Since I was a child, I’ve never really felt like I fit comfortably into the majority.
I was never the popular one. I wasn’t necessarily the outcast either. I usually existed somewhere in that strange space in between—finding my way into niche groups of people who shared some particular interest, hobby, obsession, or slightly unusual way of looking at the world.
But somehow, I always found my small group.
Maybe it was only a few people, but that was usually enough. I never needed to know everyone in the room. I just needed a handful of people where conversation came naturally, inside jokes developed, adventures happened, and I didn’t feel like I needed to change myself to belong.
And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that maybe that has simply always been my place.
I’ve always been the practical one. The dependable one. The person willing to put in the work behind the scenes even when somebody else ultimately stood in the spotlight. I could understand the system, function within it, and sometimes even thrive in it, but I never completely felt like I belonged to it.
Not as a child.
Not as a student.
Not as an employee.
And now, certainly not as an influencer or Internet personality.
Finding Your People Gets Harder
One thing I wasn’t prepared for was how much harder finding those little groups would become as I got older.
When you’re young, life constantly puts people in front of you. School, activities, friends of friends, parties, random weekends—there are endless opportunities to stumble into somebody who eventually becomes part of your circle.
Adulthood doesn’t seem to work quite that way.
People get busy. Careers become demanding. Relationships, families, responsibilities, and routines take priority. Social circles become established and sometimes increasingly difficult to enter.
And I’ll admit that part of the problem is me.
Getting outside my comfort zone locally has somehow become harder with age.
There is something strangely intimidating about walking into an event, restaurant, class, meetup, or social situation near home completely alone and attempting to meet new people. It’s easy to convince myself I’ll do it another weekend. There will always be another event. Another Saturday night. Another opportunity.
Sometimes home itself becomes the comfort zone.
Yet put me thousands of miles away from home and something changes.
Somehow, Abroad Is Easier
This is one of those contradictions about myself that I still don’t completely understand.
I can struggle to walk into a social situation alone twenty minutes from home, yet somehow I can board a plane by myself, land in another country, navigate an unfamiliar transportation system, walk into a bar or restaurant where I don’t know anyone, join a tour full of strangers, and start talking to people.
Apparently crossing an ocean temporarily disables whatever part of my brain normally tells me, “Maybe we should just stay home.”
When I’m traveling, being outside my comfort zone is already the default.
Everything is unfamiliar anyway.
The streets are different. The food is different. The customs might be different. Sometimes the language is different. Nobody knows me, and there aren’t really any expectations about who I’m supposed to be.
There is a strange freedom in that.
At home, walking into a room alone can feel awkward.
Abroad, walking into a room alone feels like part of the adventure.
Maybe that’s one reason travel has become so important to me. It doesn’t magically transform me into an extrovert, but it pushes me into situations where I don’t have the luxury of retreating into familiarity.
And occasionally, somewhere thousands of miles from home, I find another temporary little group.
Maybe we spend a few hours together on a walking tour. Maybe we meet on a ship. Maybe conversation starts over food or drinks. Maybe we’re all solo travelers who independently decided that exploring the world sounded better than waiting around for someone else to come with us.
Some connections last beyond the trip.
Others exist for only an afternoon.
But they remind me that I can still find my people.
I Don’t Think I’m Built for the Mold
There seems to be a formula for almost everything.
There’s a formula for being popular. A formula for being successful. A formula for climbing the corporate ladder. There’s definitely a formula for building an online following.
Post this often. Use this kind of hook. Follow this trend. Make this video. Talk about this topic. Optimize this headline. Chase this algorithm. Turn yourself into something easily packaged, categorized, and consumed.
I understand why people do it.
I just don’t know if I’m particularly interested in becoming it.
Maybe that means Maybe A Weekend will never have hundreds of thousands of followers. Maybe my photos won’t consistently go viral. Maybe I’ll write thousands of words about some random weekend adventure and only a handful of people will ever read the entire thing.
That’s okay.
Because somewhere along the way, I realized I’d rather have ten people genuinely connect with something I created than have ten thousand people mindlessly scroll past it.
Just Me
The Internet encourages everyone to create a persona.
The traveler.
The photographer.
The successful professional.
The adventurer.
The influencer.
The expert.
The funny guy.
The inspirational guy.
But I’m not particularly interested in choosing just one.
I’m simply me.
Sometimes I’m traveling halfway around the world with a camera in my hand. Sometimes I’m taking a quick weekend trip somewhere relatively close to home. Sometimes I’m sitting near the water doing absolutely nothing. Sometimes I’m working entirely too much. Sometimes I’m digging through twenty years of photographs and remembering adventures I nearly forgot about.
And sometimes I’m sitting at home writing something like this, wondering whether anyone will actually read it.
That might not be the perfect recipe for becoming an Internet personality, but thankfully I’m not trying very hard to become one.
I’m just documenting my life.
Finding the Other Weirdos
Of course, I’d love for these stories and photographs to reach a large audience.
I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Every person who creates something and presses Publish hopes somebody is on the other side. Otherwise, we’d probably just leave everything sitting quietly in a folder on our computers.
But numbers aren’t everything.
If millions of people eventually stumble across my little corner of the Internet, fantastic.
If it’s only a few thousand, that’s fine too.
And if it becomes a small collection of travelers, photographers, weekend adventurers, introverts, overthinkers, late bloomers, practical people, and other assorted humans who have spent much of their lives wondering exactly where they fit—maybe that’s even better.
Because those are probably my people.
I’ve spent much of my life moving between niche groups anyway. Why should the Internet be any different?
Maybe Different Is the Point
It took me a long time to understand that not fitting perfectly into the mold isn’t necessarily something that needs fixing.
Sometimes it gives you freedom.
You stop worrying quite as much about doing things the way everyone else does them. You become comfortable exploring interests other people don’t understand. You travel somewhere because you want to see it. You photograph something because you find it interesting. You write a story because you think it’s worth remembering.
Maybe it reaches a huge audience.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Either way, it existed.
It was experienced.
It was photographed.
It was written down.
And it was mine.
So I’ll continue posting photographs, writing stories, documenting adventures, taking weekend trips, boarding planes, wandering through unfamiliar cities, floating down rivers, sitting beside oceans, and occasionally questioning what exactly I’m doing with all of it.
Maybe I’ll also keep challenging myself to bring a little bit of that traveler mentality home—to occasionally treat my own city like somewhere I’ve just landed, walk through the door alone, and see what happens.
I’ll keep hoping these stories reach more people.
But I’m perfectly comfortable if they mostly reach more of my kind.
The people who never quite fit into the majority either.
The people who found their small groups along the way, watched some of those circles change with age, and occasionally had to venture far outside their comfort zones to rediscover that feeling of belonging.
Maybe we were never supposed to fit neatly into the majority.
Maybe we were just supposed to keep wandering until we found each other.
