Seoul Felt Like a Rebirth to My True Self

Some places you visit. Some places you remember. And then there are the rare ones that introduce you to a version of yourself you’d forgotten existed.

For me, that was solo travel in Seoul.

I arrived expecting a city break. Four days of eating, exploring, taking an unreasonable number of photos and walking around with an Insta360 on a selfie stick that made me look like I was conducting some very niche form of urban surveillance. The only people who seemed to notice were the Halmeonis and Harabeojis, who watched me pass with a mix of deep curiosity and barely concealed amusement, like I was the most entertaining thing to happen to their morning walk. I expected neon streets, incredible food and enough walking to make me question every decision that led me out of the hotel that morning.

What I didn’t expect was a reset.

Not the cinematic kind, where you arrive as one person and leave with your whole life figured out. I’m fairly sure that only happens in K-dramas. This was quieter. Seoul just made me feel comfortable being myself.

And not one curated version of myself. Not the one who behaves appropriately in public, or the one trying to look like he has it all together, or the one quietly wondering what everyone else thinks. All of me. The slightly ridiculous one. The one who’ll walk for an hour because something looked interesting on Naver Maps. The one who stops dead in the middle of the pavement because the light is perfect. The one who sometimes just wants to sit somewhere beautiful and do absolutely nothing.

Seoul made space for all of him.

Nobody is watching (in the nicest possible way)

We spend so much of our lives imagining we’re being watched. Worrying about how we look, whether we’re being weird, whether we’re breaking some invisible rule we wrote for ourselves.

Then you land in a city of millions and realise something wonderfully liberating: nobody cares. Curious grandparents aside.

Take the streams that wind through the city. You can be surrounded by skyscrapers, traffic and thousands of people, sit down by the water and somehow disappear. One minute you’re in one of the world’s great metropolises, the next you’re listening to running water and watching people drift past, armed with a 7-Eleven iced coffee and a punnet of the biggest grapes I have ever seen in my life. I’m talking grapes that looked like they’d been on a gym programme. Grapes with ambition. I genuinely considered whether I needed a knife and fork.

Those became some of my favourite moments. Not because anything happened, but because nothing did. Just me, my coffee and my steroid grapes. I sat there. Thought. Breathed. Let the city carry on without me for a bit.

The Golden incident

Then there were the moments when sitting quietly wasn’t enough.

A song would come on in my headphones and suddenly I needed to dance down the street. So I did. And obviously it had to be “Golden”, because you cannot walk around Seoul in 2026 without at least one K-pop Demon Hunters song permanently renting space in your brain. At that point it’s not embarrassing. It’s cultural participation.

So there I was, headphones in, looking significantly cooler in my head than I did in reality, giving it everything.

No one stopped. No one stared. No panel of judges appeared to score my choreography. The city just carried on.

Honestly, it was one of the most freeing things I’ve ever done on a trip.

I could be the tourist with the unnecessarily long selfie stick. The guy sitting quietly by the water. The guy dancing down the pavement. I could take the wrong turn, change my mind or spend twenty minutes photographing something nobody else found remotely interesting. None of it needed explaining.

Eating alone was the one I’d braced myself for. Food in South Korea feels like a very social thing, with dishes served family style and built for sharing, and I’ll admit I wondered how a table for one would go down. Then I found Myeongdong market. Stall after stall of halal Korean street food, the kind of dishes I’d only ever been able to dream about trying, and suddenly I was the one with the problem of too much choice. I loaded up, perched myself on the steps opposite an unnecessarily large Olive Young store and ate my way through the lot with live music playing and an endless parade of people to watch. No table, no company, no one wondering why I was on my own. Just me, a slightly unreasonable amount of food and the best seat in the house.

Why travel undoes the editing

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we get very good at editing ourselves. We learn what’s acceptable, what’s expected, how we’re supposed to look and sound. We start thinking about careers, mortgages and responsibilities, and slowly, without really noticing, we leave bits of ourselves behind. Nobody tells us to. Growing up just quietly rewards being more socially acceptable.

When you work a 9-5 and your adventures have to fit inside your annual leave, it’s easy for that edited version to become the default. Travel is one of the few things that interrupts it for me. Nobody knows your history. Nobody knows which version of you they’ve met. You’re just another person in another city, and there’s real freedom in that.

In Seoul I didn’t have to perform. I didn’t have to be impressive or have a reason. I didn’t have to justify travelling alone, filming myself, sitting somewhere for an hour or deciding the walk home required a full K-pop routine.

A rebirth, not a reinvention

Which is why the word rebirth keeps coming back to me. Not because Seoul turned me into someone new. Quite the opposite.

Growing up, I genuinely didn’t consider what people thought of me. Maybe it was a lack of caring, maybe it was a lack of social awareness, but I would happily walk down the street singing at the top of my lungs (for the record, I am tragically tone deaf) or dance around simply because it was fun. Somewhere along the way, that changed. I became very aware of what I was doing and what people must be thinking, and on occasion people even felt the need to share those thoughts with me.

Fast forward to my thirties and I am a put-together individual, fully versed in the social graces. I know you don’t walk the streets expressing your inner joy. That is reserved strictly for solo car karaoke or behind the closed doors of my flat.

Which is what made that walk through Seoul with “Golden” in my ears feel like such a big deal. For a few minutes, I wasn’t the sensible adult with a 9-5 and a firm grip on public decorum. I was that kid again, singing badly and dancing because it felt good, completely unbothered by who might be watching.

He hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d just gone quiet. Seoul gave him a reason to speak up again.

Maybe that’s the real gift of travel. We talk about discovering new places and cultures, but sometimes the biggest discovery happens much closer to home. You step away from the familiar and the things that felt so important shrink a little. The self-consciousness fades. You realise the world is enormous and your embarrassing little moments are, in the grand scheme of things, gloriously insignificant.

Nobody is keeping score. Nobody cares if you dance, eat alone or walk around with a camera on a pole. And eventually, you stop caring too.

What Seoul actually gave me

Not a new identity. Not the answer to every question I’ve ever had. Just permission. To be a bit louder, a bit sillier, a bit more spontaneous. To take up space as myself, all of myself, in all its glory.

I’ll remember the obvious things, of course. The food, the lights, the streets, the hundreds of photos. But I think I’ll remember the feeling most.

Some trips give you photographs. Some give you stories. And some quietly hand you back a part of yourself.

Seoul did that for me. Somewhere between the streams, the neon, the endless walking, the steroid grapes and a completely unnecessary amount of K-pop dancing, I finally understood something:

Travel doesn’t always help you find yourself. Sometimes it just gives you the freedom to stop hiding.

Seoul was where I stopped hiding.

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