Happy Holidays!🎉 😂

A comically delayed attempt at The Holiday Letter that adults send to their other adults friends to recap a year (it is still a thing right?) Well, I’m about 3 months late but it is time. SO, here goes!

🚨*Family/ Friends of my Parents Trigger Warning*🚨

*This is a ruthlessly candid, no holds barred recap of the growth and experiences I went through in 2018. If you’re last memory of me involves a ballet recital where I was dancing as a purple penguin (cerca 2nd grade), you may want to select a different piece as your reintroduction to my life today😅.

2018 was an absolutely MENTAL year for me.[1] On New Years Eve of 2017, I boarded a plane out of Boston with my long-term partner, excited for a full year of Digital Nomading, exploration, growth, (insert ‘woke traveler cliche here’).

In one year: I lived in 14 countries, across 4 continents. I took 26 flights, 8 train, 6 buses, 5 boats, and road on the back of 20+ GrabMotos, as well as in the bed of 3 pick up trucks. I went to 4 Music Festivals, met Danny Divito in an Italian airpot, and rode a boat through (Iguazu Falls) a series of waterfalls taller than Niagara Falls and twice as wide.

I used my bomb Spanish skills to hustle my way into a free Yellow Fever Vaccine, worked on a Vietnamese Farm picking Morning Glory leaves, and saw firsthand the factory where my Vans were made. I sold a company, started another, and discover new passions in dance, art, and psychology.

I communicated in 14 different languages, made more friends than I can count, fell in love, had my heart broken, and unearthed a version of myself that was stronger, smarter, more competent and more intuitive than I ever realized existed within me … and as I reflect back on it all, there is no doubt that this was all just the beginning.

Part of me thought about writing an e-book on this experience and TBH, that’s not completely off the table… but I thought that a more fun and concise activity would be to deconstruct each month/country I called home throughout the year and roughly highlight:

1) 😍My Dopest Experience

2) 💩My Toughest Experience

3) 🔑My Biggest Take Away

The Overall 🔑🔑🔑: Travel is such a transformative journey. You’re constantly facing new challenges and experiences that inevitably stimulate a significant amount of introspection …BUT guess what: THERE IS NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTROSPECTION AND INSIGHT. What does this mean? The act of thinking ABOUT ourselves isn’t actually correlated with KNOWING ourselves. Introspection is the ability to consciously examine our thoughts , feelings, motives, and behaviors and THAT is what I intend to explore with this series.

This will be a ~14 part series (one per country) so….I hope you’ll come along on a little journey with me as I dive back into 2018, how each experience worked to make me the person I am today: A happy digital nomad, living in South East Asia and living each and every day to the max.

So, without further adu…