Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to reinvent yourself or uncover a new you through travel. I, for example, do this on the regular. Sometimes it’s as minor as an eight-course meal of foods I fear, while other times, I go all out, shave my head and move into a Buddhist temple. In general, my travel self is more bold, more go-with-the-flow and more independent than regular me. I like to travel simply to coax her out. This weekend, however, she let me down. Hard.

For years I’ve wanted to go bioluminescent kayaking — a nighttime experience I envisioned as floating dreamily down a blue-green river of glowing phytoplankton. Last Saturday night, I finally got the chance right here in northern California. After what felt like hours of orientation and choosing our oars, kayaks, splash jackets, life vests and spray skirts, our group of 20 adventurers set off. A mere fifteen minutes later, after trying to catch up with kayaks we couldn’t see or hear in the dark, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. My travel fantasy was just that: a pure fantasy. Suffice it to say, I’m not a nighttime kayak-girl.

My husband, on whom I’d sprung our little adventure, was paddling with his oar upside down and backward. He couldn’t time his strokes to coincide with mine and kept trying to steer, despite the fact that I was seated in the stern with clear control of the rudder. Exhausted at paddling but getting nowhere and already stressed from earlier having shattered my new laptop, I fought back waves of panic. Neither of us can swim, and the black Bay waters around our plastic kayak rippled for miles. Oh God, if we lived to tell the tale, was there any way I wouldn’t have to?

There’s an entire genre of white-woman-memoir-turned-feature-film devoted to the travel-to-reinvent-yourself fantasy. The books are usually set in Tuscany or some other European countryside where picturesque, abandoned villas and charming handymen await. This genre perhaps reached its climax with Elizabeth Gilbert, who made India and Bali sexy, too. I once had a white female graduate student report me to the Dean for joking with my Black teaching assistant about “Eat, Pray, Love.” The student felt transformed by the text, which I’d assigned, and by expressing amusement at its romantic tropes (before class started), we, the “two Black women” named in her complaint, were personally attacking her.

Full disclosure: I have additional reasons for resenting “Eat, Pray, Love.” My first memoir (published two years prior) is similar. Like Gilbert, I fled America and Western markers of success. Like Gilbert, I headed to Asia, where I stumbled my way into a transcendent experience, as Gilbert was paid to. (Unlike her, though, I wasn’t clever enough to get an advance from a New York publisher to have a spiritual break-through in my country of choice.) And, while my account of flunking out of college and becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun is widely taught, I certainly didn’t become a bestselling author with a TED talk and a European lover. So, yes, I’m hella jealous.

But jealousy aside, I believe it’s important to separate our personal desires to recalibrate through travel from the expectation that the world exists as a blank page awaiting the Western protagonist. Caribbean-born author Jamaica Kincaid put it beautifully in “A Small Place,” her anti-travel classic: “Since you are a tourist, a North American or European … and not an Antiguan black returning … from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot, clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed (which is to say special); you feel free.”

After a lifetime of being Black in America, I rely on travel for that taste of exhilaration and freedom. At the same time, I’m aware that the travel-as-freedom-and-reinvention narrative comes from colonialism. I don’t want my travel fantasy to be at the expense of local realities, especially in the Caribbean and other Black nations. I can cheer “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” provided I also acknowledge that Stella’s dreamy blue-green river was enabled by her blue passport and green dollars. It’s good to have my fantasy capsize every so often; otherwise, I could end up paddling in the dark.

Faith Adiele founded the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color, and her award-winning memoir Meeting Faith routinely makes travel listicles. Her media credits include A World of Calm (HBO-Max), My Journey Home (PBS), and Sleep Stories for the CALM app, two of which involve traveling by boat – “The Waters of Senegal” and “The Land of Springs.” The latter ends with a bioluminescent encounter in Jamaica. She’s @meetingfaith on Twitter and Instagram.