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A year after my dad died, I found myself standing on a beach in Vietnam at 6am, watching waves stirred up by an incoming typhoon, asking a question I'd been avoiding for years: what if this is all there is?
I'd had itchy feet for a while — a quiet, persistent pull to see more of the world than the life I'd built had room for. So I booked one trip: Vietnam and Cambodia, nothing more ambitious than that. I nearly cancelled it twice.
Three days in, I met Eddie on a bus outside Hanoi. What started as a two-country trip became something else entirely — because saying yes to that first, smaller leap made space for a much bigger one. Four months and twenty-four countries later, I came home someone else entirely.
This is that story — the real one, not the highlight reel. It's a grief memoir, though it didn't start out that way. Six months after Hanoi, I was standing in front of the Taj Mahal wondering if love was actually supposed to feel this steady. Somewhere along the way, grief caught up with me in four different places — the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal — and each time, I found a piece of myself that twenty years of putting everyone else first had quietly buried.
I've kept this honest, because I think most of us have had enough of the curated version. There's a smashed coffee table and an altitude-sick meltdown in Cusco. There's a grief thread that never resolves, because grief doesn't work that way, no matter how far you fly from it. There's also monkeys stealing sunglasses, deep-fried guinea pig, and a Bridge of Sighs that somehow followed me across three continents. And there's Eddie — who never once asked me to be smaller, and who taught me the difference between "I'll figure it out" and "we will figure it out."
If you've quietly wondered whether it's too late to start again, or whether grief and a new life can actually sit side by side — this is for you. I didn't have it figured out before I left. I'm still not sure I do. I just said yes to the first small thing, and let it lead me to the rest.
You don't need your whole life sorted to start living it. You just need to book the first flight.
A year after my dad died, I found myself standing on a beach in Vietnam at 6am, watching waves stirred up by an incoming typhoon, asking a question I'd been avoiding for years: what if this is all there is?
I'd had itchy feet for a while — a quiet, persistent pull to see more of the world than the life I'd built had room for. So I booked one trip: Vietnam and Cambodia, nothing more ambitious than that. I nearly cancelled it twice.
Three days in, I met Eddie on a bus outside Hanoi. What started as a two-country trip became something else entirely — because saying yes to that first, smaller leap made space for a much bigger one. Four months and twenty-four countries later, I came home someone else entirely.
This is that story — the real one, not the highlight reel. It's a grief memoir, though it didn't start out that way. Six months after Hanoi, I was standing in front of the Taj Mahal wondering if love was actually supposed to feel this steady. Somewhere along the way, grief caught up with me in four different places — the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal — and each time, I found a piece of myself that twenty years of putting everyone else first had quietly buried.
I've kept this honest, because I think most of us have had enough of the curated version. There's a smashed coffee table and an altitude-sick meltdown in Cusco. There's a grief thread that never resolves, because grief doesn't work that way, no matter how far you fly from it. There's also monkeys stealing sunglasses, deep-fried guinea pig, and a Bridge of Sighs that somehow followed me across three continents. And there's Eddie — who never once asked me to be smaller, and who taught me the difference between "I'll figure it out" and "we will figure it out."
If you've quietly wondered whether it's too late to start again, or whether grief and a new life can actually sit side by side — this is for you. I didn't have it figured out before I left. I'm still not sure I do. I just said yes to the first small thing, and let it lead me to the rest.
You don't need your whole life sorted to start living it. You just need to book the first flight.