Thanks for bearing with me over the past few months. I’m getting ready to start publishing my book, chapter by chapter, on Substack, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, this is a pretty solid preview of that story:

For those of you who found me through my first talks about letting go of fear by traveling through South America without a phone for 3 months, this is a really different version of the story. It chronicles the things I learned across the last 7 years of living, working, and traveling abroad that helped me to live my best life.

But the biggest difference is that it also talks about a part of the story that I’ve never spoken about publicly.

I had no idea when I stepped on that plane 7 years ago that what I was really stepping into was a life where I would fulfill my childhood dream of growing up to travel around the world, learning about magic.

Hello! If you ended up here from my talk on “Why getting robbed at gunpoint in Colombia is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” welcome! It means so much to me that you want to hear more about my story.

Letting go of fear to go after the life I really wanted, and learning how to have faith that everything was going to be okay, is a huge part of my story.

But the real story, the story I want to tell, the story that means the most to me, isn’t about travel or managing anxiety or faith.

It’s about magic.

Real magic.

Because when I was 14 years old, what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to grow up to travel around the world, learning about magic. Real magic, like Harry Potter magic. And I was so depressed as a teenager because I KNEW that that was supposed to be my life, and I had no idea how I could possibly get there.

Because there’s no such thing as magic. Right?

When I set foot on that plane 7 years, I had absolutely no idea that what I was really stepping into was a life where I would grow up to travel around the world, learning about the real-world equivalent of magic.

And that’s what I’m here to talk about.

So if you’d like to join me for a story that is essentially Eat Pray Love meets Harry Potter, subscribe. It’s one h*ll of a ride.

Leaving the states definitely comes with its own problems. While you’re traveling, you have to navigate all of the logistics of getting around in an unfamiliar place in an unfamiliar language, figuring out the subway, feeding yourself, acclimating to different expectations of how to act and how to dress, and figuring out the thousand everyday little differences between wherever you are and where you’re from.

The internet is full of places to learn about culture shock, but I always found this particularly helpful during my early travels.

But for me, it’s getting back home that has always been far more difficult.

Because then the adventure is over, and I go back to what most people would call “real life.”

Whatever exciting new foods I discovered are no longer available. The cool, new people I met are thousands of miles away. And most importantly, I am not having amazing, new, life-changing experiences every day, riding the high of the adventures that fill me like nothing else does.

I have to come down.

Sound like a drug addict? I am. I’m addicted to the high I get off of travel. And like all addicts, I hate nothing more than coming down.

Except boredom. Which is the real problem with being back home.

I cannot stand being bored. It is the absolute worst case scenario for me. I’ll take pain over boredom any day, knowingly and gladly.

Because at least when I feel pain or anguish or anger, I’m FEELING something. Feeling nothing feels like a death sentence. Why am I even here anymore? Honestly, I do get a little suicidal in those moments sometimes.

I know that the pain and the hard things fuel those high highs of joy, love, ecstasy – feeling so good that I could almost step off the ground and fly.

During my 2 years as a digital nomad, I was having once-in-a-lifetime experiences – those high highs – basically every 2 weeks. And I am so grateful for all of the amazing things I experienced: living in a Buddhist monastery, cherry blossoms in Japan, the world’s most dangerous festival, hiking in Patagonia, Carnival in Brazil, swimming with pink dolphins in the Amazon, an aboriginal concert at the Sydney Opera House, checking all 7 continents off my bucket list – and that barely scratches the surface. I became best friends for the day with people from all over the world, peered into local life in communities across Asia, Australia, and Latin America.

In many ways, my life was like an adventure novel. But after 2 years of moving on average every 10 days – while also constantly taking on new languages, new currencies, new staple foods, new public transit systems, new ways of doing EVERYTHING – I’ve had to own that maybe I need a little more boredom in my life. That even explorers need to rest.

Because my tank is empty now. Sitting down every month to figure out where you’re going to live the next month is physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting. And also just straight-up time-consuming. I was so busy making plans, packing and unpacking, figuring out where the next grocery store was and which bus to take and what local words and customs I needed to pick up and facilitating some kind of human interaction to keep myself sane that I just didn’t have time for anything else. My life didn’t have space for anything else.

I mean, not literally. I was still working (some of the time – not as much as I’d have liked to be honest), volunteering in exchange for room and board, learning languages, making connections, checking visa requirements, figuring out how to get my prescriptions filled, and searching for somewhere to land more permanently. But it FELT like I never had time for anything other than planning my next step.

