I started traveling alone in my twenties, with small weekend trips around Florida, where I was working as a journalist. At first, I simply wanted to see new places. But I quickly learned that solo travel is about something much bigger.

Traveling alone has shown me how much of the world opens up when you’re willing to go on your own. Women are given plenty of reasons not to travel: a place is too far away, too unfamiliar, too difficult or dangerous to navigate alone. But some of my most meaningful experiences have come from going anyway, trusting myself to figure things out and discovering places I might never have seen if I’d waited for someone else to come with me.

Over the years, my travels have taken me across the world: to tiny islands in Thailand, on walking safaris in South Africa, into the Peruvian Amazon, along the coast of Australia and across the Scottish Highlands. I’ve learned that I’m often happiest when I can discover a place beyond the headlines and social media posts that often define it from afar.

My background as a journalist shapes the way I travel, too. I’m interested in sharing stories about people and how they live and what makes a place distinctly its own. Photography has become another way to tell those stories, capturing the landscapes, wildlife and small details that give a place its character. I want to understand how other people live, what matters to them, and what I might learn by paying attention. Some of my most enduring travel memories aren’t landmarks at all, but conversations, unexpected encounters and moments of generosity from people I might otherwise have never met.

Solo travel has made me more confident and independent. But more than anything, it reminds me that there is no single way to live, and that sometimes the best reason to go is to see how the world looks from somewhere you’ve never stood before.