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How many have opened their eyes the morning after a party, a college gathering, or an otherwise unremarkable Friday night, trying to piece together fragments of an evening that had somehow disappeared?

How many hav…

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I have been thinking a lot this week about all of the things I was taught as a girl in order to keep myself safe from men, because somewhere between being told to watch my drink, not get too drunk, never walk home alone, never leave my friends, never trust the wrong person, never dress in a way that might send the wrong message, never put myself in a compromising situation, always pay attention in the parking lot, always notice who is walking behind me, always know where the exits are, and always understand that there are wolves in the world, I absorbed another lesson that nobody ever had to say out loud, which was that if something happened to me, there was a very good chance that someone would eventually ask what I had done to allow it to happen.

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We have been teaching women how not to get assaulted for as long as I can remember, and the more I think about it now, the more extraordinary it seems that we have placed so much of the responsibility for preventing sexual violence onto the people most likely to experience it, creating generations of girls who learn to move through the world with an invisible checklist running constantly through their heads, hyper vigilant generations, while simultaneously understanding that if all of those precautions fail, their behavior may eventually become part of the evidence presented against them.

We ask where she was, what she was wearing, what she drank, how much she drank, why she went there, why she trusted him, whether she flirted with him, whether she liked him, whether they had kissed before, whether she clearly said no, and sometimes even whether something can really be called rape if she was so intoxicated that she cannot remember every minute of it, and while some of those questions can have legitimate relevance in a criminal investigation, culturally they have also become extraordinarily effective at moving our attention away from the choices of the person accused of violating someone and toward all the ways the person who says she was violated supposedly failed to protect herself.

The allegations coming out of Cornell University this month have brought all of this roaring back for me, not because I believe that my experience is identical to the one described in that civil lawsuit, and certainly not because I believe the Internet should determine the criminal guilt of anyone accused of a crime, but because underneath the specific facts being disputed in that case is a cultural conversation that feels painfully familiar to me, which is what happens when a young woman becomes profoundly intoxicated or incapacitated, what responsibility the people around her have toward her in that condition, and why we remain so interested in investigating the choices she made before she became vulnerable rather than examining with equal intensity the choices other people made once she was vulnerable.

A former Cornell student identified in court papers as Jane Doe has filed a civil lawsuit against seven former members of the Chi Phi fraternity alleging that she was drugged and sexually assaulted during an October 2024 incident, and while no criminal charges were brought after the initial investigation, Cornell has said that its internal process resulted in disciplinary sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions, while the fraternity chapter was subsequently barred from campus; after the civil lawsuit brought renewed attention and additional disputed evidence to the case this month, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced that the investigation would be reopened and presented to a grand jury, while also publicly disputing some of the characterizations being made about how the original investigation was handled. (People.com)

The civil suit and subsequent reporting have also drawn attention to messages allegedly exchanged among fraternity members surrounding the incident, which the woman’s attorney has described as important evidence and which the district attorney has said his office did not previously have in the form now being publicly discussed, although he has also cautioned that even deeply disturbing messages do not independently resolve the legal question of consent, which is precisely why I think it is important to hold two ideas in our minds at once: criminal guilt belongs to a legal process that must examine evidence fairly, while the culture surrounding intoxication, sexual access, bystander behavior and the treatment of vulnerable women belongs to all of us. (The Guardian)

Today, September 29, Wells Fargo reportedly terminated Diego Sarabia, one of the former fraternity members named as a defendant in the lawsuit, nearly two years after the alleged assault, and although losing a job is neither proof of criminal guilt nor the equivalent of a judicial verdict, I cannot stop thinking about the amount of time contained inside those two years and about how differently time functions for the person who says she experienced an assault than it does for the institutions deciding what, if anything, should happen because of it. (The Independent)

While universities investigate, prosecutors evaluate evidence, employers conduct reviews, lawyers file lawsuits and the public debates what happened, the person at the center of an alleged assault does not get to place her nervous system, education, relationships, sexuality, sense of safety or the trajectory of her life on hold while everyone else decides whether what happened to her qualifies as serious enough to warrant consequences.

According to the civil allegations that have now become public, this young woman eventually left Cornell, and that is one of the details I have had the hardest time getting out of my head because I keep thinking about everything required for a young woman to get herself into an Ivy League university in the first place, including the years of studying, competing, planning, sacrificing and imagining a future that exist before an acceptance letter ever arrives, and I keep wondering how easily the loss of that future can become a footnote while public conversations center on what consequences might mean for the lives and careers of the men she has accused.

