47 Countries Later

There was a long, frantic season of my life when I treated existence like a race I was losing, though I couldn’t have told you who was winning or where the finish line was drawn.

I was obsessed with the geography of escape. At thirty, I was standing in the wreckage of my first divorce, a mother of three without a stable job, looking at a world that suddenly felt like it had no floor. For a decade, I had tried to earn love through the sheer grit of survival. I performed the roles I thought would buy me safety. The perfect wife, the tireless mother, the woman who could carry it all without a sound. But in that silence, I had become a stranger to myself. I was a hollowed-out thing, a ghost haunting my own kitchen. I thought that if I could just collect enough horizons, I would eventually outrun the version of me that couldn’t stop aching. My passport became a ledger of survival, a collection of ink and paper proof that I was still moving, still breathing, still capable of crossing a border when I felt I couldn’t even cross my own living room.

I looked at a map and saw a lifeline. I wrote “40 countries by 40” on a vision board like a frantic sort of prayer, a spiritual contract I signed with the universe. I called it ambition, but it was really just the displacement of a soul that didn’t know how to sit still. I was trying to buy my way into a state of grace with frequent flyer miles, not yet realizing that you cannot find stillness while moving at six hundred miles per hour.

Rome was where the grief finally turned physical. I remember the smell of damp stone, the heavy, metallic tang of espresso hanging in the humid April heat, and the way the sun hit the cobblestones, a relentless, golden weight. I wandered into every single cathedral I could find, not because I was searching for God, but because I needed a space where the air was heavy enough to hold me up. I sat in those ancient pews and I just broke apart. I cried and prayed even though I didn’t know what, or who, I was praying to. I was a ghost among saints, a woman who had spent thirty years trying to be enough, realizing I was profoundly lost. But in that shattering, something strange happened. I felt alive for the first time in years. Rome gave me a pulse again. The city’s ancient scars made my own feel less like a tragedy and more like a history. I decided then that I would keep going, simply because the movement made the lostness feel like an adventure instead of a failure.

I flew home and immediately looked for the next cliff to jump off, desperate to keep the momentum of that new, terrifying heartbeat.

Guatemala was my first real attempt to conquer the fear that lived in my marrow. In Antigua, I stood above a canopy of emerald steam, my knees turning to water. I have always carried a fear of heights like a stone in my gut, a physical certainty that the earth wants to reclaim me. The guides were laughing, their voices bright and careless against the looming silence of the volcanoes. My blood was screaming for the ground, but for the first time, I chose to trust the air. When I finally stepped off the platform and the zip-line hummed into life, my scream didn’t sound like terror. It sounded like someone finally waking up. I realized then that courage isn’t the absence of fear. It is the willingness to let go of the edge even when your hands are shaking. It was my first lesson in trust, not in a man or a job, but in the strength of my own spine.

Then came Hawaii, where the ocean taught me that peace is often a lie we tell ourselves before the storm hits. One moment the water was a sheet of turquoise glass, an invitation to believe in a permanent calm. The next, it was a mountain range of salt and fury. I was in a kayak, miles from the shore, despite the fact that I didn’t know how to swim. I remember the salt stinging my eyes and the way the rain felt like needles against my skin. My hands were white on the paddle, my chest tight with a raw, animal panic. I realized how fragile a body is when the world decides to be heavy. But somewhere in the middle of that grey chaos, the fighting stopped. I didn’t find calm. I found rhythm. I stopped trying to conquer the wave and started trying to be part of its movement. I learned that you can be terrified and still keep your head above water. You don’t have to be fearless to survive. You just have to keep paddling.

For the next ten years, I didn’t stop. I hit forty-seven countries. I remarried and I divorced again. I spent a decade striving for a better version of myself. New careers, new skills, new degrees, a relentless pursuit of a woman who was always just one more achievement away. I thought I was growing, but I was still just fighting for love, still trying to prove I was worthy of occupying space. I had the stamps, the resume, and the scars, but the inner room of my heart was still empty.

The Sahara was where the noise finally died. It was a silence so loud it made my ears ring. I lay on dunes that felt like the cooling skin of a sleeping beast, sand shifting beneath me like a secret. The stars weren’t pretty. They were violent, piercing holes in a velvet sky, reminding me of the sheer scale of the universe. All the roles I had played, the traveler, the survivor, the woman who had it all figured out, they just evaporated. The desert has no use for your resume. It doesn’t care about your divorces or your forty-seven countries. It simply held me in my smallness and whispered that existing was enough. I didn’t need to be better. I just needed to be.

By the time I reached the falls at Iguazu after my second divorce at forty, my heart felt less like a broken thing and more like a riverbed, worn down and shaped by years of heavy water. Heartbreak isn’t a single event. It’s a slow erosion. Standing there, soaked in the roar of the earth, I watched the water shatter itself over the rocks and realized something. The water didn’t become weaker because it kept breaking against the rocks. If anything, that was where all the force came from.

I remember Rio, running off the edge of a mountain to hang-glide over the city. My entire body screamed no while a quiet voice inside, one I had finally begun to recognize, whispered trust yourself. For one impossible second, there was no ground, just gravity pulling me into the sky. Freedom, I realized, wasn’t arriving somewhere safe. It was loving life enough to leap into the unknown even after you’ve been bruised a hundred times before.

Iceland was the final exhale. A landscape of black ash and blue ice, where the earth is still being born and dying at the same time. I drove through a lunar silence that allowed me to finally hear my own breath without the background noise of someone else’s expectations. I stood at Godafoss and watched the water thunder through the ice, motion coexisting with the freeze. I realized that my own winter, the divorces, the joblessness, the years of frantic striving, didn’t mean I had stopped. Beneath the ice, the water still flows. Beneath the grief, the woman is still there, moving toward the sea.

I used to think I was traveling to find a better version of me. Now I know I was just traveling until I was tired enough to stop being anyone else.

The grand adventures make for good stories, but the real transformation happened in the quiet gaps. It happened in the cold coffee in a rainy cafe in a city whose name I couldn’t pronounce. It happened in the long, lonely walks back to a hotel room where no one was waiting. I was learning the difference between being alone and being abandoned. I was learning to sit in my own discomfort, to stay in the room with my pain until it stopped being an enemy and started being a teacher.

These days, I have intentionally slowed down. I still love the lift of an airplane, the way the world falls away and the clouds become a new floor. I suspect I always will. But I am no longer a fractured woman looking for her missing pieces in a foreign zip code. I am a whole woman who has finally learned to reside in her own skin.

These mornings, before the sun comes up, I water the roses barefoot with dirt under my fingernails. Sometimes the neighborhood is so quiet I can hear the sprinkler ticking softly across the grass. There is coffee going cold somewhere beside me. A book waiting on the hammock. Yarn half-finished in a basket by the door.

For the first time in my life, I no longer feel the urge to leave. 🤍