For as long as I can remember, I have always hated eating alone. As a travel writer, that has proven quite problematic. Though I’m often hitting the road with friends, a photographer, or another writer, I am not ashamed to admit that when I’m alone, I usually forgo dinner; often opting for room service instead. I am baffled when I talk to travelers who actively enjoy going out for dinner by themselves, leading me to believe eating alone is an odd thing to fear. It never has and probably never will be one of my life’s pleasures—and in therapy, I’ve finally uncovered why.
It all comes back to when I was a little girl (inner child shadow work for the win!). Around age six, I began moving all over the United States with my family as my parents pursued job promotions. Though I have an older sister, we’re five years apart, and after our second move, she went off to college. From that point forward, leaning on her to save me at school wasn’t an option. I still remember walking into the cafeteria in the states I moved to (Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Florida, to name a few) and looking around at the sea of people in the cafeteria. Nearly trembling, holding my lunch bag to my chest, I would look around for someone, anyone, to call me over to their table. Sometimes they did. But most of the time, especially during those initial few weeks, I ate in the bathroom.
How that manifests as a woman in my 30s is this: Breakfast on my own can be quite enjoyable, and I even find it pleasant to have an afternoon lunch at a sunny café. But eating alone at dinnertime? Forget about it. That’s the moment in the day when my cafeteria recall is at its most profound; when families, lovers, and friends are dining together, enjoying each other’s company and the ease that intimacy brings. Dining alone, in that scenario, brings up the feeling of being an outsider, of not belonging, of feeling like the other.
Recently, I was forced to face my fear of dining alone when my friend backed out of a six-week trip through Europe the night before we were set to take flight. We had a big itinerary—hiking the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain, attending my friend’s wedding outside of Rome, and island-hopping in the Balearics, to name a few—and as I boarded my flight from Mexico City to Paris, I realized traveling alone wasn’t my fear. It never had been. It was all those dinners that lay ahead—ones where I’d inevitably have to eat alone.