That is where this story stopped being something happening somewhere else and began touching a part of my own history that I spent decades struggling to understand, because I was raped when I was young, and for a very long time I could not say that sentence without immediately following it with every reason I thought perhaps I wasn’t entitled to say it.

I had been drinking, I had blacked out, I had a crush on his brother, he was a year younger than I was, and I eventually went on to date his brother afterward, which meant that for years I could take almost any detail surrounding what happened and somehow turn it into evidence against myself even though none of those details answered the only question that actually mattered, which was whether I was conscious and capable of choosing what happened to my body.

Even years later, when I saw him at a wedding, I remember still carrying that confusion inside me and wondering whether perhaps I had misunderstood the entire thing, whether being blacked out somehow made me responsible for what happened while I was blacked out, whether having a crush on his brother meant I had invited something I could not remember inviting, whether dating his brother afterward somehow retroactively changed what had happened before, and whether the fact that the person who did it was younger than I was meant that I could not possibly have been the vulnerable person in that room.

I understand now how completely backward that thinking was, because my intoxication did not make my body available, my attraction to someone else did not make my body available, my later relationship choices could not retroactively create consent, his age did not create consent, and my inability to remember what happened certainly did not create consent, but when a girl is taught early enough that she is responsible for protecting herself from sexual violence, it becomes incredibly easy for her to conclude that being violated means she must somehow have failed at the job she was given.

What I remember about the next morning was not ordinary at all, but profoundly confusing, because I had never blacked out before and had no framework for understanding how nearly an entire stretch of my life could simply be missing from my memory.

My girlfriend and I were barely 15 then, probably 100 pounds each, and earlier the previous afternoon we had gotten her upstairs neighbor to buy us a bottle of Bacardi 151, which we began drinking as shots at her house while her parents were gone, thinking it was going to be just the two of us hanging out together, although apparently at some point other people began coming over and by then I was already far too intoxicated to understand what was unfolding around me.

To this day, I do not know exactly when I crossed the threshold from drunk to completely gone, because my memory simply stops sometime in the afternoon and does not begin again until somewhere around five o’clock the following morning, when I woke up on the couch confused about where all of those hours had gone and trying to comprehend how it could suddenly be morning when the last thing I remembered was essentially the same time the previous day.

I remember getting up and almost immediately going to the bathroom, and when I pulled down my shorts to pee I saw blood in them, which was the first physical indication I had that something had happened to my body during all of those hours my mind could not account for.

I was supposed to run a cross-country race that morning, but I did not run it, because instead I was trying to piece together a night that did not exist in my memory and slowly beginning to understand that something sexual had happened to me during a period in which I had not been conscious enough to remember participating in it.

That was how I lost my virginity, although even writing those words now makes me uncomfortable because saying that I “lost” something makes what happened sound strangely passive, as though I had misplaced some precious possession through carelessness rather than having my first sexual experience occur during a period of time when I was incapable of consciously choosing it for myself.

For years afterward, I returned again and again to everything that happened before my memory disappeared as though somewhere in those details I might find the evidence that made me responsible for what happened next, and I thought about the alcohol, the fact that we had asked someone to buy it for us, the fact that I had willingly taken those shots, and the fact that I had gotten myself that intoxicated in the first place, without understanding the distinction that seems so painfully obvious to me now, which is that I had made a choice to drink alcohol with my girlfriend that afternoon, but I had never made a choice for someone to have sex with my incapacitated body.

Those were two completely separate decisions, and only one of them was mine.

What happened afterward is almost as important to me now as what happened that night, because even my best friend blamed me, and when someone you trust responds to your pain by examining what you did wrong, you learn very quickly to turn that examination inward, which is how I spent years wondering whether I should not have gotten that drunk, should not have been there, should not have trusted those people, should not have liked his brother, or somehow should have been capable of preventing something that happened precisely because I had become incapable of protecting myself.

I left school not terribly long afterward, and I am not interested in drawing a neat causal line between one traumatic night and every decision I subsequently made because human beings are more complicated than that and memory becomes even more complicated across decades, but as a 39-year-old woman looking backward at that girl now, I think I am allowed to wonder how much an experience like that changed the trajectory of her life, particularly when she did not yet have the vocabulary to call what happened rape, did not have meaningful support for processing it, was blamed by someone she trusted, and was nevertheless expected to move back into her ordinary life as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

I am allowed to wonder whether some of the choices I made afterward belonged partly to a girl trying to escape a life she no longer felt entirely safe in, and I am allowed to feel enormous compassion for the version of myself who spent so many years searching her own behavior for the crime instead of understanding that the responsibility belonged to the person who saw her incapacity and chose to take advantage of it.

