you can love fiercely but hold lightly, then you are loving authentically.”

I don’t know how we got there, how a casual queue for a drink turned into a moment of clarity I’d carry with me for months. But that’s the thing about travel, about the way it throws people together in these strange, fleeting collisions. Some conversations barely scratch the surface. Others feel like someone cracked open your ribs and dropped a truth straight into your chest.

Another friend, back in Costa Rica, offered a different perspective. We were sitting on the beach, feet buried in the cooling sand, watching the light fade into the Caribbean Sea.

She took a slow drag of her cigarette, eyes fixed on the horizon. There was a quietness to her that made you lean in when she finally spoke.

“We must become what we desire in others.”

She flicked the ash into the sand, then turned to me. “You want a surfer? Learn to surf yourself. You’re into people who play guitar and look like they could ruin your life? Buy a leather jacket and take some guitar lessons.”

She smirked, but her words had weight.

It made sense—how often had I been drawn to people not just for who they were, but for what they represented? The freedom, the passion, the effortless cool. But admiration can be a slippery thing. It can make us place people on pedestals they never asked for, or worse, make us feel like we’re missing something, like we need them to complete a version of ourselves we haven’t yet figured out how to embody.

But what if we didn’t need anyone to fill those gaps? What if we became the person we were searching for?

“Think about it,” she said, flicking her cigarette away before standing up and stretching. “It’s a lot easier to fall for someone authentically when you don’t think they have something you’re missing.”

This ties back to the idea of need that I mentioned earlier. When you’re not looking for someone to fill a gap in you, love stops being something desperate or heavy—it becomes freer, something you can hold lightly but still feel deeply. When we cultivate those qualities we admire within ourselves, we don’t just grow in self-respect—we also strip away the illusion that someone else has what we’re missing. And in doing so, we allow love to be real, not just projection.

However, after this week, there’s one conversation I think about more often than any other. I once met a woman on a long bus ride through the farmlands of Uruguay. I remember thinking that her presence felt like a deep exhale.  She was older than me, maybe in her late forties, and had the sort of quiet confidence that makes you sit up straighter just by being near her. We were strangers when we boarded, but something about long travel days turns strangers into confidants, so when the conversation meandered toward love, we leaned in.

She told me about a man she once loved, how they had met one heady night in Medellín, a city neither of them were from. They had built a life around late-night dancing and morning coffee and the easy rhythm of belonging. And then, one day, she left. Not because anything was wrong, not because the love had soured, but because she felt the world pulling at her again, telling her that it was time to go.

I must have looked at her with the kind of confusion only a twenty-something can have—because how could you walk away from something so good?

She smiled, a little sadly, and said:

“Sometimes, the bravest way to love someone is to leave them before you love them less.”

We’re conditioned to believe that love must always be clung to, fought for, salvaged at all costs. But maybe some love is meant to exist in its purest, most beautiful form, untouched by the slow decay of resentment or obligation. Some love is meant to be left while it’s still glowing.

At the time, I wasn’t sure I understood. But now, after enough goodbyes of my own, I think about her words often.

Because love is in the staying, yes. In the choosing. In the working-through. But love is also in the leaving. In knowing when to walk away so that the love remains untarnished, so that the memories stay soft instead of bitter.

And maybe that’s the hardest kind of love to accept—the one that doesn’t end in disaster, the one that doesn’t have a villain, the one that simply bows out gracefully, whispering, this was enough.

But sometimes, too, leaving is loving yourself.

Because love isn’t just about choosing someone else—it’s also about choosing yourself, even when it feels like the harder choice. It’s knowing when staying would mean shrinking, when holding on would mean losing parts of yourself you can’t afford to give away. It’s recognising that some doors need to close, not because the love wasn’t real, but because you refuse to keep walking further into something that will pull you away from yourself.

I write these conversations down, in part, to remind myself of them—because I still have so much left to practice—but also in the hope that somewhere out there, these words will reach someone who needs to hear them.

Because wherever we go, however far we run, love is always with us. Not just in the people we meet, the places that hold us for a while, or the stories we collect, but in the quiet, steady way we choose ourselves every day. And the best love—the most consistent, unwavering, forgiving love—is the kind we give ourselves.

So when the weight of it all feels unbearable, when the past shows up uninvited, when the ache lingers longer than you think it should—please remember, you can, in fact, love yourself through this.