If you had told my 18-year-old self that by 26 I’d be living on a sailboat in Southeast Asia with my Australian boyfriend, I probably would’ve laughed — and then asked if I had somehow won the lottery.
But here I am, barefoot on deck, coffee in hand, fixing things I never knew the names of, and chasing a version of life I didn’t even know existed until I stopped chasing the one I was told to want.
I grew up in Reston, Virginia — a leafy suburb just outside D.C. The kind of place where most of us went straight from high school to college, college to career, career to marriage and mortgage — in that exact order. And I was right on track.
In high school, I applied to a bunch of colleges, but deep down, I knew I wanted out. I didn’t want to stay in Virginia — not because I hated it, but because I wanted to see what life looked like somewhere else. I wanted to live by the ocean. I wanted mountains and saltwater and strangers who’d challenge the way I saw the world.
So I chose a school 3,000 miles away: the University of California, Santa Barbara. It felt like everything I had dreamed of — sun, surf, hiking trails and a beach five minutes from my dorm. But even as I settled into college life, I couldn’t shake this itch. I loved the ocean, but something still felt incomplete. I didn’t just want to study life — I wanted to live it.
