The Purpose of Getting Lost is a reflective memoir about identity, belonging, and the courage to question the life you’ve carefully built. As Tracy Smith enters midlife—navigating the end of a long marriage, children growing up, and a growing sense of disconnection—she realizes she has spent years performing for expectations rather than listening to herself.

Through solo travel across more than thirty countries, Tracy doesn’t search for reinvention or escape, but for clarity. In unfamiliar places and quiet moments in between, she begins to notice her patterns, longings, and the stories she’s lived by—some worth keeping, others ready to be released.

Told with honesty, warmth, and insight, The Purpose of Getting Lost explores what it means to stop waiting to belong and start building a sense of home from the inside out. It’s a book for anyone who has ever felt out of place, questioned who they are becoming, or sensed that getting lost might be an essential part of finding their way.

Excerpt

I was looking for something before I even had the words to know what it was I was looking for. Most of us start searching before we recognize the question driving us—the question that drives every journey. Mine was this: Where do I belong?

It wasn’t a question I could answer from my couch in Chicago. So I went looking for answers—and found them in movement. I danced in mosh pits in Doha and sank in quicksand in the Amazon. I drank rice wine with the Hmong and laughed with strangers. I swam naked in the Caribbean and got lost in the streets of Reykjavík.

The geography shifted, relationships rose and fell, and my body broke and healed. Through it all, belonging never announced itself—it only whispered. Not after the divorce that left me untethered, the kids who were growing up and away, or the friendships that faded when I stopped playing the part.

For most of my life, I’d looked for belonging in other people—in marriage, in motherhood, in the opinions of friends and family who always seemed just out of reach. I bent myself into shapes I thought would make me acceptable. I smiled when I wanted to scream. I stayed when I wanted to run.

What I’ve learned is that belonging isn’t something we wait for. It’s something we build—from the inside out.

Buy on Amazon Kindle | Paperback | Bookshop.org

About the Author

Tracy Smith, Ph.D. is a writer exploring the intersection of travel, identity, and belonging. Her work focuses on the small, often uncelebrated moments when women begin choosing themselves—sometimes quietly, sometimes far from home.

Through personal narrative and place-based storytelling, Tracy examines what happens when certainty loosens, expectations fall away, and life is allowed to remain unresolved. Her writing is less about escape and more about attention: noticing how freedom, acceptance, risk, and community take shape in everyday lives across cultures and landscapes.

She is the author of The Purpose of Getting Lost and the creator of The Geography of Connection, an ongoing project that follows these themes through travel, essays, and lived experience. Tracy’s work speaks to readers navigating reinvention, midlife change, and the courage it takes to live without a neat ending.

Connect:

Substack: https://substack.com/@tracysmithauthor

Website: https://tracysmithauthor.com/