This story began long before 1979 — when Rosemarie was a girl growing up in a log cabin in rural eastern Washington in the 1920s, with two sisters, June and Betty. Their maiden name was Marty, and the three of them became known as the Marty Girls1: tough, unbothered, go-getters. Family accounts differ slightly on how Tales of the Alhambra2 found her — an aunt’s Christmas gift, or pages her older sister June brought home for a school report on Granada. Maybe both are true. However it found her, the book planted a seed: as preposterous as it seemed at the time, for a kid of that generation, in that place, she decided she would go to Spain someday.

She graduated high school in 1940 from a one-room schoolhouse, class of 13, and spent a year helping on the family farm before heading to Washington State College to study journalism and Spanish. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and instead of going to Spain, she went to Portland to work in a shipyard, and from there to Alaska to type code for the Army. This was considered overseas duty since Alaska wasn’t a state yet. She was 21.

In Alaska, she met Gerald Kinney (everyone called him Jer or Jerry), who would become her husband, and spent the next 35 years with him raising a family in a suburb of Seattle. I never met Grandpa Jer (he died before I was born), but the stories that stuck with me — hiding his martini supplies in my mom’s closet, working an unfulfilling job at Boeing, and struggling with severe depression — don’t exactly jibe with Rosemarie’s fun-loving ethos. Rosemarie loved having a family — it’s all over her journal — but having a family meant her writing stayed a side pursuit instead of a career. She was clearly gifted — writing jingles for local radio stations, submitting articles to The Seattle Times — but never made enough to quit her secretary job. I like to imagine that in an alternate universe, if she’d been born a few years later, she could have been a Peggy Olson type.

She finally took the long-dreamed-of trip in the spring of 1979, at 55. By then she’d raised four children, lost her eldest in a car accident in 1975, watched her youngest (my mom <3) turn 18, and was living apart from Jer.

She took five weeks’ leave from her job as a middle school secretary to make it happen. She kept a daily journal the entire time. She’d also taken a photography class before she left, with a well-known Northwest photographer named Josef Scaylea, and hoped to sell an article or two when she got home. She bought a new suit. Her ability to take this trip, during this time in her life, at her age, is a miracle to me. My mom calls the story of this trip one of “seemingly mythological proportions” — I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Any story this good needs a cinematic ending, and this one has that too, although I wish it didn’t. Rosemarie was diagnosed with lung cancer not long after she returned, and died the following February, the week my mother turned 19.

I’ve now read her journal in two different sittings: first at breakfast at my hostel in Porto, surrounded by other solo female travelers swapping tips for the best sunset spots, and then during a breezy morning on the roof of my beloved Lisbon Poets Inn. Each time I sobbed.

I’ve sobbed for a grandmother I know I would have gotten along with like a house on fire — her lust for life colors every page of her journal. Her assessment of a young fado singer as needing better facial expressions is quite Rose-coded. And of course, we both love using three exclamation points in our writing!!! I’ve also sobbed for my mother, who was robbed of so many years of laughter with her mom — losing her at 19, right as she was leaving home, just as Rosemarie was finally getting her well-deserved second act. I can’t imagine what that felt like.

Their closeness is all over the journal — Rosemarie buying her a small gift in a Moroccan market and getting emotional over a long-distance phone call with her. On the very last page, at JFK, about to fly home, her description of my mom shows she hasn’t changed a bit:

And finally, I sobbed because I’m emotionally raw from already having listened to Lost Weekend, the new Phoebe Bridgers album, too many times.

Now, enough family lore, let’s get into it.

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Her Itinerary

A United flight with a layover at JFK — she’d never been to New York City before and thought the whole thing was glamorous. If only she could meet her granddaughter, who has a ton of opinions about NYC airports and frankly would have preferred a layover at LaGuardia.

