She became who she always meant to be and opted out

Written by Lauren

The crumbling down of the infrastructure you see here has been well underway for over a year now.

Last spring, in a very main character moment, at a complete impasse—I unplugged from my laptop at midday, got in my car, and drove to Nashville’s tree-lined, perfectly picturesque Bicentennial Capitol Mall park—to walk, to clear my head, to get some sense of direction as I felt the telltale rumblings of the rebar of this thing I’d built start to shift.

The pillars of this project I’d been tirelessly (and very tiredly) pursuing for the better part of three years was starting to shift.

Or rather, I was.

I can’t speak to how anyone else’s life works, but when changes happen in my life they’re nothing short of seismic shifts. I don’t just leave a chapter and go to a new one. Usually (as this has happened often enough to be a usual occurrence), I am thrown (quite forcefully, sometimes violently) into an entirely new book in a completely different genre, where I may or may not know the language. 

The only thing I’ve learned so far is: resistance is futile. Bend your knees and go with it. Because the longer and harder you fight it, the more painful it’s going to be.

How this all began

I’ve always loved stories. They were my first true love. And I’ve been a traveler since I could walk. 

I’ve always loved collecting and curating and collaging. I’ve always loved taking pictures and putting them together with mementos in a colorful cacophony to capture what it felt like to be in that place at that time.

I’ve always believed in the Anima mundi — the world soul — and that each place holds a genus loci — the spirit of a place. Both sacred and ancient and ever-unfolding. It’s the essence you feel — if you’re lucky, interact with —when you visit someplace new or the places you love very much, those soul places that beckon you, that call you home again and again. 

These are some of my oldest truths. 

Creating a travel blog made perfect sense then, when viewed through that lens. There is (and remains) a pureness to my desire to create this digital collection of travels, my archive of destinations, or as my Instagram bio reads: a love letter to all the places I’ve been.

I’ve always wanted this to be a place where people who loved stories and travel could find sanctuary. A place that felt like sharing secrets over drinks in a dark corner booth in some distant faraway land (Singapore, to be exact, it was always Singapore in my daydreams).

In my head, it read like an early 2000s rom com. 

It felt like freedom, purpose, a container. And, in my mind, there was a whimsical, autumn-leaf swirling magic to it all. 

But that’s not how it has felt.

Instead, it felt like a knot

Buried in my chest, latched in to sinew and bone with sharp hooks and barbs. 

Tight. Hard. Jagged. Notched. Scraping against my ribcage with each breath. A vice grip of barbed wire around my heart, sinking in deeper with every beat. 

A tight bundle of fear, compulsion, a need to do, to prove.

It was ever-present, this knot, heavy and constricting in my chest. 

This knot had been there since the spring of 2023 when I launched this blog into existence, a virtually real thing out in the world for all to see, no longer just an idea in my mind.

It was the thing that kept me going, driving me forward, chained to my laptop and imprisoned in the digital world more than I was present in my own life.

It had not been joy that has brought me to my desk. Not for a very long time. In fact,  I couldn’t tell you the last time I looked at photos of places I’d been just because I’d missed them or wanted to see them. It’d been a very long time indeed, since this thing felt like what I’d imagined it to be before I’d began. 

It’s taken a lot of introspection and many, many hours long conversations for me to start to untangle this knot…

It was true then

In the demise of a decade-long stultifying marriage that left me in a dizzying state of desolation, I was on a quest to find myself again. To remember who I really was. To reclaim who I’d always been all along, even if it’d been buried under so many layers of false acquiescence and the masks of players I’d so artfully performed. 

I went back to the place I remembered last feeling fully like myself. In this case, it was a geographical area. But it was also a time, an age: Twelve.

I occupied that space — spiritually, developmentally — for a long time (it’s a very strange tightrope indeed to be both twelve and thirty at the same time, in the same body).

And then, when that loop had felt completed, the next phase to see through was the one at which had felt the most truncated: my teenage self.

