Mmm no. Vacation is a way to escape yourself. Vacationing and traveling are not the same thing.

Traveling is a mindset, one that can be absolutely instrumental in discovering deeper truths to yourself. Traveling often puts you into new situations you’d never experience in the comfort of a familiar backdrop that force to you renegotiate who you are and how you relate to your environment. Traveling offers time with no set obligations, time to think and read and question and reflect. Traveling brings you regularly into contact with people who didn’t know you yesterday, allowing you to redefine your personality, see yourself through unfamiliar eyes, and express only the basic necessities for identifying yourself. To worry less about your identity because you don’t really have one, and free yourself up to just be as you are, as you happen to be in each moment.

But absolutely most importantly, decisions made when traveling (especially alone) are governed by necessity and feelings, and often nothing more. On a vacation, the mindset may be to relax, to sight-see, to hurry up and chill out because you won’t when you’ll be getting back. But that isn’t a traveling mindset. A traveling mindset is one of discovery, one of paying attention to nothing but your needs and your feelings and flowing with them. It can be cultivated while staying at home, but it is easier without the routine, without the memories, without the obligations, without the baggage (the emotional kind), and especially without the longer relationships around to clutter your view of yourself and reflect back to you things that may no longer serve you and identities that may no longer fit.