It’s six-thirty in the morning. Goldenrod light bathes the Dalmatian coastline. I’m on a bus from Dubrovnik to the airport. My traveling companion is asleep to my left. To my right, a razor-thin strip of guardrail is all that separates our 20-ton box of steel and glass from a five-hundred foot drop to the foaming sea below. Our driver takes the comically narrow roads at dizzying, disconcerting speeds. And in this moment, I’m wondering what it means to be me. Indulgent, sure. But what else are the in-between moments of travel meant for? You don’t exactly spiral into existential crises when cliff jumping from castle walls or wiping lipstick from your neck in a nightclub bathroom. It’s on the buses and the flights and the ferries between when reflection upon these moments—and what they might mean—consumes you. For me? They don’t mean much. That’s not to suggest there aren’t merits to the Eat, Pray, Love dogma of finding oneself while traveling. But I wonder if travel’s more poignant trademark is its capacity to shock, then shatter your system. Less of a mend and more of a stripping away of who you are and what you once held so dear: your beliefs, your ideologies, your comfort zones. On this trip, a weeklong excursion to the Croatian Coast, I didn’t arrive at self-discovery. Instead, I became a ball of yarn unraveling into a stringy mess of disillusionment. As our bus driver casually swung me and forty other passengers from side to side along the hairpin turns, I found myself leaping like a flea through the brain’s hyperactive jungle gym. It seemed to me, in that moment, identity meant so much and yet so very little. Each of our identities is what amalgamates to the greater whole of humankind. But the levers that define our own individuality can seem so arbitrary. There’s your operational identity—your quantitative data and life by numbers: your routing number, passport number, birth date. The modernized filing system of humans, which allows us to navigate across so many boundaries, both physical and invisible. My ability to book flights and hotels through a four-inch phone that’s tied to my bank account and that delivers me straight to a bus station where a [lunatic] bus driver takes me to an airport where my name and information is already tied up in the system because I booked a flight two weeks prior—this is inspiring and sobering. All I have to do is show a pixelated photo with a few data points about my operational history, and I’m allowed to coast through the system—detected, sure, but never remembered. Then there’s your identity by origins—where you’re from, your birthplace, your city, your state, your country. In today’s globalized world, it’s easy to slip into the notion that these things don’t matter much anymore, that we’re all just human beings. But, when you walk along the 16th Century parapet of Dubrovnik’s Old Town walls, and you peer into the red-tiled, Tetris-shaped heart of the city and notice where certain sections were bombed out as recently as 1991 during Civil War, you understand how tied to our cultural upbringings we remain. Finally, there’s your identity by biology—your animal brain, your material mind, your biological makeup, and the weight of millions of years of evolution. As humans, we’re both vastly superior to other creatures, yet profoundly limited. My decisions to visit Croatia, and my choice to write about it now, was governed by nothing but a series of neurological mini-explosions, most of which were never fully within my conscious control. It was always, and still is, more a case of my motives playing catch-up to my instincts. And so, when your choices are only halfway tied to your decisions, where does that leave you in terms of who you are? When I planned the trip to Croatia, I expected to be dazzled by the Adriatic’s emerald waters and by the labyrinthine marble passageways that would spill into beachside tavernas. Less immediate on the agenda was unearthing a deep vein of unanswerable questions about who and why I was. And yet, that’s sort of the magic and anti-magic of travel, isn’t it? You never know what you’ll get.