In some ways, that was great, because I really was living in the moment. But my bank account was definitely feeling the strain, as was my body as I put it through new thing after new thing after new thing – and a thousand new beds – never with a real chance of recovery.

And at a certain point, I wasn’t even really enjoying the travel anymore. That’s not true. I still got a high off exploring and new experiences, but it was more of a bump than a jettison, and eventually it just wasn’t worth it anymore. I found myself craving the ability to buy a bag of rice and actually use most of it, instead of checking a new country off my list.

I bought a couch last week. That’s the most exciting thing I’ve done in a long time, for me. I’m staying with friends this week that BUY IN BULK, and I’m so jealous.

As much as I’d like to just ride the highs forever, that’s not how this works. Without stability, my body eventually starts to shut down, and then what’s the point? I was starting to feel super guilty that I was spending money on experiences billions of people would kill to have when I wasn’t really appreciating them anymore. And I was feeling an ever-stronger pull toward doing something more meaningful with my time.

The problem is that too much stability kills my soul – or at least that’s how it’s always been for me.

I don’t want it.

I do need it.

But the more bored I am – the more stable I am, the more my body gets its chance to relax into a routine – the more my mind wanders off to create stories that shake things up. The more my brain actively chooses to bring drama – largely just imagined – into my life to avoid my worst case scenario: having my life become going to work, coming home, making dinner, watching TV, maybe going to the gym, going to bed, and starting all over the next day.

That is my hell.

That is why I travel. Because the hit of dopamine I get off of new experiences is my heaven.

But it’s not working anymore.

These last couple of years, I was using travel HARD, much more than I ever had before, to keep me going, and there have been physical consequences to my withdrawal. Like any addict, my tolerance increased, and I needed bigger and bigger hits to keep going.

Like Antarctica. Like hitting all 7 continents. Like finally, FINALLY, checking off the thing that has been #1 on my bucket list my entire life.

But I was so exhausted and jet lagged and broken during my African safari that I was only half-there.

It was still amazing, but I feel like I missed it.

I feel like I’ve been missing LIFE.

So now I need to find balance between having enough adventure to keep me engaged with my life and enough stability to allow me to enjoy it.

This year, my anthem has been “House Parties” by Dawes. I saw Taylor Goldsmith play it – 10 feet away from me – at an actual house party back in December thanks to a friend’s music industry connections. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since.

That song shits on everything I’ve always loved: travel, the beach, Disneyland! So why on Earth am I so fixated on it?

Because this is my life right now. Not epic adventures but day-to-day ones, back home with people I care about.

I think a lot these days about these 7 weeks I had in Puerto Rico in the fall of 2021. I was newly divorced, living on my own for the first time as an adult, adjusting to a new culture in a place that was ripe with adventure but not the easiest place to live. I was grieving, going through an unnecessarily difficult divorce, and didn’t care for my job. Those 7 weeks should have sucked.

Instead, they were the best 7 weeks of my life.

Because for 7 weeks, I did find that balance. And got to live the life I always wanted. I worked during the week, but left a few hours to go to the beach on weekdays. Then on the weekends, I was exploring the island with a friend who wanted to explore it too. She’s not who I would have chosen to adventure with, but she did something for me that no one, in my 33 years of life, had ever done before.

She showed up.

She was exactly what I needed: someone who wanted to explore but didn’t want to lead. Someone who WANTED to participate in my Weekend Warrior lifestyle but was largely open to just following me around as I dragged her around the island. And the thing that really MADE the experience was that she ALSO turned out to be someone I ended up getting on really well with at home – much better than I ever would have imagined.

That is what I want out of life right now: bringing joy into my day-to-day life and people I care about to share it with.

The trouble is, I’ve been isolated from most of my people because there’s nowhere left in this world where I have true community anymore. And I’m realizing more and more every day just how unacceptable that is to me.

But somehow, despite the fact that I haven’t lived there in 20 years (except one little moment during COVID), Southern California – where I grew up, where I never intended to leave forever, and then never intended to return to – seems to be the place in the world where I have the most people. Several close friends who fill different needs in my life. Enough where I wouldn’t have to completely start over. And at least one that I know wants to Weekend Warrior it as much as I do.

So I’m just praying that the job I’m interviewing for works out. Because it seems like my best chance at the balance that I need. And now I have to wonder, was this the life I was working toward all along?

What makes life worth living for you?

I always wanted to live abroad, but the moment that most inspired me to get off my ass and actually do it was watching Semana Santa in San Lucas Tolíman.

