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When I was younger, I was an introvert. Today I am older, and still an introvert – but there's a sting in my tale. A twist in my solitarian soul that sometimes propels me towards distant places. Places, people, and panic-inducing moments of misery; a state introverts nearly always cross into when in the territory of that most frightening of predators – the extrovert. I was itchy when I was 18. Introverted and itchy. Two years at college studying Food Science led me to not much really, and when my parents offered to send me to New Zealand for a few weeks as a reward for not getting accepted into university, I realized they were giving me the freedom to start scratching in ways that I simply wouldn't be able to with my mother watching. I leaned in to that opportunity like a bear against a tree, and my life changed. Travel can be captivating. And New Zealand not only captured my heart for a few weeks all those years ago, its gently green yet glowingly glaciated grandeur has kept me enthralled from an unsafe distance ever since. Aside from my home country of Great Britain, New Zealand is the only place on earth from which it somehow hurts to be separated. I've never been back, but in so many ways I never really left. Travel can also be scary. Setting sandal from our home shore invites experiences to happen; good or dismal, exciting or mind-numbingly boring (hello, 18 hours at Keflavik airport). Each and every one of them enclosing a lesson they can teach us, as long as we aren't merely looking for instantly gratifying, clichéd snaps of tourist time. There's nothing wrong with a few of those, however if that's all we're after we should stay home. The food's cheaper, and we've already developed immunity to the viruses. So, what was I after when I took off for New Zealand as a not very fresh-faced 18 year old? I had no idea, other than 'life' itself. I viewed myself as being a nut, hoping to crack and sprout... I sprawled on a rock by the Waiho river, which is the outpouring from the frozen tears of Hine Hukatere – otherwise known as the meltwater of the Franz Josef glacier. All around me were the murmurs and moods of a primal rainforest. All inside me was wide-hearted wonder at what I was experiencing. Just a few miles to my west, golden sands wriggled as the ocean waves caressed them. To my east, the glacier winked at me as the sun sent slivers of wild light along its body. Little clouds of dust from rockfalls drifted through the otherwise clear, sweet air. I let my hand dip down into the flowing tears of a Maori legend, and felt as if all I had known and been before that moment had become a myth melting into the trees. The day before, I had taken my first ever helicopter ride and had buzzed like an awestruck wasp up to the head of the glacier. I walked on the viscerally white snowfield, the views of the mountains and of their tears flowing down to the sea gripping me with earthly glory. My itch was being well and deeply scratched, roughly enough to crack the nut and allow the almost unbearable light of being into my soul. Next day, I started making my introverted way back to Auckland. That would have been fine if it wasn't for the fact that Auckland harbored the young lifeforms of the extremely extroverted family that my parents had arranged to be my hosts down under. They were as bright, brash, and bouncy, as they had been upon my first arrival. However, somehow, this now didn't bother me quite so much. Something had planted roots inside, down, and under, my introverted self. I was learning to play twister, without crossing into misery. Travel was teaching me how to fit in with the fun as well as be soothed by the solitude. It was teaching me how to leap into the unknown. The bug was stinging me. And it still is. Unlike the myth, the old zeal hasn't melted away into the forest.