Borrowed Confidence

A backpack, a borrowed map, and the world

I’m back in Australia.

The first foreign country I ever spent any real time in.

1991.

I was twenty-one.

I’m here visiting a couple I befriended back then when I was studying at Sydney University. Being here again has stirred something familiar. That particular blend of youth, curiosity, and a willingness to step into the unknown without fully understanding what it might cost.

At that stage in my life, I wasn’t just traveling.

I was running away from America.

Recovering from my mother’s death.

Trying to make sense of my father’s bipolar nature.

I didn’t have language for it then, but I was carrying grief, instability, and a quiet urgency to put distance between myself and everything that felt too heavy to stay with. Travel wasn’t ambition. It was survival.

I’m sitting now with my friend Alexi. He has always been wild about heritage. His family traces back to Russian nobility, and he speaks about lineage the way someone might curate a museum. Carefully. With pride. As if history only stays alive when someone is willing to keep telling the story.

Alexi was quite possibly the first person in my life who pushed the edges of my comfort. Not by daring me. But by making the unfamiliar feel navigable.

As I finished my academic year, I told him I was taking a year off to travel. A very Australian thing to do. A walkabout. I said I was going to travel through Southeast Asia for a year, because that was all I could imagine at the time. Australia was the furthest I had ever gone.

He looked at me and said, almost casually, “That’s a misfortune.”

Then he explained that if I was already going to Southeast Asia, one of the most extraordinary places I could visit was China.

China hadn’t even crossed my mind.

But suddenly, it had.

A month later, he laughed and said, “Well, if you’re going to China, it would make sense to take the Trans-Siberian. Go from Beijing to Moscow.”

Again, something I had never even fathomed. The idea felt enormous. Unreal. Almost absurd.

What changed wasn’t my bravery.

It was his certainty.

He told me how it worked. How I’d navigate it. What to expect. Why I’d be fine.

The confidence I didn’t yet have was soothed by his experience. And because I trusted him, I took the journey. I ended up having one of the most magical experiences of my life.

I think about that often now.

I mentor people every week. And I see how much of their confidence doesn’t come from knowing the answers, but from knowing that uncertainty itself is survivable. That the confusion is part of the process. That they will navigate it just fine.

Being back with Alexi has brought up a bigger question for me.

How much do we allow ourselves to be influenced by others?

How willing are we to let go of comfort and take a risk we wouldn’t take alone?

And just as importantly, how sacred is the responsibility when we influence others?

I’m deeply grateful for the people in my life who helped me go further than I could see on my own. Who lent me their confidence until I grew my own. Who trusted me to carry myself across the world with nothing but a backpack and curiosity.

Those moments don’t disappear.

They turn into stories.

Stories become guidance.

And guidance becomes something we pass on.