I was flying out of Phoenix after a layover, my forehead pressed to the window, staring down at the red rocky hills framing the stripmall wasteland. Flat, wide buildings flanking expansive parking lots. The cars looking like a mosaic of shining bits of candy about to melt under the Arizona sun. Long straight frontage roads crossing under long straight expressways. Flat. Straight. Orderly. Good old America.

I don’t fly as much as I used to. The last year and a half I have hunkered down, my freshly renewed passport collecting dust, with only two measly stamps in it. Before, I would take every opportunity I could to leave the country. Now, as much as I want to go to Barcelona or Tokyo or Sicily or Hong Kong or Mexico City or Ho Chi Minh or Prague or a dozen other places I’ve never been or want to go back to, all I can think of is the discomfort of the plane ride. The sore knees and aching neck. The screaming baby. A stranger’s elbow in my ribs for 6 hours or more.

I think of all the traveling I’ve done—I have been insanely fortunate to travel as much as I have—and I don’t remember the thrilling disorientation of being in a new place for the first time, where everything you see is an exciting opportunity to engage with another culture, a different environment, a whole new way of seeing the world. No, instead I remember that in between these fantastic moments of being totally present in the world, I am beset with temerity and angst, crippled by excessively abundant caution and stupefied with shyness.

I worry that I am not the traveler I once was—if I ever was a true traveler.

A thousand years ago, my cousin, Janet, asked me to edit and organize a manuscript for her. I was much too immature and inexperienced to do the task justice, but she was trying to help me get some valuable experience in doing something besides Jim Beam shots. Janet had returned a couple of years before from a 15-month journey around the globe at the age of 28, and had written the story of her experience traveling from LA to dozens of destinations eastward until she completed a total circumnavigation.

I read the manuscript hungrily, often forgetting completely my purpose as an editor and organizer of her remarkable adventures that included but were not limited to hiking up Mount Sinai, trekking through the Himalayas, climbing volcanoes, practicing yoga in India, training with Muay Thai fighters in Thailand, hitchhiking (by herself) up the east coast (or possibly the west coast) of Australia, swimming past the shark nets off Bondi Beach, scuba diving in basically every body of water throughout Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the South Pacific, traipsing into the Australian Outback with a stranger she found on a message board (the old-school kind, probably made of cork), and a few dozen other experiences that had my mouth hanging open in admiration, delight, shock and envy. God, how I wanted to do the same—to set out into the churning world with all my belongings on my back and an open mind and a courageous, trusting heart.

It was years before I’d come to achieve a tiny little taste of that, when I went to Thailand by myself for three weeks. Thailand had been on my list for a long time precisely because of how Janet wrote about the lushness and beauty of it. I wanted to see this magical place for myself and it did not disappoint. It is a wondrous and gorgeous place that was unlike anything else I’d ever seen. Bangkok was a turbulent spectacle of golden Buddhas and suicidal traffic and needle-pointed temples and writhing buckets of eels and the muddy expanse of the Chao Phraya river teaming with boats. The coasts had the most beautiful golden beaches fringing dense gorgeous jungle that reached green fingers into the sky, graceful long boats anchored in colorful phalanxes in shallow turquoise water where you could see psychedelically colored fish darting around. It was everything I’d hoped for. It was magical. The perfect setting for many bold adventures.

What I didn’t take into account, however, was me. I am not Janet, who has that certain insurmountable glow that comes with unshakable confidence that some people have. Not a cocky, self-important or entitled confidence, but the confidence of an old soul who is gracefully competent and appropriately bold in any situation. I possess a different sort of confidence, that, it turned out, was dependent on a certain minimum level of familiarity. Take this fish out of her bowl, and she is a timid mess.

Whenever I found myself at a crossroads—whether a literal crossroads or a metaphorical one—I tried to guide my decisions with “What would Janet do?” And having spent so much time with her wonderful, exciting stories, I had a decent grip of what Janet would do. But then, despite my keen desire for boldness and adventure, I would do the exact opposite. When a bartender offered to take me to the underground Muay Thai fight in Railay, Janet would’ve said yes; I shyly demurred and instead spend the evening reading a trashy novel on the porch of my bungalow and chain-smoking and imagining the awesome story I would have told about going to a real-deal Muay Thai fight. When I met an Englishwoman who offered to help me start the scuba-certification process on Ko Phi Phi, Janet would’ve said yes (pretending she wasn’t already trained and certified, which of course she was), I said no thank you and spent the remaining days on the island at the pool where I was staying reading yet another trashy novel and availing myself of the insanely cheap cans of Singha beer that were dispensed poolside, telling myself that I would fulfill my lifelong desire to learn to scuba dive some other day. When the place I was staying on Ko Pha-ngan offered free sea kayaks for whomever wanted to use them, Janet would have paddled all around the island. I didn’t even make it to the neighboring beach. I returned the kayak and spent the remainder of the day on a lounge chair near the water drinking yet more Singha and smoking yet more cigarettes from a box emblazoned with a rotting lung, thinking that kayaking is a lot harder than it looks.

At every turn, rather than being freed and emboldened by my autonomy I was instead all too aware of my solitude and the vulnerability that comes with it. This then blossomed into acute paranoia, as my overactive imagination wrote and directed worst-case scenarios, starring me, that played out every violent, bone-cracking, flesh-flaying, paralysis-inducing, life-altering possibility in high-def detail on the widescreen of my mind, ensuring any adventurous, open-hearted intentions were duly capsized.

No matter where I’ve gone, this dynamic has made an appearance. I want to do all the things. Climb that, go there, see the things, eat the weird stuff, find the local spots, sit among the citizens, avoid the tourist traps. But what happens is I immediately home in on where I’m comfortable and stay there. It’s usually a bar or a pool or a beach. If all three are combined, I may never see or do another thing, no matter where I am. I may succeed in knocking off a couple of things I wanted to do or see, but then I’m exhausted, and I retreat to wherever I’ve determined that comfort zone to be. I become deeply lonely, but in perverse proportion, I also become increasingly shy and suspicious of everyone’s intentions. So there I am recognizing a friendly face offering a badly desired conversation, but extricating myself from the whole situation at at the soonest possible opportunity, heaving me back into loneliness. From there cue the self-loathing and general self-flagellation, which I am super good at under the best of circumstances and the result is that I usually need a vacation from whatever vacation I’m on.

There, of course, have been exceptions. While I am older now, more experienced, generally more confident, and overall way more relaxed than I used to be, I am still not Janet, nor am I anyone like her. But I find myself torn between my desire to see more of the world and my discomfort and shyness in doing so. Now more than ever it’s so important that we all step out of our proverbial (and literal) comfort zones and rub shoulders with as many kinds of people as we can, reminding ourselves that we are all humans (even if some of us are real assholes), and that one of the surest (if smallest) ways of treating the world and each other with deserved respect is to constantly remind ourselves that it all extends beyond the reach of our little reality—geographically, experientially, intellectually.

So I cruise Hopper and Kayak. I plot trips—researching destinations, perusing the hotel and Airbnb options, reading up on the character and highlights of different neighborhoods; I daydream about strolling down a street in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona or eating street tacos in Mexico City or driving on a cliffy winding road into a tiny Italian town that will have the best pasta I will ever eat. But I have become more and more hesitant about pulling the trigger on booking trips. I’m no longer hindered by a lack of funds or a lack of time—only a lack of energy and a lack of will, even as I steep in the desire to see the places I’ve never been. I hope somehow, and soon, I’ll find a way to reconcile that. So I can go back to being a citizen of the world, instead of just a citizen of Brooklyn.