Four Years Ago I Left for Three Months

Four years ago today, I closed the overhead door to my storage unit in Northern Virginia, and rode to the airport with a one-way ticket to Tulum for what was supposed to be a three-month adventure of experiencing life as a digital nomad. I had no idea that nothing in my life would ever be the same.

What led me there? I have always been a wanderer. My parents encouraged it from the beginning, and I loved travel so much that I ended up building an entire career around it. International development, which meant I got to see the world and be genuinely useful in it, often in the places people don't visit on purpose. That's how much travel has shaped my life. It was never a hobby I picked up on the side. It's the thing I organized everything else around.

But it's one thing to go on a holiday or a work trip abroad, and quite another to actually move abroad. I knew deep down which one I wanted. Over the years, I’d grown a little envious of people who sold everything they owned and packed up and went, like it was nothing. I kept telling myself my annual solo trips would satisfy my desire, but they never did. They just left the curiosity burning hotter, because there was so much to see and do and I wanted to experience all of it.

My empty apartment and my sweet pup Sophie

At the time I felt stagnant, and underneath the stagnant there was this deep calling for expansion, this sense that if I ever wanted to properly meet myself I was going to have to leave the place where I already knew exactly who I was.

So that's what I did. Although not, I'll admit, without a little nudging.

It took a great deal of courage and a lot of introspection. And it took, more than either of those things, a massive rent increase on my one-bedroom apartment. The rent increase was really the only nudge I needed. 

I was lucky in one major way, which is that I had an employer at the time who was completely supportive and gave me locational freedom. That’s not the type of luck everyone gets and it’s not luck I take for granted. So I told myself I'd start somewhere familiar and then branch out from there. 

Tulum, Mexico - 2022

Which is how I ended up in Tulum, Mexico. Two weeks of working from my Airbnb during the day and exploring in the evenings on a scooter I rented from a local shop, searching for the best taco spot. Tulum was great, but familiar was the exact thing I'd left, and I knew within about a week that staying somewhere comfortable was never going to give me what I'd come for.

I did some research and heard a lot of buzz about Colombia, so I packed up again and headed south.

The drive from the Medellín airport takes you through the Túnel de Oriente, which is an extremely long tunnel, but then you come out to the other side and the whole city unfolds with such beauty, opening up to lush greenery and red brick homes and buildings cascading down the mountainsides, stacked on top of each other, creating a unique harmony between nature and the metropolis. 

I had a plan for Colombia, by the way. A month in Medellín, then a month in Cartagena, then a month in Bogotá to finish.

Well, as you can guess, absolutely none of that happened.

Medellín, Colombia - 2023

I stayed in Medellín for nine months. I met some of my closest friends there. I started my thirties there. I spent my days working in cute cafés and my evenings chatting in parks with some really interesting people from around the world. I explored every neighborhood I could get to, from Poblado to Sabaneta, before finding my favorite corner of the city in Laureles. Medellín cracked me open to dreaming bigger and wanting more for myself, and somewhere in those nine months the fact that I wasn’t going back to the U.S. stopped being a decision I was debating, and became something I had already decided.

And then, because all good things must come to an end, my time in Colombia came to a close. 

Four years of being the one who is always somewhere else changes what you are to people. This was really hard for me to accept. You miss the birthdays, the baby showers, the family gatherings, the funerals, the weddings, and all the ordinary hangouts that are what a friendship is actually made of. The cost of going was never the flight but losing proximity to the people you held close for years. 

Some of those relationships changed shape, and I’d be lying if I told you that didn’t hurt. But the space it opened let others blossom that would never have had the chance otherwise. I share this because every decision comes with a trade-off, and I’d rather tell you mine than pretend there wasn’t one. 

Since that leap I’ve lived in Portugal, where I seriously thought I would settle forever, but I'm sure you've heard the saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. Shortly after moving to Lisbon, I received a job offer to work in Nairobi, Kenya, and, of course, I accepted. That one stretched me beyond measure. It challenged me in ways I think I’m still unpacking, but it also handed me the most precious gift of my life, my now husband. 

But no, the journey didn't end there either. My solo travels turned from a “me” to a “we”, and my partner and I packed our belongings and spent eight months on a travel sabbatical through South and Southeast Asia, until his work pulled us for a brief stint in Sydney, Australia. Now I'm somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean writing this blog in complete amazement about how a three-month adventure turned into four years, 25 countries, and a whole husband.

I know, I know, if you're getting whiplash reading this, imagine living it. 

I'm not writing this to list off every country I’ve lived in since I left. I’m writing it because of the thing that sits underneath it all, which is that I bet on myself once, at a moment when I had no real evidence it would work, and my life unfolded in a direction I could never have imagined from where I was standing. If I’d listened to the skeptics, and there were plenty, I’d still be in that overpriced one-bedroom apartment, climbing the corporate ladder toward somewhere that was never going to fulfill me anyway.

So no, I'm not going to tell you to move abroad. That was my hard thing, and yours is almost certainly something else entirely. Maybe it's starting a business or it's the move across a state line, or the conversation you've been rehearsing in your head for a year. I've noticed that the women who need to hear this usually already know exactly what theirs is.

What I will say is that the version of you waiting on the other side of the hard thing is not someone you can meet from here. You can't think your way to her. You can't research your way to her, and you certainly can't wait until you feel ready, because that feeling doesn't arrive on its own, it arrives afterward. You just have to go, and the distance between who you are right now and who she is turns out to be the best part of the entire journey, trust me on this one.

I don't know what's next for us. I don't know whether we keep living out here or find our way back to the U.S. eventually. My husband and I haven't settled it, and some weeks I want to but most weeks I very much don't.

What I do know is that taking the risk gave me a deeper relationship with myself than I'd ever had, and it brought the most extraordinary people and experiences and lessons into my life because of it. So wherever I land next, I have an unwavering faith that it'll be okay.

Four years ago I left for three months and I'm still going.

Keep planting. 

Ash