That teenage self, doped up on a brand of dopamine-chasing, militant, and manipulative proselytizing christianity (yikes), (probably well-meaning) academic praise, and the caffeine-jitters of Gilmore Girls, decided she wanted to be a journalist.

Or rather, she knew she was good at writing (or so her teachers told her), she knew she was meant for more than the mundane suburbs of Detroit (or so the cultural conditioning of American millennials everywhere sold her), and she had always wanted to see the world (or so all those documentaries rented from the local library and Disney movies showed her) … and since she was middle class and global travel on the scale she dreamed of just out of reach, an idea was hatched:

Get paid to do what you want to do. Become a National Geographic photojournalist! 

That became my definition of success. The pinnacle by which all other things were judged. A bar set by an idealistic adolescent brain that became lost to time, and then picked back up again by my thirty-something self in an attempt to recalibrate herself to who she’d once been. 

In 2023, in the midst of what felt at the time like an endless chasm of grief after what had already been years of what I can only describe as utter desolation, I found myself at this undeniable crossroad in my life (with not a single demon in sight to make a deal with, fortunately). 

At the age of thirty-two, I found myself, for the first time in my adult life, absolutely, utterly free. Untethered. No one to take care of, no one depending on me. I was beholden to no one, nothing, no where. 

I could go and be anywhere and anything I’d wanted to be.

This was the moment I’d been waiting for, wasn’t it?

And yet, I found myself grappling, once again, with the question of how to build a life that was truly mine.

I could finally be the intrepid traveling photojournalist I always thought I wanted to be. 

I could heed the call of adventure, perhaps quench this deep, existential thirst and yearning I have to experience life the world over. 

I could do this. This could be my life. I could get my home fix by housesitting in the English countryside. I could put all my stuff in storage and go sail the seven seas. 

I could spends months living in an apartment above a cafe in Morocco, working on a piece. 

I became attached to the idea of this jet setting writer who is always galavanting off to the far-flung deserts of the Middle East or the jungles of Central America. She wears aviator glasses, a neck scarf, and lots of military green cargo shirts, without even a hint of irony. She travels with a leather duffle bag and camera in hand. (On second thought, maybe I picked this entirely up from a Banana Republic ad featuring Angelina Jolie.)

This idea-version of me, she doesn’t have relationships, she has flings. Each deep and meaningful in their own ways, but never long lasting. Her community is wherever she finds herself at the moment; a mismatch collection of pilots and guides and local bartenders. Maybe she has a city apartment back home in the States, filled with books and a typewriter. Maybe she doesn’t live anywhere at all, just goes from one place to the next. She submits her work to editors at National Geographic and gets hired to work on nature documentaries. She spends months in a tent in Africa, tracking herds of elephants. 

Her life is exciting and thrilling. She is dazzling, quick-witted, mysterious, unknowable. But is she happy? I wondered. Does she miss home? Does she miss her mom? Do the static-filled dropped calls with her dad make her heart hurt in the deepest way? Does she long for an armchair with a sleeping cat in it? Is she lonely? Is she sick? Is her nervous system tapped?

Is this what I want? I asked myself again and again. 

Is this what I really want?

It felt like it did, and it also, somewhere deep down, didn’t. The only way to know for sure was to try.

And at thirty-something, starting a travel blog felt like the best way way to start in the direction of that dream.

The compulsion to account for: otherwise known as my neurosis 

The call was also, it turned out, coming from inside the house.

An overwhelming internal pressure to account for my story that felt constrictively compulsive. After years in animated suspension — years where I felt simultaneously like I’d walked away with nothing to show for and also could not fully remember — I needed to reclaim my story by making sure it was the one I wanted to tell, the one I wanted to be in.

After years of feeling erased, I needed to record, to remember, to recollect, to say, see look, this is what I’ve done, this is who I am. I am the person I’d always set out to be.

This accounting, though, morphed into a mental rigidity that held me captive. It started to feel not like excitement over the prospect of a new adventure, but like anxiety. The mounting dread of what was starting to become a never-ending task list of places to account for. 