Five nights in Madrid, including a day trip to Toledo. A seven-day tour around Morocco — Tangier, Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez, and back to Tangier. Three more nights in Madrid, then on to Granada — where she finally sees the Alhambra — then Barcelona, then Seville. Then five nights in glorious Portugal. Like me, she used Lisbon as a home base, with side trips to Estoril, Cascais, and Sintra. She flies down to Faro in the south, takes a day trip up to the hill town of Loulé, where she can’t stop mentioning the smell of the orange blossoms, and visits the Atlantic at Quarteira, remarking that it looks and feels cold like the Pacific. (For what it’s worth, I said the same thing on my own trip to the beach.)

Her last night in Lisbon, she goes on a night tour to see a fado show — this is where we get her iconic comment about facial expressions — and makes fast friends with a Canadian couple from Nova Scotia, ending up at a casino 10 miles outside the city, out until 3:30 a.m. No Portugal casino experiences for me, but I do wonder if Rosemarie would be proud or aghast at the image of me under several influences, playing the Little Shop of Horrors slot machine at Caesars Palace Las Vegas and winning big.

Her Hotel

Had I read her journal before I was already on this trip, I probably would have done a lot of things differently. For starters, I would have visited Granada and gone to the Alhambra — when my mom did her own Europe trip, you bet she went to the Alhambra. But one of the beautiful things about getting the journal when I did was the coincidences. I’m such a type-A freak, I would have been tempted to copy her trip shot for shot. A lot of people asked me, “Why Portugal and not Spain?” “Why Lisbon and not Copenhagen?” — the honest answer is that a dear friend, and one of my favorite gay guys, Edgar, had the time of his life in Lisbon a couple summers ago. I sort of just went on vibes, and I guess, I know now, Marty Girl intuition.

Every bit of overlap between our trips felt like it was meant to be — starting with her hotel, Hotel Albergaria. When she arrives in Lisbon, she asks her taxi driver to take her to a nice hotel with a view — in those days you either wrote ahead by letter for a reservation or took a recommendation from your driver, no endless price, photo, and review comparison at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday after a 5 mg edible. The view delivers, and she spends her downtime admiring the Tagus River outside her window. When I look up her hotel on Google Maps, I’m delighted to learn it (A) still exists and (B) is next to Miradouro da Graça, my favorite sunset viewpoint. That viewpoint overlooks Jardim da Cerca da Graça, where I spent several afternoons on a beach towel, drinking vinho verde and reading The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. So here I am, 47-odd years later, enjoying that same view.

We both climbed the Moorish castle ruins in Sintra and marveled at the ancient walls (because it’s Odyssey summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about Benny Safdie entering the walls of Troy as Agamemnon) with views of the colorful, postcard-worthy National Palace of Pena. I took the train through Estoril and Cascais on my way to Praia do Guincho, which caught my eye for its Point Reyes-esque bluffs and its status as a filming location for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — a C-tier Bond movie, but the only one where he actually marries the Bond girl!!! This is when I really wish Rosemarie’s photos3 were more readily available. I could do a side-by-side: her in the new suit she bought for the trip, probably not what she wore beachside, but a girl can dream — me in a sparkly brown Vetchy bikini I scoured the internet for.

For my last night in Lisbon, I made a reservation at Taberna Do Mar — one block from Hotel Albergaria. When I travel I inevitably save dozens of restaurants to my Google Maps, but this one made the cut for being Portuguese-Japanese fusion (sushi's arguably my favorite and they do a sardine nigiri) with a 10-course tasting menu for 35 euros. Dinner ended with a carob miso brownie topped with tangerine sorbet, and a 1996 Carcavelos fortified wine that Claude told me was worth the 8 euros because it's from a tiny coastal region near Cascais that almost went extinct — down to about two producers by the 1980s before a government-backed winery saved it. Socialism works, folks?! I was pretty tipsy from Portugal's signature heavy pours, the breeze was electric, I looked out the window ... a real "I can feel God in this Chili's" moment, except instead of God, I could almost feel my dead grandmother.

