“You flew to Turkey, stayed at a monastery, now you’re in Nepal about to trek around Annapurna… and what scares you is posting on a blog.”
“Yes,” I confess over a plate of half-eaten momos.
Mandy (to be formally introduced later) shakes her head in disbelief.
It was at this moment that we identified a new fear of mine: being vulnerable online. I’m unfazed by this. Not a day goes by that I’m not confronted with a new creepy crawly truth about myself.
A therapist once told me, after I confessed my frustration about not being done “fixing myself,” that there is no end. “It’s a lot like walking down a beach. You flip over rock after rock and see what you find. You’ll never flip every rock, but you keep going anyway.”
And so, hi, here I am, saying hello after recently flipping a new rock on my pebbly Washington coastline.
I’m writing to you from my bed in Lalitpur, aka Patan, a city in Kathmandu Valley. Today marks the 30th day since I flew from Seattle. So much has happened since we last spoke that I need to catch you up on… and it’s become clear to me that I need to start from the beginning.
I’ve known I wanted to travel abroad for an extended period of time since I was in high school (yes, I meant beginning). I was one of the lucky ones in life who could travel abroad on their parent’s dime, and it was through this gift that I caught “the bug.”
I remember hanging out in my mom’s backyard the summer before I turned 17 when I met a guy in his late 20s who had just returned from a multi-year trip around Asia. It was the coolest thing I had ever heard of. He got me thinking about traveling abroad after I graduated high school. A summer in northern Thailand teaching English the following summer didn’t help.
Flash forward to early fall of my senior year of high school. I’m sitting across from my dad at Doc’s Marina Grill telling him I’m not going to college because I want to travel. The poor guy looked like he saw a ghost. “With what money?” he asked. I gave a half-brained answer about staying in town after graduating to work and save before setting out on a six-month venture…
We all know how that went.
I kept my head down for the next four years, allowing myself to get swept away in the rhythm of university, but I still had an itch to scratch. I started traveling around the US and western Canada, often because of sailing regattas and my increasing interest in hiking and camping. These opportunities meant everything to me—giving me enough energy to keep working, saving, and achieving. I started to get the idea that if I did well enough in school, I could get a decent supply chain job, pay off my student loan debt, and travel/do seasonal work in my mid/late-20s.
By my senior year of college, I had a job lined up at Boeing and I was planning to move down to Huntington Beach after graduating in mid-June. It was incredibly important to me that I move out of Washington State. Partly for character development purposes, but mostly because I was deeply insecure that I hadn’t left [Washington] yet, an insecurity that persisted longer than I’d like to admit.
Alas, my dreams of a California summer were squashed when the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown hit the US in March 2020. I moved back home and stayed there for 9 months, working remotely at a time when my company didn’t allow webcams. Like most of us, I got weird—socially anxious, depressed, hopeless. I think you all know how extra dark this time was, but let’s just say any dreams or ideas I had about literally anything ceased to exist.
I quit my job at Boeing the following year and experienced ego death. It sounds dramatic but I have no other words for it. I floated for eight months: stared aimlessly at the ceiling, road-tripped around the USA to visit various national parks, and grumbled about how my life sucked to anyone who would listen.
In November of 2021, my sister suggested I apply to the University of Washington and I was hired in February of 2022.
The next few years were everything I needed and more. The stability and stillness that came from a consistent job and long-term housing enabled me to focus on my health, go back to therapy, rebuild a community, save money, explore interests, and more. Each year, I settled further into myself and rebuilt the person I wanted to be, this time on a footing that was much stronger than the one I had prior.
I’m so thankful for the sweet and loving embrace of the souls that I met or reconnected with at this time, many of which are reading this now!
I traveled intermittently throughout all of this, sticking to the US and Canada, and invested most of my time and resources into outdoor spaces and hobbies. My relationship with the outdoors is a spiritual one; nature is my church. It’s a place of healing, a source of connection and perspective, and an environment where I can explore who I am and what matters to me.
I thought weekend hikes and summer backpacking trips would satisfy me and it did for a while… but the itch came back. It was stronger, different, originating from a dissimilar place than before, but an itch for change all the same.
It took everything I had to push the feeling down, but it bubbled up in my speech and actions, uncontrollably and without consent. I remember writing over and over again in my journal about how great my life would be if I could just get this damn urge to dissipate. Why can’t I be satisfied building a long-term career in Seattle? Why can’t I be happy with what I have? What’s wrong with me?
I had a hunch about what I needed and decided to test my theory with a trip to Belize. I’d go alone for two weeks with a 40L backpack and see if I liked it. I purposefully didn’t research or book things in advance, wanting to mimic long-term backpacking travel as much as possible. A friend of mine had gone to Belize earlier that year and their endorsement was enough for me.
This was in November of last year.
It was challenging, confronting, lonely. I loved it. Life is hard but you get to pick your hard, and this was my kind of hard… Inversely, it felt easy. Wrongfully easy. When I told my mom about this, she told me, “It means you’re supposed to be doing it.”
Adventure and exploration are at the core of who I am, it seems. A numerologist confirmed this for me several months prior (destiny number 5). She also told me that I’d go through a four-month cycle of death and rebirth from November through February. At the time, I took it to mean I’d be doing a deep clean of my closet… Ha-ha… Jokes on me.
I came back to Seattle and the ache was unbearable. It felt like the train was moving and I was going along with it, one way or another. The choice wasn’t if, it was how—would I be a passenger or be dragged behind on the tracks?
A few weeks later, I crossed paths with my friend Jessika, a UW student studying landscape architecture, and she invited me to join her in Nepal that winter. “Don’t do that,” I told her, “I’m the kind of person who will take you up on that offer.” She (thankfully) insisted.
After extensive reckoning and debating, both in my mind and through conversations, I decided to quit my job one month after returning from Belize. I was a walking ball of fear—was this decision going to ruin my life?
People told me I was losing earning potential and that it’d take years to recover. Some wondered if I was struggling with my mental health again. There was fear, concern, and requests for guarantees of my safety.
Surprisingly, one of the hardest to hear was: “I could never do that.”
I didn’t feel like I was different from anyone else, but it made me wonder if I was and if this difference was some form of insanity that’d lead to my destruction and return to the sunken place (see above).
In retrospect, I should have been more careful with who I told. My dream was so fragile and each verbal exchange took me days to recover from. I shared because I wanted others to confirm to me that it was a good idea but what I needed was to believe in myself.
It was the first of many learning opportunities. When I took on someone else’s fear as my own, I had the opportunity to ask myself, is this true? Each time, I recommitted to my choice.
Don’t get me wrong, everyone was encouraging. Even when there was fear, there was excitement, and tears, and laughter, and words of wisdom, and promises of rescue. There was so much love that I felt like I was going to burst open at the seams. Gah, it makes me tear up just thinking about it.
That reminder of how rich a community I have made the decision worth it. Everything that was/is to follow is a cherry on top.
By the end of January, I was no longer working at UW and no longer had a place to live in Seattle. I packed up my things and moved them into my parents’ house. Funnily enough, I stopped buying furniture years ago; some part of me knew I wasn’t going to stay long before I admitted it to myself.
I was homeless, jobless, and scared. And then I boarded a plane to Turkey.