Just Girlie Things - Existential Crisis and a Solo Road Trip (Personal Essay)

In the summer of 2023, I embarked on yet another solo travel trip not realising the impression this one would imprint on me. Not to sound cliche but I’m very much a person who would often be described as wanderlust and I have been taking solo trips since I was 17, learning new things about myself at every turn. However, last summer I took a solo road trip for almost 2 weeks which I learnt is a new level of independence and in turn at moments loneliness. A road trip to certain parts of Northern Ireland is something I had wanted to do for a long time. 

 As a kid we often spent our summers in the Republic of Ireland but I had never really explored Northern Ireland and always wanted to. So last summer I decided to jampack my 6 weeks off work in the way that I always do this included a family trip, a trip with a friend to Arisaig and a cycle trip with my cousin. What I didn’t realise whilst in the midst of booking all of these future memories is that I would have a lot to unpack from the 6 months but really more like the year I had just had. 

 I left for my first trip immediately after I finished work for the summer on the exact same day and threw myself into enjoying time with friends and pushing away any unresolved emotions of the past working year. So when I finally sat in my car to set off to Northern Ireland, the moment of silence before the radio began was the first moment I felt a little part of the heavy weight of what I had been through to start to lift. For a little context, the past year had been my first year trying to find jobs alone and I went through a lot mentally in the job seeking process and in the jobs I had as they were particularly emotionally demanding. 

 I set off to Cairnryan for a mere two hour sleep in a bed before hopping on the ferry across to Belfast, in a moment of off brand luxury I booked a room for the ferry so that I could have an additional couple of hours of sleep (a great decision on my part). I arrived in Belfast still very much sleep deprived and regretted my past decisions slightly as I realised I couldn’t check into my airbnb for hours yet. I made the decision to drive to Derry whilst I was still somewhat awake rather than exploring Belfast. Derry is somewhere that came onto my radar when like many Derry Girls appeared on my screen and brought me many hours of great entertainment.

 A few hours into exploring Derry it became muggy which is a weather I never enjoy, especially not when running on essentially four hours of broken sleep and more caffeine than a girl with diagnosed anxiety should ever consume. It is at this moment I made a decision that many people question when I tell this story. I decided that the cinema would be a great place to go to past the time, this is not the decision in question. They had Barbie or Oppenheimer playing and I had already seen Barbie so made the interesting and somewhat if not very questionable choice of watching Oppenheimer - which for those of you who don’t know is a 3 hour long film about the atomic bomb - on as I said before 4 hours tops of broken sleep and a lot of caffeine, what could possibly go wrong? Now this next part is in a way a compliment to those involved in Oppenheimer that it was able to have such a profound effect but also a wakeup call to myself that I’ve always been someone who gets taken away emotionally by art and I have to be smart about what I watch when. 

 Naturally after leaving Oppenheimer I had what can only be described as a true existential crisis, not my first but definitely my most intense in what had been my 26 years of life at that point. The quarter life crisis was very much in full swing, this was perhaps one of the defining moments in my life where I realised that this trip was going to be a whole lot of healing. A solo road trip is possibly one of the most isolating trips you could do and yet I would do it all over again. To sit alone with my own thoughts is something I often find difficult to do and I’m sure is something that resonates with many people in my generation. The ability to avoid your own thoughts and stimulate your minds in other ways is something that is far too easy to do and something that I myself do often. 

 As a result, spending two weeks alone with my thoughts and limiting my social media use allowed myself to unpack at least a decade of unresolved emotions. Being in a world when social media first came into play whilst simultaneously being a teenager and trying to work out who you were was no easy feat for anyone. Let alone, living some of your twenties in a world pandemic which naturally happened at a moment where you had started to figure shit out or so you thought. This trip was a moment not only to heal my current self but also my inner teenager and allow myself to exist truly as who I am which can be something difficult at any age. Being able to sit and read for hours, scream Taylor Swift in my car (especially Foolish One), write things that had no reader in mind, let the tears flow and sit in moments of contentedness as the sound of the waves floated my spiralling thoughts away mended the parts of my soul I had always thought were unfixable. Reminded my mind that it doesn’t have to be invincible and taught my inner child that there is no such thing as too much. 

 For me, this trip ended in a particularly poetic way and also in a way that my friends would say is something very quintessentially me. I decided to embark on a wholesome adventure to see one of the world’s most adorable creatures: puffins. Rathlin Island was my destination of choice. I began my day at Rathlin with enjoying the sights of hundreds of puffins and listening to their calls. I then headed off on a foraging tour because I love an activity, this particular foraging tour (I say this as if I have been on many of them, this was my first) was focusing on seaweed. On this tour there was myself, the guide, a mother and daughter and two older ladies who had been best friends for at least 40 years. As a blether by nature I naturally started chatting to the two older ladies and found myself having particularly engaging and entertaining conversations with them. They then invited me to join them for the rest of the day with their husbands, very kindly paid for my lunch and we chatted the rest of the day away at a local pub watching the waves crash and the boats come and go. In this moment I was struck by the fact that although we are all only ever with one person (ourselves) our entire lives we can have particularly poignant life shifting moments and connections with strangers we may never see again and that in itself is a reason to focus not on the possibilities of the ending of Oppenheimer but instead on the moment that we find ourselves in.