That is the parallel I cannot stop seeing when I read about Cornell, because underneath all of the legal questions that must rightly be investigated and adjudicated fairly is a much simpler moral question about what we expect one human being to do when another human being in front of them is profoundly vulnerable.

If a woman is so intoxicated that she cannot meaningfully choose what is happening to her, the question should never be what can be done to her while she is in that condition, but how the people around her can get her somewhere safe, give her water, put her to bed, call someone she trusts, make sure she is breathing and protect her until she is once again capable of making decisions for herself, and I cannot understand why that standard should be controversial because it asks almost nothing more of us than basic human decency.

And yet here we are still having versions of this conversation while women around the world continue to experience extraordinary levels of sexual and gender-based violence, including in South Africa, where Ekurhuleni has been shaken by a series of killings of women in recent months and where another young woman was killed this week, bringing the number reported killed in the area since July to at least 12, although police have cautioned that the cases are not necessarily connected and several already appear to involve different circumstances or suspects. (Daily Maverick)

The circumstances are different, the countries are different, the crimes are different and it would be irresponsible to collapse them all into one story, but what they evoke in me is the same unbearable question about how much of women’s lives we are willing to lose before violence against women becomes something we understand not as a women’s issue that women are responsible for navigating, but as a societal issue that everyone is responsible for confronting.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is also one of those moments when I find myself profoundly grateful that we have the Internet, because for all of the cruelty, misinformation, voyeurism and mob behavior that flourish online, the Internet has also destroyed one of the conditions that allowed sexual violence and institutional failures surrounding it to remain hidden for generations, which was the ability to keep one woman’s experience isolated inside a family, a school, a fraternity, a workplace, a police department or a community whose reputation might depend upon nobody outside of it ever knowing what happened.

Now a woman can speak and other women can say something similar happened to them, journalists can continue asking questions, institutions can be required to explain their decisions publicly, employers can become aware of information they may not previously have possessed, prosecutors can face scrutiny over decisions that otherwise might have disappeared into a closed file, and ordinary people can insist that allegations of sexual violence be treated with seriousness without pretending that public outrage itself is a substitute for evidence, investigation or due process.

That distinction matters enormously to me because I do not want social media deciding who is criminally guilty any more than I want powerful institutions quietly deciding that the destruction of one young woman’s life is an acceptable price for preserving everyone else’s, and what I want instead is accountability, transparency, serious investigation and a culture in which the consequences of sexual violence are not measured primarily by what accountability might cost the accused while the cost borne by the person reporting the violence is treated as inevitable collateral damage.

For most of my life, when I looked backward at the girl I was that morning, I saw all of the things she should have done differently, but when I look at her now, at 39 years old, I see something entirely different, because I see a girl who should have been safe, who should have been protected once she was clearly no longer capable of protecting herself, who woke up on a couch at five in the morning with nearly an entire day missing from her memory, who walked into a bathroom and discovered blood in her shorts, who missed the cross-country race she was supposed to run that morning because she was trying to understand what had happened to her body, and who then spent far too many years asking herself what she had done to make another person’s behavior possible.

I do not want another generation of girls inheriting that question, and I do not want our answer to violence against women to be that women must become more vigilant, less free, less trusting, less adventurous, less sexual, less spontaneous, more suspicious and perpetually watchful enough to prevent another person from violating them, because that does not create freedom for women so much as it creates an elaborate prison whose walls we are then asked to carry around with us everywhere we go.

I want us to teach consent with the same urgency with which we have taught girls self-protection, I want us to teach boys and men that another person’s vulnerability creates a responsibility to protect rather than an opportunity to exploit, I want us to teach friends that intervention is an act of love, I want institutions to understand that protecting reputations cannot come before protecting human beings, and I want us to stop looking first at what a woman drank, wore, wanted yesterday, did afterward or failed to do in the moment before we look at the choices of the person who harmed her.

It took me decades to understand that being intoxicated was not consent, that having a crush was not consent, that dating someone afterward could not retroactively create consent, that my confusion was not consent, that my imperfect memory was not consent, and that voluntarily drinking far too much alcohol did not transform every subsequent act committed against my body into something I had somehow chosen.

