Why #WeGoSolo ?

"Women always need a battle to fight", they say. Well, as long as there are people (men and women alike) to start sentences with "women", there will be feminists, you know...

Lately, the Twitter world has been moved by the consequences of the death of a young American woman killed in Turkey. The consequences on female solo travel. Now, I didn't know about this terrible thing before the female travel bloggers decided to go and fight the battle for the right to travel alone for a woman. And I'm not going to talk about why, obviously, women can and should travel the world, the question has been answered several times now, and they all did a better job than I could do (see links below). You just need to type "#WeGoSolo" on Twitter and you will see numerous names mobilized for the cause.

I just want to share with you how this battle made me feel.

Since The Big Breakup, I've always considered myself more as an individual than as a woman. And when I decided to go, to leave my job, my friends and my family for a year, it was for my own personal reasons. I never even considered once that I was a woman and that I would be taking risks being alone. Why? Because I never thought I was doing anything special. A lot of people I know have used the opportunity of a Working Holiday Visa, and it's true, they were either in a couple or men.

And then I decided to write a blog of my adventures and thoughts, and again I realized how many women there were in the blogosphere who were doing the same things I was about to do. Well, not exactly the same thing, because they were either still working at home (and had a home to go back to), or they were living out of their blogs. And besides, everyone has their own reasons to travel, making the whole experience unique.

The last thing that made me conclude that I wasn't doing anything special and that I wasn't even considering the risks, happened last November, on the East Coast of Australia. On each hostels, I talked to women traveling on their own, on a Working Holiday Visa. Some of them were with another girl as travel buddies, but most of them were alone, just like me.

Going back to #WeGoSolo, this battle made me realized that I was, in fact, doing something special. For a vast majority of people, billions of which I will never meet even once in my life, what I'm doing is nuts. #WeGoSolo made me feel like I belonged to a strong community of people (again, men and women alike) firmly decided to keep travelling the world. Nobody should tell a woman, or anyone, that they shouldn't travel. And that's why I spread the good word...

So yeah, #WeGoSolo made me feel a little bit special.

For more informations on this debate, here are a few links
the truth about solo female travel and safety
the women traveling solo question
travelling solo im not brave just smart
and my personal favorite:
female solo travel is not the problem

What about you? Did you partake in the debate? Either share how that made you feel, or join the community!