Echolocation 3: Just Give Henry His Space

In which two brothers discuss embracing their ways

He doesn’t chew his nails like I do, but we share the same hair—curls a perfect balance of maternal and paternal. He also doesn’t guzzle coffee like me, but we bond over the juicy funk of our sourdough starters. When we talk, the Californian mellow in his slouch softens my white-knuckled New York clench. Underneath these fresh layers we are of the heartland, the warm clay of new America’s river delta. One family, coast to coast, indivisible.

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There exists, in the peculiar arithmetic of neurodivergent travel, a sort of inverse relationship between belonging and authenticity that my brother Henry articulates with unruffled bluntness: “I don't really like to get to know people,” he tells me over Zoom, his face awash in the reliable phosphorescence of the San Franciscan dawn. “I just want to be alone and that's pretty much it.” This is the kind of statement that would send the staff of Lonely Planet into collective apoplexy, representing as it does everything that modern travel content has positioned itself against: isolation over connection, observation over participation—the deliberate choice to remain outside. And yet there's something transcendently honest about how Henry approaches foreign spaces, seeking out what he calls Berlin's “grimy” edges precisely because they offer what turns out to be travel's rarest commodity: the freedom to disappear. Meanwhile, I find myself pursuing a parallel vanishing act through Seoul's frantically lit streets, where late autumn’s dense air imposes its own chilly solitude. We're both chasing what I've started to think of as the perfect mask—not one that conceals our essential otherness but one that, through some strange alchemy of displacement, finally allows it to breathe.

The contemporary travel¹ apparatus operates on what we might call the Extrovert's Assumption: that meaningful encounters with foreign spaces must necessarily involve their human elements, that every journey should end in some kind of social epiphany. Which makes what Henry tells me about his recent European wanderings feel deeply refreshing in its vulnerable rejection of this premise. “It’s tough for me,” he says, when I ask about venturing beyond tourist zones into those hallowed local experiences the literati fetishizes with a fervor teetering on religious.² “I feel like most of those situations are more social in general, and I just don't get a lot of joy out of them. As someone who’s not so social, I don't think I extract a lot of meaning from those types of experiences...” The trailing off here feels significant, containing within it the kind of permission that travelers like us struggle to grant ourselves: the permission to simply not.

It is also where we bump into what I've elsewhere called the Alien Paradox—that perpetual state of being caught between what we are and what we cannot but nevertheless feel we must be. “There's a bit of a privilege when it comes to being foreign,” Henry observes, “because it carries a set of expectations for others that make it less personal” In other words, the very foreignness that travel writers urge us to overcome becomes, for the neurodivergent traveler, a kind of protective coating. When every interaction comes pre-labeled with “TOURIST,” the pressure to perform normalcy in exactly the right way fades into your neurological static.

Echolocation 1: The Alien Paradox

Consider how Henry describes his time in Switzerland: “Interlaken was great because the level of interaction with others was much lower than in Berlin.” A switch flipped: the energy typically expended on maintaining what he calls “putting on” could finally be redirected toward actual observation, actual experience.

For him, it's those Alpine trails where human interaction reduces itself to its bare essentials—the brief nod between passing hikers, the shared understanding that sometimes presence requires absence. “I think I enjoy nature-based travel,” he tells me, in what might be the understatement of our entire conversation, “camping, backpacking, hiking, stuff like that.” But what he's really describing, I think, is travel that allows for direct experience unmediated by social performance. Places where the mask can slip, just a little, because the hills don't have eyes with which to make contact and the trees are content to whisper among themselves.

What emerges isn't so much a philosophy of travel as a cool acceptance of his own rhythms within it. “I don't know if I'll ever feel more prepared to travel,” he confesses, discussing the prospect of future international trips, “but I definitely feel more confident just knowing that I have done it and can do it.” I sense strength in this statement. “I don't think I have it in me to do it all myself, to be honest. Having someone like Aislinn makes me more likely to do it.”³

This resonates. In Henry’s case, Aislinn functions not only as a social buffer, but also as a kind of operational co-pilot. “She wants to travel more than me, that's for sure,” he explains. “But she has friends that like to travel, too. I'm more than happy for her to travel with them while I stay home.” The lack of performative coupling here, the absence of any need to pretend their travel styles must perfectly align, suggests a maturity that me and my wife Muyi, nearly ten years deep, are still nurturing in our relationship. “I think my mindset with these stressful things that I wouldn't seek out myself or that I don't do much, is that they’re going to happen one way or the other, so there's no need to stress. It's about acceptance—the more easygoing I can be the happier life will be.” This type of insight won't help you ‘maximize’ your journey or ‘hack’ your way to enlightenment. But its gentle rejection of achievement culture offers something far more valuable: permission to experience place on your own terms.

Henry’s way of navigating the world suggests to me that authentic engagement with foreign and familiar spaces, for the neurodivergent mind, sometimes requires less doing, not more. Less pressure to perform the role of capital ‘I’ Intrepid Traveler, less anxiety about whether you're ‘making the most’ of every moment. “I feel less capable when I'm bound to a whole bunch of things,” he tells me, "but when I only have a couple of obligations it's much easier to work my day around those obligations and do the things I want to do."

I take this suggestion seriously. To allow myself, as Henry does, the simple dignity of being exactly who I am, wherever I am—even if who I am is someone who'd rather admire Berlin's grit from a safe distance, or spend my Swiss vacation hiking in blessed silence. Isn't this the real privilege of being foreign? Not the ability to collect exotic experiences like souvenirs, but the freedom to finally, quietly, be.

1. With its influencers, blogs and endless parade of ‘authenticity merchants’

2. This is not a dig at Twain, Solnit, Bourdain et al. This IS a dig at those who bastardize their craft

3. Aislinn, Henry’s's partner, emerges in our conversation as a travel catalyst—not in the sense of forcing experiences, but in the chemical sense: enabling reactions that might not otherwise occur while remaining unchanged herself.