Her Musings

Rosemarie’s journal is an excellent accounting of the places she went and the people she met (including a lot of grumpy Spanish cab drivers), and the things she ate and drank. I was amused to learn her signature drink was Bourbon and 7 Up. I was even more amused that when she tries to order it in Casablanca, she ends up with beer and 7 Up. By the end of the trip she is regularly ordering beer and flan, which she calls the Spanish national dessert. I love this for her. In Portugal, it’s the pastries that get her. In Loulé she writes, “the pastries are too delicious — all the little layers of crust! I love them!” — which honestly could be my own review of every pastel de nata I’ve had this month.

But her musings and moments of introspection are what I cherish most. I want to read her journal over and over — to soak in her excitement, her spunk, to truly know her. I love this part because it’s so much how I felt starting my own trip:

“It is really a very exciting thing to have happen to me — and to make happen for me, and I am floating about a mile off the ground. It does seem as of this time that it was meant to be — which gives me a good feeling.”

Maybe it’s because I’ve read too many travel narratives where the protagonist is fleeing something dramatic, but there was real tragedy in the years leading up to this trip, and her journal barely touches it. She mentions the family in passing, offers a line here and there, and moves on. The closest we get to that is this reflection on the Kinney family, which, as someone who just quit a well-paying corporate job, is quite relatable:

“We aren’t searching for success — but happiness, and that is a pretty nebulous ingredient.”

She does offer one small window into the dissolution of her marriage to Jer, and his departure from Boeing. Rooting for a man you’re romantically involved with to not waste his potential is Marty Girl tradition that has sadly continued into my generation:

“I am hoping that he can work out his life to his advantage. He certainly has the potential, so it’s a shame to waste it.”

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on Rosemarie’s view of America as the world’s leading power in 1979:

“The Comments are made that our world power status may be slipping, but if my trip is typical, other countries have a long way to go before they reach our level of operation.”

Lisbon in 2026 tells a different story. The streets are cleaner than in Los Angeles, and there’s less visible homelessness — though part of that, I’ve learned, is that European cities simply have more shelter capacity, so you see fewer people sleeping on the street. There’s also a real housing crisis happening here, driven partly by remote workers (and people like me), chasing a quality of life our own countries aren’t reliably offering anymore — I was astounded by the amount of groceries I got for 7 euros. And there’s a whole other rabbit hole I won’t fully go down here: in 2001, facing a heroin epidemic, Portugal decriminalized personal drug use entirely, treating it as a health issue instead of a criminal one. There are a lot of factors behind the gap between here and home. But at least some of it is policy: choices about housing and healthcare that we’ve made differently than they have.

Her Trip to the Alhambra — and its legacy!

My mom, an excellent writer in her own right, sent me a letter to accompany Rosemarie’s journal — a preface of sorts, explaining what the journal ended up meaning to our family:

“Her faithfulness to her dream and the perseverance it took to make it happen inspired many to ‘seize the day’ and not postpone answering the call of their secret inner longings.”

One of the people she inspired was, of course, my mom. In 1986, at 25, after saving cash from a Soysage selling business and hawking hand-dyed cotton clothes for a friend at Pike Place Market in Seattle, she turned that cash into traveler’s checks and bought a one-way ticket to London — timed to catch the last year she’d qualify for the Youth Eurail Pass. I know this trip well, or thought I did: seven countries solo, until my dad (a “close friend” at the time) met her over his winter break in Spain. A detail that never stuck with me before but will now: the Alhambra, and other places from Rosemarie’s journal, were on her itinerary too. When my future dad went back to school, my mom kept going alone, making her way back to London — she’d started the trip solo and wanted to end it that way too. Knowing that now makes me admire not just my grandmother, but my mom, even more.

