When most people I know make a New Year’s resolution, it’s typically along the lines of weight loss, focusing more on their career, or quitting smoking.

This year mine was significantly different. After getting broken up with following a five year partnership, I was feeling restless. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to do something different and I wanted to stop fearing being alone. I decided to take a couple of months off work and travel. But where to? I thought about the parts of the world I am the least familiar with and ended up with East Asia and South America. Given my current taste for Asian guys, it wasn’t much of a contest. Done.

I was spending the 2015 New Year’s Eve in London with my good friends. I was slightly nervous when I told them my plan. I expected to be told that I was crazy to do it alone, that it’s too long, or at least some concern that I would lose my job. Instead, I got nothing but encouragement. Two of my friends at the table had already gone for sabbaticals – one for six months and another for a year. So my handful of months seemed relatively lame in comparison! I clearly remember one friend saying, “you have an opportunity to do this and you’re thinking about it!!! Why??”.

It became clear to me that sabbaticals are relatively common in Europe especially in comparison with the U.S. When I told my American friends about my plan, most thought I would get laughed at or fired. Some gave me this look like they were wondering why anyone would spend so much time nonproductive and without a job- like I was a major weirdo.

The most interesting reactions to my travel plan, however, came in Lebanon. “Alone???” “Alone??????” “You’re going ALONE???” “Have you lost your mind?” “Do you need to see a doctor??” “See, that’s what happens to people in America – they lose their minds”.

Right there as I stood listening to my Lebanese family and friends looking at me in disbelief, it hit me how culturally different these 3 regions were. Europe was about work life balance. America was about productivity. And the Lebanese, well, we are social beings. Very social beings. The kind of people that feel the need to call every single one of their friends just to go out for dinner. The kind of people that would not be caught dead alone – anywhere.

I‘m not very different. I enjoy being around people. The concept of being alone for long periods of time terrifies me. This trip for me is a challenge to teach myself that I will be ok being alone – that I can thrive and have a good time. I’m not shooting for eat, pray, love type of stuff, just a bit of self sufficiency.

I left London with a plan which I executed flawlessly just a few weeks later. I had the conversation with my boss on the phone and despite him falling off his chair when I said 3 months, he agreed to let me go and assured me I would have the job when I came back.

I picked the countries based on places I‘ve been wanting to visit, places suggested by one very questionable dating app, and places I didn’t t need a visa to. Visas…ah….visas. Let me tell you why Lebanese people don’t travel around the world. It not just the finances or not wanting to be alone or the inability to live without Picon and hummus (Lebanese inside joke). We have the tenth shittiest passport in the world and nobody wants to deal with 20 pages of paperwork for each visa application. What’s worse is that because have a history of war and *some* terrorism, most countries want to investigate the hell out of you before they give you a visa – and that takes time.

So it took me basically two months to get five visas. The first one had already expired before I even set out. Awesome! Planning the countries to visit was like solving some kind of optimization problem. I had to get to each country before my visa expired, minimize ticket costs, and all that without creating a path that was completely nonsensical and zig-zagged? Somehow it worked out. Plan: England, Lebanon, Jordan, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Then back to Boston from Shanghai – hopefully without any piercings, diseases, and alive in one piece. I do hope I will come back with a tattoo though. Something small and meaningful.