Two weeks into my solo pilgrimage through France, I have eaten dinner alone in a restaurant exactly three times.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that.
Before I left home, I imagined myself slipping easily into French life. I pictured candlelit bistros, little tables spilling onto cobblestone streets, glasses of wine beside handwritten menus, and evenings spent watching the world pass while I lingered over dinner alone.
Instead, most days around six o’clock, I go home.
I close the door of my rental flat, dim the lights, make myself something gluten-free in the kitchen, and retreat into a quiet little world where nothing unexpected is required of me. And today, I’ve been wondering what that says about all the courage and self-trust I thought I’d spent the last seven years building.
Solo Travel After 50 Isn’t Always Brave and Beautiful
Today I’m sitting in a café at 2:00 pm called La Maison de La Sirène in Avranches after visiting the ruins of the chateau and wandering through the Scriptorial Museum, where medieval manuscripts created by monks at the Abbaye Mont St-Michel are displayed. I dressed well today, and I’m wearing big, bold earrings that keep drawing looks from people I pass.
I love bold earrings.
From the outside, I probably look like a woman entirely comfortable taking up space in the world. Inside, though, I still feel the fried edges of yesterday.
Yesterday I barely left the couch. After almost two weeks of navigating unfamiliar cities, unfamiliar roads, unfamiliar beds, unfamiliar kitchens, unfamiliar customs and a language I speak minimally, something in me simply said enough.
So I read and I watched TV in my pajamas. I let the world happen without me for the day.
There have been plenty of other less-than-glamorous moments on this pilgrimage, too. I have spent far too much time trying to decipher French appliances that apparently require either an engineering degree or direct intervention from God.
I accidentally attempted to wash my clothes in a dryer. I spent an hour “cooking” a chicken, rice and potato casserole in an oven, only to discover an hour later that the entire thing was still cold and raw.
I stood baffled in front of a washing machine while the timer flashed at me, wondering whether it had begun some mysterious European laundering ritual or was simply mocking me.
There have been door locks I couldn’t figure out, grocery stores where my internet stopped working precisely when I needed it, parking garages, toll roads, gas pumps, spiral staircases, strange bathrooms, and conversations in which my carefully practiced French greetings were answered by a rapid stream of words I could not remotely understand.
For an embarrassing first few days, I also kept saying “gratias.”
In France.
I am happy to report that we have moved beyond that phase… Mostly.
The Extraordinary Days Are Still Part of the Story
And still, woven through all of this ridiculousness, there have been extraordinary days. Rouen captured me almost immediately.
I wandered through ancient streets beneath half-timbered buildings that seemed to lean toward one another like old friends. I sat beneath church spires drinking cider, walked into the Church of Saint-Maclou and the Cathedral Notre-Dame of Rouen, and felt the weight of centuries around me.
I stood among castle ruins. I drove alone through Normandy, watched the Seine move quietly below Château Gaillard, and sat on café terraces with my laptop while conversations drifted around me in French and pigeons repeatedly attempted to assassinate my lunch.
For brief stretches, I forgot I was a visitor at all. I was simply there, and something surprising happened on those days.
I remembered I trusted myself.
Without another person beside me to consult or reassure or accommodate, decisions often became strangely simple. Turn here. Park there. Go inside. Leave. Eat. Rest. Try again tomorrow.
I began to understand that solitude hadn’t created competence in me. It had revealed it.
That realization felt enormous. But perhaps I made the mistake of thinking that because I had rediscovered this self-trust, everything else should become easy.
It hasn’t.
Why Eating Alone in France Still Intimidates Me
Restaurants, for instance, still intimidate me. It isn’t simply the act of eating alone because I’m actually very comfortable being alone in public.
What unnerves me is everything surrounding the meal. Calling ahead for a reservation without a phone that can make local calls, figuring out the menu around my gluten sensitivity, sitting between two couples with their tiny bistro tables nine inches away on either side of mine, the noise of the crowds (because apparently everyone in the city eats out for dinner every night of the week), and knowing that dinner may mean two hours of being cycled through several courses on someone else’s timeline.
All of this happens while I’m trying to understand what the waiter is saying and hoping I don’t accidentally agree to an entire fish, dead eyes and all. By evening, after navigating the world all day, the thought of doing this one more thing often feels unbearable.
So I go home.
Part of me worries that I’m missing France because of it. I find myself doing something similar at lunch, avoiding the loud crowds but finding space and quiet in the mid-afternoon brasseries where more tables are free and there’s less pressure to perform. And only recently have I become comfortable slipping into a pâtisserie for a sandwich or snack on my walks between one grand monument and the next.
Every small thing seems to require repetition before my nervous system decides, “Oh. We know how to do this now. No surprises here.”
Healing Does Not Mean Having No Limits
Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me. For most of the last seven years since my Dark Night of the Soul, I have lived a very quiet life.
My healing journey happened largely at home. There, I created an environment in which I finally felt deeply safe.
I controlled the noise, the lighting, what I ate, when I slept, who entered my space, and how much stimulation reached me. Within that sanctuary of safety, solitude, silence, and stillness, something beautiful grew. I healed lifelong traumas, learned to love myself, and found gentleness for myself and others.
