Sometimes you’ve just gotta look at your life, look at your dreams collecting dust on your bookshelf like those books by that one poet nobody bothers to check out anymore, and say, “fuck it, I’ll go solo.” Say it out loud. Say it with your chest. Say it even if your voice shakes a little, because that shake is just fear getting rattled on its way out of your body.

One of the greatest tragedies I see is how alive folks are while living like they’re waiting for permission to start their lives. Waiting for someone to get their money right, get their schedule right, get their courage right. Waiting for a cousin who swore they’d renew their passport in time but somehow couldn’t peel themselves off the couch. Waiting for a friend who’s been telling you since 2014 they’re “down for anything,” yet the moment you send flight prices, they go ghost like they never existed to begin with.

We gotta stop postponing joy because other people can’t get their shit together.

Let me be the one to tell you: you deserve the trip anyway. You deserve the sunrise on the other side of the world, the meal that tastes like it rewired your whole nervous system, the stranger whose laugh shakes something loose inside you. You deserve the version of yourself that only shows up when you leave home behind. And if the people you love can’t make it, bless them, but go anyway.

Because here’s the truth: the world is full of people waiting for someone like you to show up. Not the group. Not the crew. You. The version of yourself that wanders into a bar alone and walks out with three new friends from Brazil, one from Seoul, and an 78-year-old woman from Trinidad who insists you call her Auntie Bev from now on. The version that sits on a long train ride and ends up in conversation with a retired sailor who teaches you more about love in two hours than all your exes combined. The version that steps into a place with no familiar faces and realizes that loneliness and freedom sometimes share the same doorway, and on the other side is possibility.

But too many of us are still showing up to the storytelling circles talking about, “I was supposed to go there, but…”

Stop it. We don’t want to hear that anymore. Nobody wants to sit through another saga of almosts, near-misses, or “my friend said.” We want stories with teeth. Stories that smell like airplane cabins, creek water, and foreign soil. Stories with receipts, not regrets.

Tell me how you exhausted every possibility of joy in Peru. Tell me how you climbed that mountain even though your legs trembled like a newborn deer, and when you reached the top, you cried. Not because it was hard, but because you finally did something for you without waiting for the committee vote of your group chat.

Tell me how you fell in love in Jamaica. Not with a Jamaican. No, that would’ve been too predictable. Tell me how you found yourself liming by the water with a Ghanaian who smiled like trouble and kissed like memory. Tell me how you left that love right there on the island because both of you knew it wouldn’t survive in the real world. Some loves are meant for vacation legs and moonlit patios only. Let the church say amen?

Tell me how you didn’t spend even one night in that expensive hotel you booked because you ended up following three locals from a KFC in a Paris alley to a chateau up the road where they were having a bonfire and passing bottles like communion. Tell me how you danced barefoot until sunrise and woke up with ash on your clothes, a head of hair that smelled like hickory or birch or field maple, and new laughter lines around your mouth. Tell me how you said yes to a night you couldn’t have scripted if you tried.

This is what happens when you stop waiting for other people to be ready.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: every time you say, “I’ll wait,” a tiny part of your life shrinks. Your dreams get smaller. Your world gets flatter. And you start rehearsing excuses instead of adventures. You become the person who says, “I could’ve gone,” instead of the person who went. And I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in being remembered as the person who lived a damn near life.

Fear will try you. Fear always does. Fear will show up like, “But what if something goes wrong?” And honestly, something might. You might get lost. You might mispronounce a word so badly someone laughs for five whole minutes. You might eat something your stomach wasn’t ready for and end up on the toilet for the first three days. You might cry from loneliness your first night. You might even get homesick.

But you’ll also get brave.You’ll learn to read maps and people’s faces. You’ll learn when to say yes and when to back away slowly. You’ll learn to trust your instincts. Your resilience will show up like, “Look at you, out here surviving and shit.” You will become the kind of person who belongs anywhere.

And here’s the secret every solo traveler eventually figures out: you’re never really alone. Not unless you want to be. Humanity has a way of gathering around people who step into the world with openness. You smile at someone, they smile back in the same language. You ask for directions, and suddenly someone’s walking you half a mile just to show you the right spot. You sit down with a cup of something warm, and a stranger asks where you’re from, and before you know it, you’re swapping stories about all the people you didn’t wait for.

So go. Please, for the love of your own life, go. Book the flight. Pack the bag. Say “fuck it, I’ll go solo,” and walk into a world that’s been checking its watch waiting for you to show up.

And when you come back, come back loud. Come back with stories that interrupt people’s sentences. Come back with sand in your shoes and a new light behind your eyes.

Stop waiting for other people to start your life.