My inability to “keep up” with posting about where I’d been recently, when I hadn’t even begun to touch the back-catalog of places I’d been to from before I’d ever even set up a domain name, was suffocating me.

I was drowning in an ocean of my own making. 

It felt like I was waiting for my “real life” to begin, like I couldn’t fully live my life until I’d “caught up”. 

I was a slave to my own system.

And I didn’t know how to get free. 

And then I almost died: how a missed flight saved my life

No, really.

In the midst of these years, I was on my way to New Orleans Jazz Fest 2024 when I collapsed and passed out for a solid ten minutes (drool and all) near the Delta check-in area at BNA and had to be rushed to the ER, where I was promptly admitted for the next two days.

Long story short: I’m severely anemic. My hemoglobin was 4.3.
With numbers like that, I should have been bleeding out.

The doctors (still) don’t know how I was still alive. (What can I say: The horrors persist, but so do I)

Two days, three blood transfusions, four iron infusions, and two weeks on the couch bingeing Outlander later, let me tell you, I had never felt more alive in my life (blood, super important to have, turns out).

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this on here, but in the wake of actually almost dying (I most certainly would have perished if I’d gotten on that plane), I spent many a morning on my porch journaling and soul-searching, and a few things became apparent:

1.) I wanted to go on another spirit quest — this time round trip from Nashville through the Carolina’s with stops in Asheville, Hendersonville, Charleston, Beaufort, Aiken, Greenville, and Traveler’s Rest — most of these places old stomping grounds I’d once been through 

(I did go that summer, you wouldn’t know this because I have not had the time or capacity to write or post about it and that was two years ago)

2.) What I really wanted was not more travel, but a house in the countryside I could call my own, one with a rose garden and a greenhouse

While the Spirit Quest actualized, the other knowledge did little to nothing when it came to impacting the decisions I continued to make for the next year. I continued on as I had been, but the seed had been planted and it continued to grow in the dark.

Are you willing to pay the cost?

We are told (sold a bill of lies, more like) that we can become anything we want to be “when we grow up” (whenever that is).

And whether this is true or not (it’s not), we never stop to ask: are we willing to pay the cost?

Because everything comes at a cost. Every yes means saying no to infinite other possibilities, infinite other versions of ourselves.

That person who has what you want right now paid a price. Are you willing to pay the same to get the same thing? The long hours, the sacrifices, the energy, the effort, the selling of a soul to a crossroads demon or two?

It had started to become clear to me by the summer of 2025 that the “dream” of “making a living” travel blogging wasn’t going to be. 

I wasn’t willing to do it the way it had to be done to turn a profit from it. I was not willing to pay the cost any longer. 

I couldn’t have known then (when I started out, when the dream formed in adolescence) what the world, the travel and travel blogging industry, would become: toxic, overtaxed, a corporate conglomerate AI algorithm that must be fed at all costs, demanding more, more, more. 

A world where we travel not to experience the world, but to take the photo, check the box, add to the list. A world where we read, not for the love of story and thirst for knowledge, but to say we did, to pretend we know the answer.

A world where I’d become beholden to others ideas, conceptions, and perceptions of what it meant to be a travel blogger. Where what they’d thought about me, about what I was doing, how it looked became more important than how it actually felt for me. 

A world where I was constantly met with an exhausting set of predictable questions that all had no soul: what’s the best place you’ve been to? (South Dakota), how do you make money doing that? (I don’t), How do you afford to travel? (not really any of your business), How many places have you been to? (couldn’t tell you, I don’t count), How many followers do you have on instagram? (I don’t know), When’s your next trip? (I don’t even want to hear the word airport for the foreseeable future).

A world I no longer wished to be a part of or contribute to in any way. A world that, quite frankly, disgusted me.

It wasn’t worth my time, my presence in my actual life, my nervous system, my inherent pacing, my peace. 

Things that are no longer true

“The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get home.”

It had been true once, that my dream had been to be a traveling photojournalist for National Geographic.

This is the standard by which I held myself for a very long time. And by that standard, I have unequivocally “failed”.