This tiny town in rural Guatemala completely transformed the week before Easter. On Semana Santa, or Good Friday, all 30,000 residents came together to build alfombras – a miles-long carpet made from pine needles, saw dust, fruit, vegetables, and flowers that snaked throughout the entire town. As evening approached, every single person walked out their front door to watch a procession inch along the alfombras throughout the town.

I had never experienced that level of community in the United States – a holiday where EVERYONE came out to celebrate together. I wanted that. I wanted that level of connection. Desperately.

A big part of why I moved abroad – and why I specifically targeted developing countries – was to find a way to make that moment my actual life. To see what community looked like in other countries. I wanted to learn how I could incorporate that level of “togetherness” into my own life.

Because growing up in California, it had never even occurred to me that such a thing existed. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the San Francisco Bay Area. People were so insistent on including everybody that the ability to come together and celebrate as a unit like they did in Guatemala never seemed possible.

Don’t get me wrong – I love that I got a taste of so many different cultures living there. It’s one of the things I like best about the Bay. I highly valued the festivals and conversations and, above all, food from different cultures that came from living there.

But when everyone is doing their own thing, you do lose something too.

No one said “Merry Christmas” at my office at Stanford, not because they didn’t celebrate it, but because they were afraid of appearing offensive to anyone who might not – at least, that was my impression. The streets packed with trick-or-treaters of my childhood were few and far between. So were Christmas lights. Even Fourth of July, a decidedly non-religious holiday, was kind of a joke.

That sense of oneness – togetherness – is one of the reasons I liked living in Japan so much. Their culture is so focused on homogeneity that any step off the assembly-line path is considered a big deal. While there were definitely problems with that, I loved it. Because it allowed them to preserve and celebrate their unique culture without foregoing modern amenities. It kept their streets clean and allowed morning commuters to flow without getting in each other’s way. It helped the trains run on time and kept costs down because no one was wasting time fighting the system.

Homogeneity is convenient, and it makes life so much easier in a way that America – as it demands prioritizing the individual over the collective – just doesn’t understand.

That said, I think I felt the lack of connection growing up here more than a lot of Americans because I didn’t have a strong family unit. I essentially grew up estranged from my extended family. My immediate family was strong when I was growing up, but – as many of us do – I moved away for college and never came back. And because I was living in the Bay as housing prices skyrocketed from “ridiculous” to “truly unmanageable,” so many of my friends came for a year or two and then moved away in search of affordable housing. I didn’t grow up in a church or with close family friends or any of the other ways that people build community. Much of my adult life has been a seemingly endless struggle to build what many people had handed to them. And I had to do it with an introvert’s social skills.

All that is probably why I love expat communities so much. The thing about being a foreigner in somebody else’s country is that we all came from somewhere. Most of us came without built-in family or friends, so we all know how hard it is, and we all need to rebuild community when we get there.

Of the expat communities I’ve experienced abroad, Phnom Penh felt the most close-knit. There’s not a lot of foreigners in the country, and the language barrier and culture make it particularly difficult to truly assimilate (although some manage it), so barang (foreigners) tend to stick together. There was a nice mix of “everyone knows everyone,” but the city was big enough that we weren’t constantly running into each other. We would turn up for trivia in English on Tuesday nights, go to the same weekend gatherings, support each other’s restaurants and comedy shows. Phnom Penh is far enough off the tourist trail that people would generally stick around long enough to get to know each other. When I went back five years later, many were still around.

Puerto Rico was much more transient, but I loved that this was my first opportunity to have a cohort of “local” friends – that is, Puerto Ricans who had lived in the states long enough to speak fluent English and share some cultural similarities but who also understood life on the island in the way that I wanted to. I was able to do so much more to assimilate. My Boricua friends showed me local swimming holes and hidden beaches, cooked local dishes with me, and patiently helped me limp through Spanish. I felt like I had a chance to really get to know the locals and the culture in a way I just couldn’t in Cambodia.

At the same time, it was easy to bond with many of the other statesiders who were attracted to the island’s natural beauty. Easy to find others who wanted to explore the island’s beaches, rivers, hiking trails, and watering holes. At one point, I spent 7 weekends in a row exploring with a friend who was born in PR and had just rediscovered her roots. It wasn’t planned – we just kept finding things that we both wanted to do, and weekend adventures just happened! That was what I had always wanted my life to look like – what I tried FOR YEARS in California to create for myself – but it took 33 years and a pandemic for me to find someone else who wanted that too.

