I grew up with no real sense of "home." I think probably because of that, traveling was never exciting for me. I did it. I spent months bouncing around various places, but it didn't feel like anything unusual to me. Each was just one more new place.

It wasn't until I turned 30 and abruptly made a decision to pick somewhere and stay there that I found the kind of satisfaction it seems like most people get from traveling. It's not challenging for me to adapt to new situations and experiences. It's challenging for me to navigate the depth of experience of the same people and the same places, day in and day out. It's especially challenging for me to face the depth of myself that I have encountered since deciding to put down roots.

It's a lot less glamorous to invest my time into trying to understand and solve local problems with local people than it would be to create highlight reels of exotic locations, but I feel like I'm growing more this way than I would otherwise.

It makes me think whichever type of experience you didn't grow up with might be the challenge you need as an adult. If you grew up with all the challenges of a small town people rarely leave and where everybody knows you, maybe you need the challenge of new places where nothing is familiar and you have to start all your encounters from scratch.

But if you didn't "belong" anywhere as a kid, maybe what you need to develop in adulthood is the opposite.