It’s taken quite a lot of unraveling and reckoning, but what I started to let myself acknowledge that day in the park was that that dream was no longer true for me. It was no longer what I actually wanted. And it hadn’t been for a long time.

I was being held prisoner by the ideals of a naive starry-eyed fifteen year old girl who just didn’t know any better.

(It’s an absolutely psychotic societal standard — the definition of insanity and no wonder we’re all on medication — to expect that you’ll be the person you’d thought you’d be at seven or fifteen or twenty seven or even, thirty three, ad infinitum.)

At fifteen (even at thirty-two), I just didn’t have the full scope. I didn’t have all the data. I didn’t know the true cost.

(But — and I feel this important to say — just because it’s not true now, doesn’t mean it wasn’t fully true then.)

For me, it was never about the likes or views or impressions. It was never about a checklist of countries to visit, passport stamps to collect, bylines to stack up.

It was only ever about presence, connection, healing, a celebration of places I loved so much they became a part of me.

Longings lead you home

This dream, this blog, was also born out of longing. 

For as long as I can remember, I have longed. I have yearned. I have ached. For places other than where I’m at.

I don’t know why I have the need to know what it feels like to drink my morning coffee in a humid plant-filled courtyard in the French quarter of New Orleans, or a river house on the bayou.

Or at the need to know what it feels like to restore a southern plantation. Or watch life go on from the sidewalk cafes of Paris. Or see the red-lantern strung alleyways of San Fransisco and Hong Kong. Or chase the cherry blossoms and temples of Japan. 

I don’t know why I feel called to the open fields of the Grand Tetons or to know what it feels like to step foot in a rusty coal mining town of West Virginia. 

I don’t know why I have a need to explore the small towns of the south. Or to hear a bluegrass band play in a bar off a two-lane highway in Texas. Or to swim the clear waters of Key West. Or to explore the hidden beaches of Hawaii or spend a Sunday evening sitting on a lanai. Or to shop the marketplace in Seattle and see the buffalo in South Dakota. Or drive the dusty trails of New Mexico. Or explore the jungles and ruins of Central America. Or be a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming. Or hear the wild wolf packs howl in the valleys of Yellowstone or go dog sledding in the arctic north. 

I don’t know why I have a deep need to hear the call to prayer in ancient cities. See the ancient site of Petra. See the rolling green hills and seaside towns of Ireland. Walk the markets of Morocco and the rain-gray streets of Edinburgh. Dance in the streets of Spain. Sleep under the stars in Saudi Arabia. See an elephant heard of thirty strong that brings tears to my eyes. Walk the ancient streets of Venice and Sicily. See the gorillas in the jungles of Africa. 

I don’t know why I find myself with this need to immerse myself in places I don’t belong to and never intend to stay, but I do. 

I just do.

And, the truth is, this blog gave me a vehicle — permission, if you will — to live out those yearnings. 

It’s also true that I’ve done a lot of things I’ve set out to do.

I’ve had my daily coffee and bagel from the corner bodega for that period of time I lived on the Upper East Side, while going to school in Manhattan. I’ve called the live oak studded coast of South Carolina home, for a time, and became a South Carolina Master Naturalist while I was there.

I’ve surfed in Maui. Visited the North Shore of Oahu. Hiked an active volcano in Iceland. Seen the gargoyles-view of Paris from the top of Notre Dame. Been on safari on the plains of Africa where I’ve watched herds of majestic elephants amble by in the brush. I’ve sipped gluhwein as I’ve shopped the Christmas markets of Vienna and taken the ferry over a mirror-clear alpine lake to the salt-mine slopes of Hallstatt. I’ve had Turkish coffee by myself in a cafe in Istanbul, and been woken up from a nap in my hotel room by the call to prayer in the same city. I’ve driven through the streets of Barcelona and seen the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. I’ve had a mental breakdown on a very picturesque hillside at a Catholic convent in Albania. Wandered the ruins of Chichén Itzá. Snorkeled the clear waters of the Caribbean. Swam with dolphins in the Dominican. Walked the enchanted forest paths and sparkling skyscraper streets of Vancouver. Sat on the sunset-streaked dunes at White Sands National Park. Visited the Smithsonian and toured the White House. I’ve taken pictures of myself in the reflection of Chicago’s Bean. Been drunk in Vegas and on Nashville’s Broadway and Memphis’ Beale Street and New Orlean’s Bourbon Street more times than I care to count. Driven myself through South Dakota, New Mexico, and the Carolinas.

