I love to travel. New sights, new sounds. I find the thought of going someplace new exciting.

Ooooh, and traveling out the country? Yeah, that’s even better.

You step past TSA security at the airport, you sit down on the train, you start up the car—and all of a sudden you’re on an adventure. New places. New sights. New food. New people. The whole thing is exciting.

But it’s not all Instagram-worthy, is it? Some things about travel can be pretty disappointing. When I was a kid, I’d spend summers in Mexico at the children’s home with my grandparents. It’s thrilling for a little kid to be in another country. So exotic when everybody speaks a different language from you … except when you’re stuck by yourself and you can’t make the lady selling homemade clay pipes at the market understand that you don’t need a pipe—you’re looking for luchador masks. Except you didn’t know they were called luchadors; you just knew them as the masks that goofy looking professional wrestlers wore.

Apparently, it was expecting too much to think she might be able to communicate with a nine year-old in a language not her own. I never did get the mask, but if you’re in the market for a clay pipe, I’m pretty sure I can hook you up.

Not knowing the language can really mess you up when you leave the country. Want to know one of the places I felt most alien in?

Canada. Seriously. We spent a week and a half in Montreal a few years back, and those dang French Canadians insist on speaking … get this … French. I know, right?

I didn’t practice my French, because, I mean, it’s Canada, for crying out loud. Aren’t they, like, almost American?

Turns out they’re still pretty serious about the whole Parlez-vous-Francais thing up there in the great white north. All the signs are in French. You go to the IGA to pick up some milk and bread and, get this, the cashiers speak French to you. Even the little kids running around the playground … speaking French.

The whole thing is a little off-putting, if you ask me. Why couldn’t they speak Spanish or Italian, or here’s a thought: English?

I’m kidding. Montreal was lovely, French language and all. But I felt there, like I’ve felt in other countries, the acute realization that this place wasn’t set up first with me in mind.

Believe me when I say, the whole thing came as quite a shock to me, too.

Here in the U.S. things are pretty much designed with people like me in mind. White, straight, middle class, cisgender men.

I know it. Seriously. I do.

I realize now the privileged hand I was dealt before I ever so much as took my first gulp of air. I didn’t do anything to earn the deference our culture pays to people like me, so I’m not going to try to “feel” extra guilty to compensate for it. It is what it is.

On the other hand, I’m also not going to act like my privilege doesn’t exist. I must be constantly aware of the fact that other people’s experiences of the world are different from mine, and that my experience shouldn’t be held up as the standard against which other people’s lives are measured. In fact, I have to be willing to let the experiences of those I’ve too often casually assumed existed on the margins move to the center—to completely rethink what the margins might look like if people like me existed out there—instead of the people who’ve for too long lived on the edges.

As a White parent, for example, I don’t have to have “the conversation” with my sons about how not to provoke the police.

I don’t have to worry that somebody’s following me around the Target to make sure I don’t swipe a toaster or something.

I’m not constantly beset by the nagging suspicion that people think I got my job not because I’m qualified for it, but because of my race.

As a semi-scary looking male, I generally don’t have to wonder if I’m being targeted as a victim of sexual assault when I walk through a poorly lit parking garage at night.