As a digital nomad, I was always meeting cool people. The only way for me to stay sane while solo traveling was to find other travelers to adventure with along the way. We would be best friends for a day… and then never see each other again. Sometimes we kept in touch, and we had amazing, life-changing adventures together… but it’s not the same as having people who know you in your daily life, and eventually those intense and meaningful but fleeting bonds just weren’t enough anymore.

The biggest challenge in my life now is that I’ve spent so much time moving around that I don’t have consistent community anywhere. There are friends I’ve met while traveling, and friends I had before I left, but we’re scattered all around the world. I’m tired of having to get on a plane to see the people I care about. I want a way for us to be together more. Having a homebase somewhere would be easiest, but if I’m really honest with myself, I’m a much happier person when I’m traveling. I start to feel stagnant and stuck when I spend too much time in one place. And the people I feel closest to these days feel the same way.

What I really want – what I think would make the most sense for me and my traveling friends – is to build a 21st century nomadic community.

Like indigenous communities of old – the Lakota, Romani, Bedouins, Mongols, and more – I’d love to build a community of people who decide they want to travel together. Maybe not all the time, but most of the time. A group of people who want to walk through life the way that I, and so many others I’ve met, have moved these last few years: never in one place for too long. A group of people who want to be each other’s nomadic family. Who want to live together, even raise kids together, while experiencing everything the world has to offer.

I know I’m not the only person who is tired of the “solo” but not the “travel” part of solo travel. I can’t be the only digital nomad who would be willing to give up a little freedom to work and travel together.

Maybe we have a homebase for part of the year, or maybe we flit off to our own respective bases for part of the year. But I think all of us would like to have a life where we spend a few months a year somewhere new. Somewhere different. Somewhere we haven’t yet explored!

I know it’s not just me. So if this is what you want your life to look like, hit me up. And let’s do it!

Coming back to the United States after six years abroad has been incredibly challenging in so many ways. But it’s been such a relief to not have to think so much before I speak anymore.

I’ve lived in six countries and traveled to all seven continents. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s how to live — and communicate — in a culture that’s very different from my own.

Working for a local NGO in Cambodia, I was the only foreigner in my office. It took me a month to realize that my co-workers were missing half of what I was saying; that for them to understand me, I could use only the most proper English: no idioms, no colloquialisms, no slang, nothing that wasn’t textbook English — and British English at that.

And fair enough. They were, after all, adjusting to my language when I really ought to have been adjusting to theirs.

But it’s harder than it sounds. I don’t think we realize how pervasive idioms and colloquialisms and slang and dropping letters or sounds really are.

Take, for instance, words like “hey” or “wanna” or even “can’t”. Sure, anyone who has spent any time talking to an actual human in English is going to understand these. But someone who is literally only learning out of a textbook, someone who does not have even textbook fluency? I don’t think it would be fair to expect them to understand these.

Now, my Cambodian colleagues — the ones who spoke fairly fluent English at least — would understand these words. They were, after all, the cream of the crop, working at one of the highest-regarded NGOs in the country, THE premier research organization on the Khmer Rouge.

But things like “this sucks” or “is that cool?” or “this is a big deal” — things I say every day without really thinking about them — these sayings can get iffy (← hey look, another one) real fast. Many probably would understand, but I couldn’t expect them to, and I never really knew where to draw the line (← and another one!). I use phrases like this so often that it can be difficult to find replacements, particularly as I was talking about work, which wasn’t always straight-forward (← questionable).

And I had to do it on the fly (← this is too out there [← this too]), in the moment, as I was talking. Every time I opened my mouth (← questionable) at the office.

I had to either feel it out or find a more formal way of saying what I was trying to say. And it’s really hard to feel things out in a culture you don’t know well (or really at all) where negative feedback — ANY kind of negative feedback — is considered rude. And where rudeness is considered a huge offense.

The mental work of trying to navigate that every day really added up, for me.

It probably took me another month to get the hang of it enough to be confident that at least 70% of what I said was making it through (← this would be iffy), and even then, I knew things were getting lost in translation the whole time I was there.

Puerto Rico was easier. So many people spoke English that it was sometimes difficult to practice my Spanish — which was its own brand of frustrating. But this time I was the one pleading for people to talk like a textbook. Puerto Rican Spanish is notoriously filled with slang, so much so that when I told my friend from Peru that I was moving there, he cried, “No! You’ll have the worst accent!”1

I love Puerto Rico — of all the places I’ve lived, it’s my favorite — but it is particularly difficult to understand when half the letters in a word get dropped (for example, “pescado” is pronounced “pecao” — when my Spanish tutor told me this, I almost quit right then and there). I complained about the dialectical nature of Puerto Rican Spanish incessantly while I lived there.