Perhaps that is the thing I most wish someone had told the girl standing in that bathroom all those years ago, because there is a profound difference between acknowledging that you made a choice that put you in a vulnerable position and accepting responsibility for another person’s choice to exploit that vulnerability, and I spent far too much of my life believing those were the same thing.

They were never the same thing.

We have spent long enough teaching women how not to be raped, and perhaps it is finally time to put the full weight of responsibility where it always belonged, on the people who choose to violate another human being, on the people who stand by when they have an opportunity to intervene, and on the institutions entrusted with taking these allegations seriously when someone finally finds the courage to say that something was done to her that she never chose.

With Love,

Hannah

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Years ago, I went to get a quote on an FJ Cruiser because I was convinced I needed one—or, more accurately, because I was in love with what it represented. In 2020, I put a deposit down on a Ford Bronco before they were even readily available. I loved the idea of a vehicle th…

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I had spent most of my twenties moving around the world, living in different countries and building a career and a life that didn’t look particularly conventional, and while I had been earning money and supporting myself for years, I hadn’t been doing any of the things that establish an American financial identity in the background of your life. I hadn’t had a mortgage, hadn’t financed a vehicle—or anything else, for that matter—hadn’t carried any loans, and hadn’t been particularly interested in borrowing money in the first place; hell, I was so nomadic at that stage of my life that I hadn’t even had an electric bill in my name for fear of being “tied down.” So when someone at that dealership pulled my credit history, there simply wasn’t enough there to tell them much of anything about me.

I remember feeling like they didn’t take me particularly seriously, which was strange because I knew exactly which car I wanted and I knew that I could afford it, but there was nothing in the system confirming that I was the kind of person they should trust to make payments on it. I left the dealership, went to the bank, and returned the following day with a cashier’s check for the entire purchase price, and I can still remember how astonished they seemed that this woman they hadn’t known what to do with financially the day before could simply walk back in and buy the car outright. I’d dazzled them the previous day with stories from my travels around the world and what I’d been up to while I was out there, so I’m fairly certain no one imagined that the wildly nomadic woman donning African beads and a handwoven Colombian bag sitting across from them had also managed to do what I’d done without touching her nest egg.

At the time, I found the whole thing more validating than frustrating because I didn’t particularly want their loan anyway, and if anything the experience reinforced a belief I had already been carrying for most of my life, which was that if I couldn’t afford to buy something with money I actually had, I probably didn’t want to own it.

It took me many years to realize that my relationship with debt wasn’t simply a financial preference and probably had much more to do with what I had watched happen to my parents when I was growing up, because the idea that a bank could take away your home wasn’t an abstract possibility in my family; it was something I had watched happen….twice.

When I was three, my parents lost our house in Northern Virginia, after my dad’s business partner did some shady deals on the side. This was ultimately the reason our family moved to Florida in 1990, and then a decade and a half later, during the financial crisis, they lost another two homes but one was the home we lived in and had since ‘94, so twice in the course of my upbringing I watched the place that was supposed to represent safety and permanence disappear because the bank ultimately had a claim to it.

You don’t have to understand mortgages or foreclosures or interest rates when you’re a child for an experience like that to settle somewhere in your DNA, and somewhere inside of me it seems to have created a very simple understanding of money and ownership: if you owe somebody money for something, there is always the possibility that they can take it away, whereas if you own something outright, it is yours.

That belief followed me into adulthood and influenced far more of my financial life than I realized at the time, because I became deeply uncomfortable with owing anyone anything and deeply attached to the idea that real security meant ownership without debt. When I eventually started dreaming about buying land of my own, I knew that more than almost anything else I wanted to create a home that nobody could ever take away from me, and while other people dreamed about the size of their house or the neighborhood they wanted to live in, one of my greatest fantasies was simply knowing that wherever I eventually landed would belong to me.

When I bought my four acres on Hawaii in March of 2022, roughly seventy percent of the purchase price was paid upfront in cash while the remaining portion was privately financed for two years with a balloon payment due at the end, and although that technically meant I hadn’t purchased the property entirely outright, the plan was always to pay that remaining balance and ultimately own my home free and clear.

What I hadn’t fully anticipated when I bought the land was that someone else would buy into that dream with me, or that the relationship would fizzle before we finished paying for it. By the time the balloon payment came due, I had already poured an extraordinary amount of cash into transforming the property over those first few years, and suddenly having to come up with the remaining balance on the land myself, meant needing an amount of liquid cash that I had never anticipated having to produce alone.