Three generations in, and none of us have managed the full circuit. My grandmother didn’t get the decades she was owed to keep going back. My mom didn’t go to Morocco — as she put it, you can’t do it all in one trip. And I didn’t go to the fucking Alhambra. I’ll admit it stings a little, writing this from Lisbon, knowing the place that started it all is a few hours away and I’m not going — all because I’d heard enough stories about my mom’s Eurail trip that I tuned it out. What a moment it could have been: from a little girl in a log cabin, to 32-year-old me on my own solo trip, jaded but still inspired.

But this isn’t a tragedy. Nothing in my life is — not like Rosemarie losing her eldest daughter at age 22, or dying of lung cancer despite never smoking a cigarette (real shit!!!). Something I’ve learned in therapy, usually while kicking myself for dating guys who drink too much or not standing up to a bully at work, is that you learn the lessons when you’re ready to learn them. I tuned out my mom when she talked about the Alhambra. That doesn’t matter now. What matters now is that I am finally sitting still.

With gratitude, or as Rosemarie would say, “Nighty Night,”

Rose

Lisbon, August 2026. Posted from Berlin.

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Well folks, here we goooooooo — I am coming at you live from a very luxurious eight-hour layover at Dulles International Airport in Virginia before my overnight flight to Lisbon. My most vivid childhood memory of Dulles (I grew up in Maryland, so international flights left from here) is how glamorous it seemed. It was November 2004 and we were going on a family trip to London, for which my outfits drew heavy inspiration from Amanda Bynes’ character in What a Girl Wants. I can report that in 2026, it does not feel glamorous at all. They do, thankfully, have a Chick-fil-A which (I’m sorry!) is an excellent airport meal.

I’m tired. But I picked this flight because the base fare was a cool $358, and with a well-timed flight credit, it came out to $5. There aren’t good places to sit in airports anymore. I blame airport lounges — classic American capitalism, making something better for a couple of people and worse for everyone else. As both a political statement and a budgeting strategy, I won’t be partaking in airport lounge culture during my sabbatical.

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To recap, I left LA at the end of June and drove to Bozeman to spend three weeks in Real America, timed so that my friend Raven could fly in for Fourth of July weekend and we could go to the Livingston Rodeo together — a sacred ritual. This was the first time I’d been since I was a kid. It’s the only event I’ve ever been to where they sell you a six-pack of beer in a plastic bag full of ice. This wasn’t Raven’s and my first rodeo, literally — we’d been to one together before in Hermiston, Oregon. I genuinely love a small-town event like this. But because I am both a Pretend Montana Native and a Liberal Coastal Elite, I will say the most horrifying part was actually listening to the lyrics of the new America “Two Five Zero” song, released just in time for the country’s big birthday. I agree that America is a zero right now, but I don’t think that’s what the songwriters intended. I also fulfilled a longtime goal of visiting Banff National Park in our better, northerly neighbor, Canada. When I have more time, I’ll publish a guide on how to do it with your parents (or solo, as I originally intended). We had a lot of fun!!

July was also a reminder of how easy it is to fill up your day with tasks, even when you’re unemployed. I was sharing a house with my parents, who wake up before 6 a.m. every day to work in the yard (owning property in Montana looks glamorous; it is, in fact, a lot of work), and my sister, who has been coding nonstop — I joked that this was a ploy to avoid hanging out with me, and that she was really just typing the word “code” into Claude over and over again. We did find time to watch Pop Culture Jeopardy together, a show that makes me feel both incredibly smart and slightly sad that I’m able to sweep an entire Kardashians category despite never having seen the show in its entirety.

I also want to catalog in Charli xcx fashion how i’m feeling now (everyone smart says this is her piece de resistance, and now that I have time to listen to music and wander around aimlessly, I’ll listen again with my Pitchfork1 ears on). Besides feeling tired, I mostly feel calm. A determined, happy calm, and a lot of gratitude, especially after flying back to LA for four days to say final goodbyes (and get a haircut) before my trip officially began. I don’t have that giddy excitement I used to get before big trips or events — but I also found that giddiness shifted very easily into anxiety or anger. My biggest anxiety about this trip is making it count and of course continuing to entertain you, dear readers, who enjoyed my first post!! But ultimately I know that doing what feels right in the moment, aka doing “whateva,” is going to lead me to the experiences that will change me the most.