But if I’m honest, I do the same thing in California… although not while talking to non-native speakers… but of course, I only know not to — only think not to — because I’ve traveled.

Because I know how it is.

Learning languages is hard for me. I can’t even begin to count how many months of my life I’ve ceded to stressing about having to speak in Spanish or Japanese or figuring out how to communicate without speaking at all (after a year in Southeast Asia, I got real good at pointing).

And it’s not just languages. Little gestures we take for granted are different in other countries too. For instance, the reason my Khmer2 colleagues knew what “👍” meant is because of Facebook, not because it’s something they do on the regular (← they’d probably have to think about this one).3

I’ll never forget this one moment when I was wayyyyy out in one of the provinces, waiting for a bus, not sure if I had missed it, and this oh-so-kind man was trying so hard to help me, but we couldn’t understand each other at all, and he kept waving his hands out by his sides in a way that was clearly meant to mean something, and to this day, I have no idea what he was trying to say.

But the truth is, much as I lament how difficult languages are for me, it really wasn’t that hard for me to adjust to the expectations of people in other countries. I was a guest there. I didn’t belong, and everyone knew it. I always made an effort to learn the cultural norms, and I did make a strong effort to follow them. But the truth is, people had different expectations for me because I was a foreigner, and that worked for me. If I did something out of the ordinary, it was easy to explain away because I wasn’t from there. It was easy to write it off (← nope).

And to be completely frank, it was easy to take advantage of this.

When all the foreignness — the language barrier and the trash in the roads and the unrelenting heat and the noise and the lack of greenery and the air pollution — became too much, it was easy to go walk by the Mekong where the tourists stay and pretend that’s all I was — someone who was only going to be here a few days and didn’t speak the language or understand the customs.

I didn’t do anything that I knew was going to be offensive — I just stopped trying so hard to live up to ALL of the expectations I knew I could meet.

But I can’t get away with that here.

In the states, I know exactly what the expectations for me are, and I know what people will think of me if I don’t meet them. In Cambodia or Japan or Peru, I could occasionally let my freak flag fly (← not a chance), just a little, and no one would be the wiser.

Not here.

In some ways, living abroad was a refuge from society’s expectations. And in stepping away from their expectations, I also slipped away from some of my own expectations for myself.

And losing that is one of the reasons it’s so hard for me to be back here.

Because the truth is, for all its hardship, I actually loved not being able to understand people sometimes.

When so much is lost in translation, so many of the negative things people say — the little ways you can tell what they’re thinking — get thrown out too. I think this is why I love Japan so much: people may very well be judging the shit out of me as I walk down the street, but they are far too polite to give any indication of it to my face, and I am perfectly fine not knowing about the bad things some rando (← god no) is thinking about me.

It’s harder to escape it here.

It’s hard to come back to it when I’ve spent so much time not having to know.

And while I absolutely think my mental health has gone up a few notches from all that time away, it stings twice as hard to readjust to understanding, to having to accept, that I can tell more of what people think about me here.

… or can I?

America has so many cultures, so many voices, so many ways of being… who’s to say whether I can in fact tell what other people are thinking about me? Who’s to say how much I’m projecting versus how much I’m just picking up what they’re thinking? How many social cues are based on my background, not theirs?

I often ponder just how much of why we have so much trouble getting on is purely because of misunderstandings. That, even within one country, there are so many ways of communicating that pieces of our national dialogue get lost in translation.

That many of us find it difficult to truly express ourselves. That in a country based on freedom, so many people I know are afraid to speak because they’re afraid that people will judge them, and judge them harshly, if they say what they’re really thinking.

But personally, I’ve found the opposite to be true — that when I share things that seem too personal or too “out there” (← no), there might be one or two people who judge me, but the vast majority of people applaud instead. They thank me for being brave or sharing a piece of myself or inspiring them to do the same.

And the truth is, my life is a bit lost in translation right now. I’m not the same person I was when I left this country, and I’m still trying to teach myself — let alone the other people in my life — who I am now. And how to be an American when I’ve spent so much time thinking of myself more as a citizen of the world.

So I’m here to process, and also to share, what it was like living in Thailand, Cambodia, Puerto Rico, and Japan, and what it was like traveling through all seven continents. And what it’s like to be back in the states now and how I view my home country differently than I did when I left.

I’m here to translate — for anyone who cares to listen, and also for myself — who I am now versus who I was when I left. And I’m hoping I figure out the next phase of my life along the way.