The land I bought was essentially raw jungle, an old junkyard when I found it, and turning it into an off-grid farm meant clearing acres of overgrowth, hauling out abandoned vehicles and debris, fixing a 370-foot well, installing an enormous solar and battery system, digging septic and permitting, building structures and infrastructure, purchasing equipment and then maintaining four acres in one of the wettest climates in the world, where anything you clear begins trying to become jungle again almost immediately.

Because of this long and arduous process the property was still considered raw land rather than a conventional residential property, so I couldn’t simply walk into a bank and access the kinds of construction loans, home-equity products or traditional financing that are available to someone who owns a normal permitted house, so nearly everything I did on the farm came out of cash, which at the time still felt like the safest and most responsible way I could possibly build my life.

For nearly three years I poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the land on top of what I had already put into purchasing it, and every time I paid another contractor or bought another piece of equipment or funded another enormous piece of infrastructure, I could at least tell myself that I wasn’t accumulating debt, wasn’t leveraging my future, and wasn’t putting my home at risk by borrowing against it.

The irony, which I wouldn’t understand until much later, was that I was putting almost all of my financial security into the exact thing I was trying so desperately to make secure.

Then 2024 happened, my relationship ended abruptly, and the balloon payment that had always been sitting on the horizon suddenly became mine to solve.

I had spent years pouring cash into the farm because I believed that cash was what would ultimately protect me, only to find myself staring at a substantial payment on the remaining balance of the land while an enormous amount of my money was already sitting underneath my feet in wells and solar panels and infrastructure and equipment and improvements that I couldn’t simply turn back into cash when I needed it.

Because the property still wasn’t treated as a conventional residential property, there wasn’t an easy refinancing option waiting for me, and because I had spent the previous several years funding the build-out myself, there wasn’t some enormous untouched pile of cash sitting in an account waiting to rescue me either. The asset I had worked so hard to protect contained an extraordinary amount of my money, but having wealth inside an illiquid asset and having cash available when you urgently need it are two very different things.

That period of my life taught me more about money than almost anything that came before it, because for the first time I understood that paying cash for everything doesn’t necessarily make you safe, just as borrowing money doesn’t necessarily make you reckless, and that you can own an enormous amount of equity while simultaneously finding yourself frighteningly short on options.

I had spent much of my adult life believing that the primary financial question I needed to answer was how to make sure nobody could ever take my home away from me, when perhaps the better question should have been how to structure my life so that if something completely unexpected happened, I would have as many different ways out as possible.

It has taken the better part of the last two years to dig myself out of the financial hole that followed, and I don’t use the word miracle lightly when I say that sometimes it feels miraculous that I managed to do it, because there were moments when the possibility of losing the one and only home I ever intended to buy felt far less theoretical than I would ever like to experience again.

Whether it was the grace of God, good luck, sheer stubbornness, an enormous amount of work, or some good karma I managed to accumulate in this lifetime or another, I was spared my worst-case scenario, and I came out the other side still standing on the four acres I had fought so hard to build and protect.

The experience didn’t make me regret paying cash for the farm, nor did it suddenly turn me into someone who believes debt is the answer to everything, but it dismantled the black-and-white relationship I had with both of those things and forced me to recognize that financial security is much more complicated than simply owning something outright.

Which is why there is something unexpectedly emotional and wonderfully full-circle about the fact that, as I turn 39, I am buying a new truck and, for the first time in my life, intentionally choosing to finance a major purchase.

In the slightly more than ten years since I walked into that dealership after moving home from abroad as a financial ghost, I have slowly built an almost perfect credit score, year by year and payment by payment, despite spending most of that time with very little intention of ever using it for anything significant.

For years, I almost thought of my credit score as a funny little badge I had accumulated in the background of my life, because I was proud of having excellent credit but still subscribed to the philosophy that if I had the cash to buy something, why would I ever borrow money to buy it instead?

Now, for the first time, I understand the value of having spent all those years building a financial history even when I didn’t need it, because when I decided to finance this truck I wasn’t the invisible woman standing in a dealership with nothing in the system to prove she could pay for the thing she wanted to buy.

I had more than a decade of credit history behind me, along with my income history, assets, a nearly perfect credit score, and the fact that I own my home without a lien, and instead of needing to prove that I could afford the truck by draining the entire purchase price out of an account and placing it on the table, I could let the financial life I had built over the last decade speak for itself.

There had been some conversation during the financing process about whether I might need a cosigner depending on how a lender viewed my self-employed income to qualify for a special (super low) interest rate, there was something surprisingly meaningful about ultimately being able to qualify based on my own financial history, without needing someone else’s name or credit score beside mine.

