The Boy Who Was Afraid of the World - Jamie Bowlby-Whiting

As a child who suffered from crippling and irrational fears, Jamie was not the typical candidate to start hitchhiking alone through Europe. Yet at the age of 25, tired of a mundane life involving routines and comfort, he gave up everything and put his trust in the goodness of strangers. Told in the first person, this true story encapsulates the dizzying highs and desperate lows of what happens when a fearful individual chooses to let go of everything and travel alone through the world, sleeping under the stars and in the homes of strangers. It is a story about places, about people, about the constant internal battle that occurs during six months on the road. This is not an epic adventure or a travel diary. This is not a story about defeating fear and being courageous. This is an internal roller coaster spread across a whole continent. This is real life, and sometimes real life is big and scary.