Now I’d like to present to you my travel philosophy, aka my rules of the road. I want to be as intentional as possible with this trip. It’s easy to confuse “I watched 40 TikToks, read an Eater Guide, and made a Google Maps list” with actual research. I did this for most of my Japan trip, and I’m trying to do it less this time. As such, I am laying out some rules to help me live in the moment and have the best possible time. Some of these I’ve picked up on other solo trips, others are new. I am laying these out for you, dear reader, but also as a reminder to myself. I’ll come back to these later and judge how I did — like my very own sabbatical performance review. I am a Capricorn after all.

Rose’s Rules of the Road

• Only plan one activity a day. I’ve done enough 6 a.m. hikes on trips in my 20s to know this is not how I want to spend my time. (If this is your vibe, go off!) One activity a day, two if I am feeling ambitious, leaves room to actually explore — stumble into a coffee shop that looks good, chat with a local. I saved my money and quit my job so I could relax. WHY WOULD I WANT TO BE RUSHING??

• Immerse yourself in a place, don’t hop. I stole this one straight from Liz Gilbert. On this trip I’m opting mostly for month-long stays. Those “seven European cities in three weeks” trips stress me out. I will be doing side trips, but they’re the exception, not the rule. I am simply going to miss places. I agonized about converting my layover in New Delhi into a week in Goa, but that’s what the next trip is for.

• Use that big brain2 to learn about the place. Instead of scrolling, in the mornings I read local news. I’ve been Google-translating Público, one of Portugal’s leading papers, and have been genuinely fascinated by their debate over the Prestação Social Única — my understanding is it’s Portugal’s answer to universal basic income. If I’m traveling near an election (a treat for a freak like me!), I’m always on the hunt for a good campaign poster. Of course I learn history wherever I go, but I like to learn about what’s happening now even more.

• Read books about where you’re going. Could be fiction or nonfiction, anything to set the mood and help you learn names of places from something other than Google Maps. Some titles I’ve loved from recent and future trips: Red Water for Croatia, Stasiland for Berlin, House on Dream Street for Hanoi, The Bells of Old Tokyo for Tokyo. I am currently slogging through The Book of Disquiet by famous Portuguese poet and mustache icon Fernando Pessoa. I probably won’t finish because I am tired of hearing about “Our Lady of Silence,” but it did feel cool to sip espresso3, eat a pastel de nata, and read a chapter in the café-lined neighborhood where he actually lived.

• Learn a few phrases in the local language. Many people asked how I’d get around on this trip, and the comforting but sad answer, in our globalized economy, is that everyone’s English is better than [insert Rose trying to speak literally any language here]. That said, I like to try. I got so good at my three Japanese phrases that a couple people asked if I actually spoke the language — not the case in Croatia, where I could barely pronounce “thank you.” I’m sure my Vietnamese will suck! But ultimately, my greatest fear about traveling isn’t being kidnapped, it’s looking like a stupid American. So I make the effort, even if it’s a bad one.

• This trip isn’t “party abroad.” Party abroad, bless her, is the nickname my mom gave to study abroad, which I famously didn’t do (my mom’s words, not mine - I know plenty of people who studied abroad and had genuinely rich experiences.) I love eating, drinking, and going out. But I also want to feel good on this trip, and at the ripe age of 32, the hangovers just get worse. Everything in moderation. I fully intend to go clubbing in Berlin and see how Portuguese natural wine bars stack up to LA’s, but I’m also going to swim laps and work on a daily meditation practice. I don’t want to spend seven months on a cycle of being hungover.

