I don't travel to become someone new. If anything, travel makes it clear to how many versions of myself were already there.

There is the practical version of me, the one who moves through airports with a kind of quiet competence. The one who makes the flight, finds the hotel, knows when to speak and when to listen. And then there are the other layers that surface when I am just far enough away from home to see it more clearly: gratitude, awe, and, a kind of longing I don't always make space for in the middle of everyday life.

I spent this week in Washington, D.C., with a communications cohort, which meant conversations about clarity, message, and meaning. We circled ideas, refined language, and tested what it means to actually reach someone rather than just speak at them.

There were moments that cut through the abstraction. A conversation with my congressman that drifted, unexpectedly, into something more philosophical than transactional. The kind of exchange that reminded me how rarely we slow down enough to ask what we actually believe, versus what we've learned to say.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I kept thinking about a scene from the movie "Paris, je t'aime." A woman traveling alone narrates her experience with careful honesty, and at one point she admits, "Sometimes I think it would be nice to have someone, with whom to share this life."

There was both gratitude and longing, especially when I could feel the truth of it in real time. While I was exactly where I had worked to be, doing work that mattered to me, I was still aware of the absence of the people that I most wanted to share it with.

Layered on top of that was something quieter, but just as persistent. A sense of intellectual pull that is harder to explain in practical terms, but something that welled up when touring the Library of Congress.

The main hall had an ornate inscribed quote by John Milton, which entails how we should be "beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." I mulled it as I walked throughout the building.

There's a viewing space of the main reading room, and a few people were studying in the room below. What would lead me to study there? Would there be a need in the next chapter of my life as I'm heading into the next level of academia? How would I travel into that world?

I hope with competency, awe, and gratitude, but those threads all interweave into the different aspects of who I am: the mom, the wife, the professional, the writer, who all sit alongside each other. Travel doesn't unwind the fabric, but it does give space to see what is being woven.

On the jetbridge home, something tightened the threads again. A man walking ahead of me wore a shirt that read "915 Strong," a phrase that has carried weight since the 2019 El Paso shooting. It was a quiet reminder of where I was headed, and what waits there. Not abstraction, not theory, but community shaped by both resilience and grief. A place where meaning isn't something you workshop. It's something you live with.

Travel brings a sharper awareness of what matters, who I carry with me even when they aren't there, and where I might ultimately be trying to go.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at [email protected]. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Tom Barrett at Unsplash