From Divorce To Discovery Through Travel // 176

The hardest part of divorce isn’t the paperwork.

It’s waking up to a life that no longer feels familiar.

Your name.
Your routines.
Your identity.

And the question that whispers in the quiet:

Who am I now?

In this episode, we talk honestly about the emotional weight many women carry after divorce — guilt, shame, exhaustion, and the fear of starting over.

And we explore a simple starting point:

Not a bucket list.
Not a long-haul flight.

But small, intentional travel that meets you where you are.

Inside This Episode:

• Moving through guilt and “failure” narratives
• Using nearby travel as healthy disruption
• Why new environments shift perspective
• Designing affordable, low-pressure reset trips
• Creating space to hear your own voice again

This isn’t about escaping your life.

It’s about rebuilding it.

Travel can become a container — a place to think clearly, breathe deeply, and remember who you are becoming in this next season.

You don’t have to leap across the world.

Sometimes healing starts with a sunrise walk in a new place.

If you’re rebuilding after divorce and craving direction, you don’t have to figure this out alone.

In 1:1 coaching, we build:

• Emotional readiness
• Safe, realistic travel plans
• Confidence in your next chapter
• Structure during transition

This isn’t just about taking a trip.

It’s about becoming confident again.

👉 Ready to become the woman who books the trip? Apply for 1:1 coaching here https://calendly.com/solotraveladventures/book-a-call

Your next chapter doesn’t start someday.

It starts with one decision.

