This 7-day trip to Spain made me realize I wasn’t chasing adventure — I was craving belonging

It was supposed to be a research trip. A few slides, a confident voice, a PowerPoint deck outlining the nuances of emotion regulation.

When I booked my flight to Barcelona, I told myself it was just another chance to discuss my research on emotion regulation, meet fellow psychologists, and perhaps enjoy a little overpriced coffee between panels.

And it was a conference.

But Spain had other plans for me.

I didn’t expect to fall into conversations that felt like shared lifetimes, or to eat Basque cheesecake with three strangers in the middle of an unknown street that suddenly felt like mine.

Spain didn’t ask me to try so hard. It simply let me be. And in just seven days, something shifted in me I hadn’t realized was dormant.

The intimacy of strangers

At first, I thought it was the novelty that enchanted me — new faces, a new city, the gentle chaos of shared Airbnb kitchens and post-presentation coffee breaks.

I’ve always found comfort in the unstructured pockets of travel. But this felt different.

Over seven days, I met thirty-four new personas (as I like to call them in my notes). Thirty-four names, accents, laughs, small confessions over Vermouth or Americano.

None of them knew my whole story.

But strangely, some of them saw me more clearly than people I’ve known for years.

And that’s what travel does when it’s honest — it makes room for you to show up differently. Or maybe just more truly.

I wandered the city, but never felt lost

Everyone warned me about walking around Barcelona alone at night.

But somehow, I never felt unsafe. I walked those warm, buzzing streets with a softness in my step. I wasn’t trying to “see the sights.” I was letting the city see me.

There’s a kind of safety that has nothing to do with crime rates. It’s the safety of belonging — not to a person, or a group, or even a plan — but to the moment. To yourself.

And in Spain, I belonged.

I wasn’t chasing adventure. I was craving connection. And for the first time in a long time, I felt it everywhere — from a stranger’s eyes across a lecture hall to the way the city lit itself just for dusk.

The deeper why

There’s a psychoanalytic concept I often return to — “lack.”

Psychoanalysts like Kristeva, Lacan, Phillips — they all suggest in different ways that desire is born from absence. And in Spain, I felt the shape of that absence more clearly than I ever had before.

It wasn’t loneliness exactly.

It was the absence of felt belonging. Not just being with people, but feeling truly known by them, even if only briefly. The kind of attunement that mirrors you back to yourself.

As a researcher, I teach others about emotional intelligence and regulation. But living it — especially in unfamiliar geographies — is different.

Spain wasn’t therapeutic in a clinical sense. It was emotionally generous. And that generosity rewired something in me.

When belonging arrives quietly

What was even more important than the conference, was a chance to reunite with my friend Alicia in Valencia. 

But guess what?

The beauty of the Valencian architecture didn’t move me nearly as much as a quiet afternoon in Algemesí — a city Ali now calls home.

It wasn’t the kind of place you’d find in a travel guide. But for her, it carried the weight of everyday life, of routines and memories stitched into the fabric of sidewalks and street corners.

That afternoon, we picked up her childhood favorite: horchata and fartons — cold, sweet milk paired with light breadsticks. I watched her eyes soften with nostalgia as she took her first bite. There was something sacred in it — not in the dessert itself, but in what it remembered.

Then came Bronchales—and everything changed

When my friend said we’d go to her family’s village in the mountains, I expected something picturesque. What I didn’t expect was to feel home.

Bronchales isn’t a place that tries to impress you. It doesn’t have to.

It just welcomed me quietly, like a place that already knows who it is.

We arrived late, but the warmth was immediate. Her family didn’t treat me like a guest. They folded me into their days as if I had always belonged there — offering food, conversation (yes, in Spanish which I don’t know), laughter.

There was a jamón factory nestled somewhere behind the hills, rice plants stretching into the breeze, and deer that wandered through the misty mornings like gentle ghosts.

Can you imagine that one night, around 1 a.m., me and Ali even climbed a hill just to look at the stars?

We lied on the ground, turned off the flashlights and just let the dark hold us.

No music, no scrolling, no rush to capture it. Just breath and sky.

And a cricket somewhere nearby.

The stars above Bronchales weren’t just bright — they were everywhere. It felt like the universe had finally opened its palm, quietly reminding us that we belonged to something vast. That no matter how untethered we sometimes feel, there is always a sky above us, and always someone willing to climb a hill at 1 a.m. just to share it.

And that’s the thing about belonging. Sometimes, it doesn’t come through words or recognition.

Sometimes it arrives as a hill in a village you didn’t grow up in, beside someone who remembers the taste of a childhood drink, beneath a sky that doesn’t ask for anything back.

I didn’t want to leave.

But I did. Because life moves. Because planes board. Because stories continue even when chapters feel complete.

Only — Spain wasn’t done with me yet.

Travel reveals what routine hides

Before this trip, I thought I knew what I needed: productivity, academic growth, something to put on a CV perhaps (not that I care about CVs, but still).

And yet, what stayed with me wasn’t the applause after my talk or the research discussions.

It was the way someone remembered my name after one conversation . The way a AirBnb owner called me “cariño” like it wasn’t unusual. The way people looked you in the eye when they asked, How are you?—and actually wanted to know.

As an emotionally observant person, I’m used to noticing nuance.

But here, nuance welcomed me. It reminded me that the best parts of life aren’t scheduled — they’re stumbled into, like cheesecake on stone steps or horchata on a dusty afternoon.

A more compassionate understanding

Not all travel needs to be transformative. But sometimes, a place meets you where you are — not as a tourist or a guest, but as someone simply trying to feel real.

Spain met me there. It reminded me that my hunger wasn’t for adventure, but for coherence. For softness. For shared moments that don’t need to be explained.

This isn’t a conclusion or a promise to change how I travel or live.

It’s just a quiet acknowledgment: I’m not chasing adrenaline. I’m following the faint trail of belonging — the kind that whispers rather than shouts.

And the weirdest part?

You might even fall in love in the very last 3 hours before your flight, no less, no more.

It won’t be a story you tell in detail. It might just be a surreal scene featuring a person who drove you to the top of a mountain, showed you the whole of Barcelona like a secret, and kissed you like time wasn’t about to run out.

You might leave Spain, but Spain never really leaves you.

Because what you’ll carry won’t be souvenirs. It’ll be the way someone made you laugh mid-sentence. The warmth of a hand brushing yours.

The feeling that, for once, you didn’t have to try so hard to be understood.

Final thoughts

If you’re a young nomad, a tender traveler, someone wandering through cities and selves — don’t go looking for “epic.” Don’t wait for the story to be perfect before you start living it.

Go where your heart softens. Follow the scent of something cooking you don’t yet recognize. Let yourself feel silly, or moved, or awkward. Sit with strangers. Say yes to small invitations.

And above all, don’t be surprised if what you thought was a trip becomes a mirror. A quiet return to the version of you that remembers how to belong—without needing to earn it.

Because sometimes, you don’t need a new destination. You just need a place that reminds you: you already are enough, as you are.

And for me, for seven golden days, that place was Spain.