• Shop for souvenirs at thrift stores. A trick I learned on road trips. It’s cheaper, better for the environment, and you’re less likely to end up with buyer’s remorse. One of my best work blazers came from a Mormon thrift store in Utah. (Take that, Argent!!) I also love browsing the book section of a thrift store in a conservative town to see what unhinged Bill Clinton takedowns they’ve got from the ‘90s. Ok, I digress, but ... could hatred of Bill be the thing that unites the left and the right?

• Sit at the bar. Not a table. This is how I’ve met some of the most interesting people while traveling. Bartenders can be a wealth of knowledge about local history, spots, and recommendations on their own menu. I love a recommendation from a trusted source more than anything. I’m like a journalist in that way. It’s how you discover a $60 omakase at a family-run spot in Kerrisdale, Vancouver, or end up talking to your bartender at Salt Lake’s best “locally sourced” restaurant about the history of labor organizing in Vegas.

So that’s what I got for now. I don’t write these posts in one sitting, so I am no longer in the Dulles airport — I'm happily editing on the terrace of my hostel in Lisbon, about to catch a train up to Porto!

With gratitude,

Rose

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These are just a couple of the things people told me at my friend’s backyard Christmas party last December. Both of them were right, and both of them were only getting part of the story.

The full story is that I’m a corporate lobbyist — the person in the room making sure legislators don’t do anything too inconvenient to the entertainment industry — which, when people ask what that actually means, I’ve started answering with: I lobby for the Big Minion.

It is also not what 18-year-old me had in mind. I started college as a women’s studies major. I did not grow up dreaming of representing a media conglomerate in state capitols.

After graduating from college, I ended up moving to Los Angeles, despite never having visited. Three years in Boston — a pretentious place where you fall asleep on the T on your way back to campus and are rudely awakened because you’re being snowed on!? INDOORS!!!? THROUGH A LEAK IN THE CEILING OF THE TRAIN?!??!! — made LA feel like the ultimate antidote.

My Bay Area cousins told me LA was a soulless place, so I spent my whole first summer there confused. What’s so wrong with a city where you eat bibimbap at communal tables out of a steaming hot stone bowl at Beverly Soon Tofu (RIP), drink a $5 craft beer on a patio in Echo Park thanks to a $1 corkage fee (also RIP), or share duck fat fries with your cool older coworkers at a K-Town beer bar (a final RIP)?

Why the big move? A fundraising job on Kamala Harris’ Senate campaign!!! Cringe as it sounds now, this was my dream job. When I got the offer, I felt like Rory Gilmore leaving to cover Obama at the end of Gilmore Girls. I took my finals a month early, shipped my Honda Accord across the country, packed and said goodbyes in an anxiety haze, and flew to LA. I was the first of my friends to line up a job post-graduation.

My whole ethos through college: Elect more women, especially women of color, and economic outcomes improve for all of us. Representation matters1, I typed over and over, for an entire academic year. How 2016 of me.

The job was hard. We worked 12-hour days helping rich people plan parties and collect checks from their friends. Our lunches were either pie from Sweet Lady Jane or takeout tonkotsu from Jinya Ramen Bar. I started gaining weight. I stopped watching VEEP because it was too real. The Saturday before election day — a merciful day off since we hit our fundraising goal — I went through the humiliating LA girlie rite of passage: trying and failing to sell my clothes at Crossroads. I joked in the family group chat that if Trump got elected it would be my fault for not driving to Nevada to canvass that day. (Hillary did win Nevada.) After the election, guys I’d met at parties who’d gone to groovy LA private schools named after roads were texting me, “Are you going to work on Kamala’s presidential campaign???”

I stayed on campaigns anyway, through 2020 — it felt like its own identity, distinct from all the friends chasing assistant jobs and starting podcasts back in LA, and I owed something to the bosses who’d taken a chance on me. What I didn’t understand yet was what that ethos would cost my body.