I became grounded, calmer, more peaceful, and more comfortable in my own skin than I had ever been before. Over the past year especially, with my self-love journey largely behind me, I have felt an ease within myself that I once would have thought impossible.
Perhaps, without realizing it, I expected to pack that ease neatly into my suitcase and bring it to France.
I thought healing meant the woman who emerged from those seven years would now simply breeze through the world.
She would be confident.
She would be unflappable.
And she would be stylish (naturally).
She would order dinner in terrible French and laugh when she got it wrong. She would sit alone in crowded restaurants without a flicker of overwhelm, drive foreign roads without gripping the steering wheel, and sleep beautifully every night.
She would, apparently, transcend having a nervous system altogether.
France has had other ideas.
What Sleep Deprivation Has Taught Me About Travel
I’ve struggled with insomnia much of my life but I managed to ween myself off sleep medication in April after over a decade of use. In my quiet, controlled world back home, I learned to sleep passably again.
In France, I haven’t been sleeping. My eyes feel permanently scratchy, and my shoulders keep creeping toward my ears. My resilience is fraying.
Some days I feel simultaneously exhausted and wired, as though my body has forgotten how to turn itself off. After trying for months to sleep without medication, I decided this morning, after the second sleepless night in a row, to return to Trazodone for now because I don’t want lack of sleep to become the thing that defines this pilgrimage.
That decision bothers me more than I expected. But so did yesterday’s collapse onto the couch, and so does choosing my apartment over a restaurant.
Because somewhere inside me, an old voice has been keeping score.
Am I courageous or not courageous?
Am I independent or not independent?
Am I healed or not healed?
Perhaps that is what this pilgrimage is actually asking me to examine.
Maybe Self-Love Means Letting Go of the Scorecard
Maybe self-love was never supposed to become another standard I have to meet. Maybe healing doesn’t mean I stop having limits, and confidence doesn’t mean unfamiliar things stop feeling overwhelming.
I think I believed that after everything I had survived and everything I had healed, courage would feel expansive, free, and effortless.
And sometimes it has.
There have been moments here when I have walked through a medieval city alone and felt almost incandescent with freedom. But courage has looked different on other days.
Sometimes courage has looked like pulling into an unfamiliar parking garage when every part of me wanted to keep driving. Sometimes it has looked like speaking the limited French I know even though I’m fairly certain the response will contain thirty words I don’t.
Sometimes it has looked like sitting alone on a café terrace while my shoulders are tight and reminding myself that nobody is actually paying much attention to me. Sometimes it has looked like deciding not to visit another abbey because my feet hurt and I am tired.
Sometimes it has looked like going back to my apartment at six o’clock and making dinner. And yesterday, courage looked like doing almost nothing at all.
What Courage Really Looks Like in Solo Travel
Today, though, I got up again. I showered, got dressed, put on my big earrings, walked into Avranches, wandered through the ruins of a thousand-year-old Norman fortress, stood in front of manuscripts created by monks centuries ago, and then came into this little café and opened my laptop.
Nothing about me feels especially heroic today. But maybe that is exactly what I needed to learn.
We tend to imagine courage at its most cinematic: the plane ticket, the passport, the woman standing alone on a windswept coast somewhere far from home. We rarely talk about the nervous system that comes along for the trip.
We don’t see the grocery store confusion, the sleepless nights, the meals quietly eaten back at the apartment, or the afternoon spent on a couch wondering why the person who felt so capable yesterday suddenly feels so small. Perhaps women need to hear about those parts too.
Because if we wait until we are fearless before we go, many of us will never go. If we believe courage means never retreating, never struggling, and never getting overwhelmed, we may mistake our humanity for failure.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
Self-Trust Doesn’t Always Look Like Fearlessness
I came to France partly because I wanted to know what it would feel like to trust myself in the world again. I think I expected that trust to announce itself dramatically.
Instead, it has been quieter.
It says that I can figure things out. It reminds me that I can leave if I want to, that I can rest, and that I can try again tomorrow.
It tells me I don’t have to prove anything.
Most importantly, it reminds me that I do not have to abandon myself in order to have the adventure.
That last one matters.
For years, healing meant learning not to abandon myself for other people. Maybe this pilgrimage is teaching me not to abandon myself for an idealized version of who I thought I should become either.
The woman who wants the castle is me. The woman who wants the café is me.
The woman who wants to speak French is me. The woman who occasionally wants to hide in a dark apartment and watch television is also me.
I don’t think one cancels out the others.
Maybe courage isn’t the woman who never retreats. Maybe courage is the woman who knows when she needs to, and trusts herself enough to come back out and try again.
The Pilgrimage Is Not a Performance
Tomorrow I may be tired. I may eat dinner at home again, mispronounce something, get lost, or have another magnificent day.
More likely, I’ll have some strange combination of all of it.
But I’m beginning to think this is what a pilgrimage actually is. Not a demonstration of who you have become, but a meeting with who you are. Again and again, wherever she happens to be.
Today, she is sitting in a small café in Avranches, wearing very large earrings. And she is still here.
Not fearless. Not perfectly at ease. But still willing to meet herself wherever she is, and to trust that tomorrow she can step into the world again.
