Getting Over Your Fear of the Unknown

Wow, you’re brave.

Seriously? By yourself?

Aren’t you scared?

These are things I’m very accustomed to hearing.

It’s my goal to see the world, travelling to places like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and everywhere else in between, and for the most part I don’t mind going it alone. To some people, that makes me crazy.

Depending on how much energy I have to muster (because justifying your lifestyle gets pretty tedious when you do it this regularly), my response to these statements and questions tries to convince people that the world, in general, is a good place. All we’re afraid of is the unknown – which is natural. It’s a comfortable life floating on the familiar, avoiding other lifestyles we don’t know or understand, and especially avoiding the people who live them.

But who wants to glide on a comfortable life?

A few of you might still think I’m crazy for not wanting an easy ride. In truth, I’m the kind of person who thrives off making the unknown, known. I’m intrigued by our world and I want to try and understand it. If that means taking a risk – I’ll try to take it.

Many seasoned travellers will tell you that as they’ve met more people around the world on their adventures, it makes them realise that the majority of us are essentially the same in so many ways. We wake up, run our daily errands, eat, glug our morning coffee, say hello to the neighbours, cook a meal, and sleep at night. The conditions under which we do these things may differ, sometimes drastically, but stripped down to the bare minimum, the essentials are always present.

This is one of the most valuable realisations I’ve come to over the years. With this, the world seems far less scary, and much more known.

What is the unknown we’re afraid of?

People.

Few fear travelling because of all the landscapes they see, or skyscrapers in cities. We’re afraid because of the people we’ll meet who we can’t communicate with, people that might steal from us or hurt us, who we don’t have a shared culture with and therefore don’t quite understand.

For every one traveller who has a negative experience, where they find themselves in danger, there are hundreds or thousands who remain safe. Those are the odds, and this is the reality – people are generally good. In every corner of the globe.

Kids are kids – cute and cheeky – almost everywhere. Young boy in the Middle East

This subject is always difficult to talk about because you can only ever approach it in a general sense. There are always exceptions. There are people who want to do you wrong. That said, just as there are good people everywhere, bad people can be found anywhere as well. People often presume that their familiar home is the safest place on Earth, but that’s not always true. Familiar doesn’t always mean safe, just as different doesn’t always mean dangerous.

Just because a place is far from where you call home, doesn’t automatically make it a risky place to travel to. Avoid the presumption that because people live in a different way to you, they are a threat. Don’t let the distinction between different and dangerous disappear – they are not the same and it’s an important lesson to learn when losing fear in order to travel.

My usual response to the above questions are based on these ideas, but in all honesty, that response is also frequently followed up with a pinch of ‘But yes, of course I’m scared.’

After all, I’m a single girl travelling the world alone – I’d be worried if I wasn’t scared at all.

I don’t feel fear strongly very often, but I do feel anxiety when I make giant leaps with travel. I recently just moved to Thailand (kept that one quiet, didn’t I?!), a country to which, until a few days ago, I’d never been. I felt queasy for most of the journey here.

A few paragraphs ago, I may have been talking like a superhero who’s afraid of nothing, but I’m far from it. I’m a human being who shares the same worries about the unknown as much as anyone reading this.

The difference is that I don’t let those worries get in the way.

It’s not unusual to be scared, and I can tell you that even the most seemingly fearless globetrotter is not in fact fearless at all. They are, we are, all just that tiny bit terrified deep down, at least.

The ultimate venture into the abyss

How do we travel, even with fear?

As travellers we recognise that fear and let it propel us.

We thrive on the moments that make our hearts race.

We travel in the face of fear.

And it’s good to feel fear sometimes. It keeps you focused and aware of the dangers around you. Your body is an incredibly sensitive tool that picks up on your fears before you’re even conscious of them, so it’s important to listen to it. Knowing that you’re not invincible is a valuable quality to possess when you travel. Having the wisdom to recognise a bad situation and remove yourself from it by tuning in to your rational and sense of fear is an essential quality for an explorer.

You could read dozens of articles like this across the web, but there would still be no amount of advice I, or anyone else, could give you more valuable than to make the decision to experience it for yourself. Before you travel, it’s natural to see the world as a series of disjointed borders, each section with its own threats. As I’ve seen more of the world, I’ve come to appreciate our planet as a shared environment, which helps me battle my own personal fear in visiting new places.

We have our differences with other countries and continents, but broken down into personal stories, from one person to the next, we are the same.

When will you turn your fear into fortitude?

Standing on the edge of Europe (despite my serious fear of cliffs and heights!)