Solo Travel & the Search for Belonging: How Getting Lost Helps You Find Yourself with Tracy Smith
What if getting lost is exactly how you find yourself? In this warm, adventurous conversation, host Desiree Stanley sits down with Tracy Smith—memoirist, solo traveler, and author of The Purpose of Getting Lost—who at 49, after divorce and decades of people-pleasing, booked a one-way ticket to Iceland and never really stopped. What began as an impulsive yes became a four-year journey across continents and a profound reckoning with belonging, identity, and what it means to finally take up space in your own life.
Tracy shares how solo travel gave her something she'd never quite found at home: freedom from the pressure to fit in. When you're clearly the outsider, you stop trying to belong and simply get to be. She also makes a distinction that resonates far beyond travel: she hasn't reinvented herself through these adventures. She's simply recognized that she deserves space alongside all her other roles. Not reinvention—recognition. And she's slowly, imperfectly learning to bring that same permission home.
Along the way, Tracy opens up about the harder lessons—the holiday moments that didn't go as planned, the loneliness of transitions, and what it took to start showing up for herself without waiting for the right circumstances or the right destination. Her biggest shift has been learning that every moment with someone you love is already the special day—and that releasing the pressure of specific days to carry all the meaning changes everything.
Tracy also pulls back the curtain on her next chapter: The Geography of Connection, a year-long project studying how belonging shows up in the smallest human gestures across cultures and continents. Whether you're navigating an empty nest, longing for more adventure, or simply trying to understand why you feel more like yourself somewhere else, this conversation will make you want to raise your hand and say: hey, I'm here too.