I’ve cafe’d in London, in Paris, LA, São Paulo …

And most of those things, no one even knows I ever did.

It was at the end of a whirlwind three-week-that-lasted-seven-years European trip, standing by myself in the elevator of a Barcelona hotel, after having spent thousands of dollars to change my flight home early due to a death in the family, looking at the reflection of myself in the mirror, that it hit me.

I was tired. I was worn and I was weary. But I’d done it.

I didn’t become who I thought I would. But I had become who I’d always wanted to be.

I’d become a person who could (and would) get on a plane not knowing the language spoken at the destination. (German, they speak German in Austria, in case you wanted to know.)

I’d become a person who knew where to get the best beignets in New Orleans, which side street to turn down for a convenience store water on the walk back to the hotel, and where an absolute gem of a coffee shop with a lush plant-filled courtyard is to be found just outside the French Quarter.

I’d become a person who knows Charleston—knows it’s alleys and church’s, it’s pirates and secrets, it’s cobblestone streets and wrought-iron garden gates as well as any tour guide. Can plan out an entire trip in the span of two seconds and still have more to see.

I’d become a person who was paid to travel the world in pursuit of a noble goal.

I’d set out to be a person who had adventures, to have stories worth telling, and I had. I’d done just that.

I’d become who I’d always wanted to become, and not only did know one know, I didn’t need anyone to know.

In fact, I found, it tasted better when they didn’t. Because it became something that was just mine again. Without any performance. 

The moment in the orchard courtyard at our Airbnb in Shkodër, Albania where I knew I didn’t want to do this this way anymore. I wanted this moment only for myself. Not with the pressure to perform or share.

It has been my experience that your soul speaks to you in the only language it knows how. And that language often looks like yearnings, longings. Longings lead you home.

And this was a space I could hold those longings.

For a long time in my life I’d been denied access to places I loved, denied the ability to linger as long as my soul needed in a place, so this place became a medium I could use to re-live and re-experience a place even after I’d left its shores. A space where I could read my stacks of books from Istanbul, Charleston, New Orleans as I wrote down my adventures, edited and pieced together photographs of my time there.

And while I still desire to do those things, the knot, has faded. Loosened. Dissolved. Integrated.

Writing pieces like In search of the buffalo: From the Badlands to the Black Hills and 86th + Lex: old subway stops and the places we used to live were excruciatingly exquisite in the cathartic healing that took place with every word, every relived memory.

It was only through writing those long-form pieces were parts of my story able to be integrated, in a way that made it possible for me to show up fully to this next part of the story.

So, here’s the truth of where I am now

For the better part of the last year, I have given myself permission to step away from the blog. To let it be while I figured out (aka internally wrestled with with the utmost turmoil and dramatics) what was next. 

I’d given myself permission to be, but not the blog.

My creativity doesn’t fit neatly into the algorithms demands of 2 posts a week. 2000 words each. SEO and keyword placement and affiliates. I write 50 words or 5000, in the form and shape it takes, there’s no in-between for me. 

And the pace it demands — it’s tragic. The need for constant instant gratification suffocates the oxygen out of the story. 

We no longer allow space for the story to unfold in its own time. And we’re the poorer for it. 

The liminal November I spent in the mountains of North Carolina back in 2019? I couldn’t have known then just how near the end I was to that part of my story. That story wasn’t ready to be told yet. It had no context to give it meaning yet. But now, perhaps that is a story I’m ready to tell. 

And not just the content, but the expectation of constant travel? There’s no breathing room.

There’s such a beauty in the anticipation of an upcoming adventure. I miss the build up, I miss getting excited for a new adventure. 