Transcript

Naming The Pain And Shame

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Are you a woman of divorce? Or maybe you are in the midst of that process. Or maybe you've just come out out the other side, but you're still reeling from it and you are dealing with all kinds of emotions and you're not sure what to do even with your life at this moment. I see you. I have been you and I can tell you it is challenging. It's a challenging time and it's not fun in the beginning, but it it does get better. But right now you might be dealing with lots of different emotions that you aren't sure what to do with, and you just feel like you need to just escape and run away. You could be thinking, Oh, I have this guilt and this shame from what happened. Whether it's you initiated the divorce or otherwise, you still have to deal with that this happened, and you have this guilt maybe pent up inside, and you have this shame because for me there was shame. I never thought the stats are still 50% of the marriages end in divorce. And I never thought I would be that stat. And as a Christian, it was there was this shame behind it because I didn't think I should be getting divorced. Biblically, I thought we needed to work it out, and so I carried that. I carried the idea of that I failed, I failed in my marriage, and so you walk around feeling like a failure possibly. So that needs to get changed in mindset wise. You also, as I experienced, might be depressed and very sad. I was very depressed, especially in my first year in in and out of it, but it got pretty dark in the beginning. I was exhausted as well, exhausted just from that whole survival mode, and then also exhausted from the stress of the divorce proceedings, all the legal stuff that was needing to be finalized, and there's just financial drain as well, which was very exhausting and just stressful. I also grieved. The loss of a home. I lost my home. I lost my family that I built. And so there's some losses that we need to grieve during this time, during this divorce period. And it could continue beyond that first year as you're still trying to rebuild your life, possibly. And the biggest question that you may be asking yourself in this season is who am I now? As I mentioned in a last episode about identity, and we as women have so much attached, or we've just committed our lives to our family, our spouse, our children over the years, and then suddenly we are left with nothing, so to speak, or just we are not attached to those identities anymore. And so now it could be daunting and you have uncertainty happening in your brain about who am I now without these things. It can be looked at as a sort of a fun adventure, though, in which you now, once you've processed and healed a bit, can start to uncover who you really are and who God created you to be. And it can be a fun sort of time to explore that and to find out what you like and what you don't like and what you've always maybe even dreamed of that you had to put aside or on the back burner because of those responsibilities as wife, mother, any other position or identity that you had during that time. The other thing I lost was I lost friends and neighbors during my divorce. So there's it can go beyond our own circle of these losses, have can affect many areas of our lives. I'm here to tell you that travel can actually help you during this season, and you think, oh, that's just impossible. I just don't have the bandwidth. And that may be true, but I can tell you from experience during my first year when things were difficult, it was very challenging. I had severe depression and I was struggling financially, trying to learn how to support myself. And what saved me was travel. Now, aside from the initial, I filed the papers and then ended up packing up and leaving soon after that for a two-week road trip, which was amazing and it was so free, and it just really showed me too, reminded me a lot of things that I had forgotten about myself. But throughout the year, after I got settled in a new state, I ended up moving several states away and started a new job. I really, if I hadn't done these small road trips throughout the year, now I didn't do any big trips that first year financially, I just couldn't. But even time-wise, getting time off work too, and then moving and all these extra expenses, the divorce attorney, everything added up. But what I did was I did some short and even some local road trips, and these totally saved my sanity because I was experiencing all those feelings I just mentioned. Also, what saved me was my family. I spent some travel visiting family because that's what I needed at that moment. Yes, I could have gone across the pond and done something magical and seen a new world to change my perspective. But for me, I needed family support. But those road trips to them or road trips just to some other new place for me was really what saved me. So travel can help during this season. And again, you might just want to escape, and in a way, you can do that in a sense, but it has to be intentional. And so when you think about traveling and you're in this season of challenge or struggle, loss, you have all these feelings happening, and we tend to get those feelings, they go on this feedback loop that just continually repeats and plays itself, and that can be even a negative thing, and we get stuck. And so by moving out of our comfort zone or our comfort situation, physically moving out of that environment, and we get out of that mundane of just surviving, or being that cog in the wheel that just keeps going around, or I think of your daily life looking like this day. I've been there, I know, but when you leave that environment and you get outside that, you get outside yourself, it changes your perspective. You get outside of that I call it your stinking thinking, and you get to change that feedback loop because when you get outside and you're experiencing something new, it challenges your brain and it changes it. It's called noroplasticity, and it really can help, even if it's just for the weekend, you've gotten away from maybe it's that environment, or you're still living in the same town as your ex or soon-to-be ex, that you get a new perspective, and this really can take you out of that horrible mindset, to be honest. And the other thing that might even happen while you travel is you might get to experience this feeling or this beauty of being in awe. So when we are in awe, it also changes our mood, it makes us happier, it lowers our stress levels. And for me, being in awe is finding myself in nature and looking and just being just dumbfounded by how magnificent God's creation is and just be in wonder that wow, how is this possible? And I think about even just watching those daily things, such as a sunrise or a sunset, can also bring your mind to that reflection of being in awe. And every single sunrise and sunset is different. And I think about I have an aunt who lives in Florida, and she's been posting, she's doing this project where she gets out and she does walk the beach every day, but she's going out every morning and capturing beautiful pictures of the sunrise and how every picture is magnificent, it's beautiful, and how I know for a fact by her doing this, she is just bringing that all perspective of that splendor of seeing the beauty of the sunrise every morning. So when you travel, there's opportunities for that. You don't have to go far, you could just watch a sunset in your own backyard. But sometimes moving out of, like I said, our little comfort zone, our area, we have time. We have time to stop and look at nature, we have time to reflect on the beauty of creation and even just the space in our own minds to be free and to reflect on everything that's been happening in our lives, but not to dwell there, hopefully. That is my hope is that when we travel, it opens up our minds and our bodies to something that will change our perspective. We come back changed from that experience, and I can attest to that many times. And this is what I desire for you. I have walked that journey, ladies. I have been there, and as I mentioned, travel actually saved me that first year. It was a pretty bad year, but I got through it. Thankfully, due to family, which I love dearly, and that may not be your case, but you can find some joy in traveling and getting out of that stinking thinking, that crummy situation that you may find yourself in and get beyond just surviving. That is my hope for you. And if you need help and guidance in this season, I want to guide you because I've walked that path, I've been through that season, and there are ways to move beyond and come out the other end with joy and with new perspective, new mindset, and a new lease on life where you feel almost like it was a good choice, possibly, that you got divorced because now you can be, you can become this beautiful woman that you were intended to be from the very beginning. Book a call with me and let's get you on that path to healing and becoming this beautiful woman.