Lessons in Living: What solo Euro Summer taught me

Trigger warning: This article mentions eating disorders

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Euro summer may just be a TikTok hashtag to some, but for others, it’s a summer of lessons, love, and letting go.

With the end of my degree approaching, I found myself with nowhere to go. Home was not an option; my mother had painted over the candy-pink walls of my teenage bedroom and banished the slew of baroque-inspired furniture I had collected to the attic. But staying in my university city of Sunderland was also not totally fathomable to me. I had no plan. Until that point, uni and my career were all I had focused on and worked for. I had forgotten all about the little bits in between.  

Solo Travel

With money in my bank account (a situation I know very few people are lucky enough to be in) and a two-week solo trip already planned, I decided to do some proper solo travelling. I booked a flight to Germany and a flight back from Switzerland seven weeks from my departure.  

The seven weeks I spent in the European sun, in a variety of countries and cities was invaluable… but hard. This time forced me to face up to some pretty long-buried truths about myself.  

What Solo-Travelling did for me

The most life-changing thing this trip did for me was the effect it had on my eating disorder. I drank and ate what I wanted for the first time in years. Some things were too far ingrained to be fixed by a holiday but I abandoned the salad-only, step-count controlled diet I had back in the UK.  

“I ordered exactly what I wanted and enjoyed the experience, which I knew was too good and fleeting to waste on something as trivial as jeans no longer fitting properly.”

Despite being discharged from therapy years before and claiming to everyone that I had recovered, I really hadn’t. No more was this apparent than when I found myself unable to comfortably button my jeans before dinner one evening in Croatia. I knew that if I had found myself in such a position just weeks prior, I would have isolated myself, restricted my food, and hated every inch of my body for weeks. Even though the situation did still upset me, I buttoned up those jeans and went for dinner. I ordered exactly what I wanted and enjoyed the experience, which I knew was too good and fleeting to waste on something as trivial as jeans no longer fitting properly.  

Alone Time

Obviously, recovery is much harder than just taking a seven-week holiday and, for some, this would be even more triggering. For me, being alone in all these magical places pushed me to finally put into practice all the techniques I had learnt years prior. I finally began to develop the positive mindset around food I told everyone that I had.  

My seven weeks away also woke me up to the unhappiness in my life, or at least the absence of happiness. I healed most of the damage done by a three-year-long romantic situation. I mourned the woman my 16-year-old self thought I would be by then, a person I had spent every day punishing myself for not being. While I won’t lie and say that every moment was great, I did find myself happy, consistently; a feeling I was just kidding myself I felt back home.   

Letting Go of Regulation

I’m quite a type-A person. I write daily to-do lists, plan my week the weekend before, and have scheduled days to clean certain rooms in my house. But for some unknown reason, I didn’t choose to plan every element of this trip. I woke up each day and decided what I wanted to do whilst I showered and drank an early morning coffee.  

“I broke habits that others commended as productive…”

I spent days just lounging in parks with a book and a cocktail. On short stays, I half-unpacked my suitcase and didn’t make the bed instantly every morning. Looking back, I think I learned how to live my life properly as opposed to plan it and push myself through a series of daily regimes. I broke habits that others commended as productive but I knew my obsession with them had the capacity to one day land me in a different type of therapy.  

For one of the first times, I felt more human than robot and was a messy, lost (physically and figuratively) 21-year-old, just like the women in the books I had read and loved.

Euro Summer Aesthetic

The image conjured up by the term “Euro Summer” is a glamorous one. TikTok’s aestheticised version is one of Aperol Spritz, gorgeous villages, perfect tans, and creaseless linen trousers. The social media image of it is clean and rose-coloured, but the reality of it taught me how to get a bit dirty.  

Just as I was heavily regimented in my routine and order back home, so was I in hygiene. My bed sheets were religiously changed every Sunday, stains were removed from my clothes almost instantly, and my washing up was never left for more than 24 hours. But 18-hour coach journeys, cheap Airbnb’s, and weeks without a washing machine changed this. I spent over 24 hours wearing the same pair of socks, slept in a set of sheets for over a week, drank straight from bottles, and let the world see me without perfectly washed hair and consistently shaved legs.  

This is not to say I lost all sense of hygiene. I am still, by every definition, a very clean person. But this trip taught me that sometimes perfect, text-book cleanliness should take a back seat, especially if it is steering you away from the fun.  

Lessons about myself, for myself

Contrary to my earlier point, Euro summer also taught me to speed up. I learnt how to stretch my days to their maximum and then pack them full. How to have a morning coffee in the sun and enjoy it, but not let it take the whole morning. I even learnt how to speed up my routines. Getting ready in the morning went from an hour-long task to taking twenty fives minutes at most. Even the length of my showers decreased severely and my nightly skincare became a five-minute endeavour. My time there was finite. The idea of wasting even a second longer on the functional parts of life was abhorrent to me.  

“I’ve learnt how to savour even the most mundane parts of my day…”

My overarching lesson was one on how to live my life and how to love it, I think. I fell back in love with myself and who I was. I re-discovered my views and opinions, as well as learning how to conduct my life properly for me. I’ve learnt how to savour even the most mundane parts of my day and find real happiness that isn’t tethered to a person or occasion.  

These lessons may not have been exclusive to my travels; there’s every possibility I would have learnt this had I spent the summer with friends in the UK. But I certainly know I didn’t dread the life waiting to greet me at the airport when I returned home – and that’s progress in my books. 

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• 10 TIPS AND TRICKS TO TRAVEL CHEAP

• STAYING SAFE AS A SOLO FEMALE TRAVELLER

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Featured image courtesy of Lara Jameson via Pexels. Image licence found here. No changes were made to this image.