I miss creation for creations sake. For the love of the fucking game. The pure joy of creating and sharing beautiful things just to create and share beautiful things without maxing, or optimizing, or monetizing. 

And I want that back. 

The dose makes the poison (or the medicine) 

It’s taken learning how the industry works for me to realize that the adventures I’m seeking don’t come prepackaged in a PR comped press tour. 

So, I’m opting out and doing it my way, on my time.

Instead of this being the thing I do, it’s a thing I do. 

It’s a thing that enriches my life. Not the sun I orbit around at the cost of everything else. 

So, things are going to be different around here. 

There will be no deadlines. No time table. 

Some pieces will be long like this. Others (most others) will probably be a collection of (non-edited) photos with a few tidbits here and there. A format I’m calling Postcards from … 

It is, above all else, my digital scrapbook of my adventures. But if you happen to find some inspiration or some part of yourself here too, that’s good too. 

It feels now, as though the puzzle piece has finally slotted into its rightful place. I know the shape and size and feel of it, no longer swollen to disproportionate heights. 

“The endings of their stories represent a Return to the self. So many of the fairy tales I’ve written about in this book are really about the loss of the self, with a heroine who’s dismembered, wounded, broken, owned, stripped of her skin, controlled. In whichever way it might outwardly progress, the true nature of her journey is a quest to recover, reclaim, or reimagine all the parts of herself that have been lost, and to weave them all together to fashion a new self for the new story ahead. The goal of her journey, then — the aim of her Return — is to dream her true self into being.”

Ripening, Dr. Sharon Blackie

Roots and wings

You never know what you’re being prepared for, how one experience leads to the next (as it inevitably does). 

Little by little, piece by piece, the path appears.

And, truly, why would you want to know?

Isn’t that the beautiful part? The unknown ahead? The mystery of what could be? The adventure?

For the past several years as I’ve lived out some version of this dream, I was also inwardly grappling with the dexterity it takes to weave tougher a life of love and stability and adventure. That blends and balances my need for a home I can call my own with the great unknown and creation. A life of roots and wings, sails and routines.

I’d become the intrepid Jetsetter with the glasses and neck scarf, at least in part. And it was only through living that out did I learn that though she was apart of me, she wasn’t all of me. 

I no longer have the need to record, no longer have the fear I won’t remember. Because the person I’ve become in the process can’t be undone, can’t be erased, she can never be taken away from me — even if time erases and my memory fades, they’re apart of me now, a part of my very DNA and cellular structure.

Perhaps, though, this thing played out just as it always should have. Perhaps this thing was exactly what I needed until I was ready for the next thing. Until I was made ready for the next thing. Isn’t that the way these things just go, sometimes?

I wouldn’t be fully ready for this next phase to the extent that I am (and omg am I so ready), if I hadn’t thrown myself down this path so fully.

For the first time in what feels like my entire existence, I am right where I want to be. 

I no longer have a desire to escape my life.

I want to be in the part of the story I’m in, while I’m in it.

I have a new dream now

“The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.”
Oprah Winfrey

That dream now looks like moving to a small town in West Tennessee. Renovating my 125 year old Victorian house, planting and tending to my gardens, and growing (so many) pumpkins. 

It looks like a wood burning fireplace I daydream by in the winters, building a greenhouse where I start seeds in the spring, front porch swings and hanging ferns, cozy chairs with stacks of books and dogs and sleepy cats. 

Starting a small private lending library. Working at the bookstore. Marrying a man I can honestly say was meant just for me. Writing the story of our life together over cups of coffee and paint color swatches and movie marathons and trips to Japan and train rides from Memphis down to New Orleans and time spent under the live oaks in Charleston.

I just want to tend to my house, grow some pumpkins, read some books, make some candles, and work at the bookstore. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. 

So, I’ll be back when I’m back, when I have something I want to say or share.

For this story is, above all, mine. And mine alone.

My life is not content to be consumed. It never was.

If you’ve been here with me on this journey, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I leave you with this:

Go write your own story, it’s yours to live. 

xoxo