In 2017, I quit a job because the stress had worn a hole in my stomach lining. I remember dry heaving on a residential street in Eagle Rock and thinking: This ain’t it. Two years later, in the unhinged lead-up to a San Francisco fundraiser — which just so happened to take place at the mansion where that iconic Gavin Newsom/Kimberly Guilfoyle rug picture was taken — I found myself hitting a weed vape on my way to BART, hoping it would jumpstart an appetite I hadn’t had in days. Add in a workplace culture where “mandatory team fun” was really just “mandatory get drunk with your coworkers,” and my stomach never really stood a chance.

The fundraising numbers felt like a referendum on my entire identity, and I could not switch off. (Shoutout to Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz.) I was not the serene version of myself I am now. I yelled at work. I cried at work. I gossiped incessantly about people I worked with. Consultants I’d thought were mentors gossiped about my personal life and the other 20-somethings on staff. When I found a campaign manager who actually cared about me, I turned her into my unpaid therapist. Wasn’t the whole point of being on this side of the aisle that we treated people better?

I’ve watched enough of how the sausage gets made to lose faith in a lot of what I worked for. That’s its own essay, one I may actually write now that I’ve got the time. But for now, I aged out of believing I was making a difference, and into something else — a job in entertainment instead of politics, lobbying for a media conglomerate instead of a candidate. I showed up to work through a writers’ strike and then an actors’ strike, while an entire industry tried to figure out what to do about AI. In college, I’d pictured myself at a think tank, working to end poverty. Instead I ended up in a freezing conference room adorned with movie posters, discussing the impact of a new law on the proliferation of existing IP … AKA the Minions.

Eat, Pray, Love, Whateva

20 years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book about leaving her entire life behind to eat, pray, and love her way across Italy, India, and Indonesia. Her story had such an impact that anytime I tell someone I’m quitting my job to travel, they go, “Oh, your Eat Pray Love trip!”2

Liz was 34 and felt like her life was over — she hated her body, was leaving a marriage, felt like a villain for not wanting kids, and needed the whole trip just to look at herself again. Reading her as a 32-year-old single gal in 2026 was genuinely a wild experience. I realize she was likely dealing with clinical depression, and divorce is real grief. But even in 2006, your 30s weren’t the end of your life unless you were an actress or a pop star. What actually struck me wasn’t the sobbing on the bathroom floor — it was the all-consuming need to be with someone, and her total lack of fluency in being her own best friend. She learns this lesson by the end of the book, right before finding a new man to fix it. But in her latest memoir she reveals she’s a love addict, so apparently she didn’t figure it all out in Bali!

Getting married in my 20s was never in the cards — I spent those years too busy working, moving for jobs, and frankly being disillusioned by immature male behavior. When I started prioritizing dating in my late 20s, I felt behind. That anxiety, funnily enough, is what got me into therapy. My first real, serious relationship started at 29, right around when good ol’ Liz was probably deep in “I hate my husband” mode. (This is not counting my infamous LA boyfriend from my mid-20s, who dumped me after I strongly encouraged him to get a “real job” and whom I got revenge on by sending out a breakup press release. She contains multitudes.) A dear friend recently told me she’s impressed by how much I’ve decentered men in my life. Coming from a lesbian who’s got the whole “being happy” thing pretty figured out, it felt like a badge of honor.

I am, by most metrics, doing great. That’s the part that feels relatively new — you could not pay me to re-do my 20s. My bestie, who is incredibly successful in his own right managing one of NYT’s Top 100 Restaurants, likes to remind me that I am his most “normal and traditionally successful friend.” You’re allowed to want out even when nothing’s on fire.

I’ve struggled with low self-esteem myself — so much so that multiple campaign bosses noticed and told me to knock it off — and I remember a moment during COVID, alone in a massive one-bedroom in the Chicago suburbs (the one an intruder broke into and stole my edibles from), looking in the mirror and thinking: You are all you’ve got. If you don’t like yourself, what’s the point? I’m not fully healed, and I’m not perfect. But loving yourself, forgiving yourself, actually being your own best friend — that’s something I’ve worked hard at, for years, before this trip ever started. Therapy. A recovery program. Meditation. A gratitude journal my ex made fun of me for. An app that tracks my alcohol intake. Solo camping trips. Reading Liz treat all of this like a revelation floored me a little — not because she’s wrong to have needed the trip to learn it, but because I’d been doing the work while I was still going to the office every day.

And then there’s the kids thing. Liz felt like a villain for not wanting them. I’m pretty sure I do want them — as evidenced by the low-key physical and psychological torture I put myself through in May to freeze my eggs. But given the circles I run in and the men I’ve dated, it would, in a weird, backwards way, be easier for me not to want them at all. I’ve got more to say on this — probably once I’ve seen how a few other countries handle motherhood.

My last lesson from the book, one I could stand to take myself: Girl, stop trying so hard. I have a tendency to obsess over details and control everything I possibly can, because I struggle to just sit in uncertainty. Which is, admittedly, a funny thing to admit before describing exactly how I planned this entire trip.

And now, a test

A couple years into working for the Big Minion, I realized it wasn’t my forever job. Colleagues and friends would ask what I wanted to do next and I’d go blank. I wanted to take a nap and to travel. I wanted to be selfish. I agonized over actually quitting for months — I gave my boss a month’s notice and wrote something that started as an exit memo and ended up closer to a manifesto. And then all of it turned out to be easier than I’d braced for — my colleagues were far more supportive, and frankly more jealous, than I expected. I’ve cried a lot of happy tears getting ready for this, and felt a calm that I’ve learned only comes from actually listening to what you need. But I also wanted time to figure out what I want to do with my life …

I love working in policy. Plenty of people told me I didn’t have the qualifications for a government affairs job — no law degree, no time in a legislative office. I turned out to be great at it anyway. Reading legislation was intellectually challenging, not tedious, and I loved being part of a bill’s whole life cycle, from its introduction in January through however it ended — passed, gutted, or, let’s be honest, killed. But I’d be lying if I said all of it hasn’t started to feel a little soul-crushing, especially the parts that have nothing to do with policy at all. There have been so many times I’ve thought: Now that you’ve developed some healthier boundaries, maybe it’s time to go back to mission-driven work. I have friends who do that work, and I respect them immensely, but it comes at a cost. Plus, frankly, I’ve gotten used to a certain lifestyle.

So, is this trip avoidance? Probably. Is it also possibly the last real stretch of my life where I get to not have an answer before I settle into whatever comes next — a partner, kids, home ownership if I can swing it, a defined career path? A last hurrah, if you will. But I don’t think these two things cancel each other out. In the words of my girl, but also supervillain, Yasmin Kara-Hanani from Industry3: “It’s both and.” So I’m doing both, instead of pretending the other isn’t there.

I spent the last five years in LA, in my glorious Echo Park apartment, learning how to be my own best friend while I still had a job to answer to every day. I had a schedule. I went to yoga. I watched the Dodgers win the World Series twice with my neighborhood besties. I threw parties on my roof, ordered pizzas from Quarter Sheets, watched old seasons of Survivor when I was too hungover to do anything else. It was its own kind of work, in a way. But this trip is a different test. Who am I without my job? Without my routine? I love not working, I love being on vacation, but how’s it going to feel for seven months straight? Will I never want to work again? Will I have some epiphany about what comes next? I don’t know. I’ve built some strategies. I don’t know yet if they’ll hold up.

I’ll write about how I actually travel — the rules I’ve built for myself, the books, the philosophy of one activity a day — in a separate post, because that deserves its own space. I may, eventually, write the messier, more honest version of why I left campaign work, because it turns out I’ve got a lot to say. For now, this is just the beginning; not a plan for who I’ll be by the end of this, but an honest accounting of who I am walking in, and an open question about who I’ll be walking out.

With gratitude,

Rose