At 39 years old, I realize it sounds slightly ridiculous to say that financing a Toyota makes me feel like a big girl, but adulthood is funny that way, because some of the milestones that end up meaning the most aren’t necessarily the ones we were taught to expect.

For me, sitting in a dealership and realizing that I could borrow money at a very low interest rate because of the credit and financial life I had spent more than a decade building, while leaving my cash exactly where it was, represented something much larger than simply buying a truck.

It represented having another option.

That may be the single biggest thing the last two years have taught me about money, because I no longer believe that financial security means never borrowing money, just as I no longer believe having enough cash to purchase something outright automatically makes paying cash the smartest choice.

What I want now is not the absence of debt at all costs, but the presence of options: enough cash that an unexpected event doesn’t immediately become a crisis, enough credit that I can borrow intelligently when borrowing makes more sense than depleting that cash, enough income to comfortably service whatever obligations I choose to take on, enough equity that I’m continuing to build actual wealth, and enough independence that a decision someone else makes about their own life can never again so dramatically destabilize mine.

I still love the feeling of owning things outright, and I imagine some part of me always will, because I don’t think you watch your parents lose their home and then come frighteningly close to your own version of that experience without carrying some residue of it for the rest of your life.

What has changed is that I no longer confuse having no debt with having no vulnerability, because sometimes tying up enormous amounts of cash in an asset can leave you vulnerable in ways you never anticipated, while having access to inexpensive credit when you don’t desperately need it can create flexibility you may someday be enormously grateful to have.

There is also something poetic to me about the difference between the woman who walked into a dealership a little more than ten years ago and the woman who will drive this truck home now, because the younger version of me believed that walking back through those doors with a cashier’s check was proof that I didn’t need the financial system, whereas the woman I am today understands that learning how to participate in that system without becoming dependent on it is its own form of freedom.

I don’t regret being the woman who paid cash, because she built the life I have now, and I certainly don’t regret the instinct that made me fight so fiercely to own my home outright, because standing here today on land that belongs to me free and clear is one of the greatest sources of peace in my life.

I simply know something now that she didn’t know then, which is that security isn’t found in one perfect financial strategy, and there is no single arrangement that can guarantee that nothing painful or unexpected will ever happen to you.

Security, at least as I understand it now, is having enough different forms of strength that when life inevitably changes, you have choices about what happens next.

So when I drive my new truck home, I imagine I’ll think at least once about the young woman who walked back into that first dealership carrying a cashier’s check because the system couldn’t see her, and I’ll probably feel a tremendous amount of tenderness toward her because I understand exactly why owning everything outright made her feel safe.

She spent the next decade building a financial life strong enough that today she doesn’t need to write that check.

And somehow, after everything that’s happened in between, choosing not to feels like progress.

With Love,

Hannah

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Mexico has piqued my interest for a number of reasons, some practical and some harder to quantify, and rather than continuing to investigate those possibilities from behind a computer screen, I wanted to come here and experience several places through the lens of actually living and working in them. I wanted to understand their livability, their accessibility, their infrastructure and cost, how easy they are to move through, how they feel after a few days rather than a few hours, and whether they could support the kinds of live events and gatherings I increasingly want to create. There is a tremendous difference between loving somewhere on vacation and imagining investing in it, spending significant stretches of time there, or asking a group of women to travel across the world to meet you there, and this trip has been, at least in part, about investigating that difference.

I have also already identified the kind of structure I am interested in potentially investing in, which has made the way I move through these cities feel different from the way I might have traveled through them ten years ago. I have been following particular architects, design companies, builders and construction cooperatives whose work reflects the kind of spaces I am drawn to, structures that blur the boundary between indoors and outdoors, that use local materials and respond intelligently to climate, that gather people around courtyards and communal spaces rather than separating everyone behind walls. I am looking at buildings not simply because they are beautiful, but because I am beginning to understand what I want a future property to do, how I want people to move through it, where we might gather, where we might eat, where we might write, where we might train, where someone might disappear for an hour to be alone, and where thirty women might somehow feel both held by a group and completely free inside it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has turned me into a slightly obsessive observer of architecture. I notice outdoor spaces and where the sun rises. I am paying attention to the light inside, built in furniture, outdoor kitchens, rooftops, pools, shaded terraces and breezeways, the direction a building opens toward the landscape, the places where people naturally congregate and the places that seem to invite you to linger without asking anything of you. I find myself saving architects to folders on my phone, following building projects as they take shape, looking at land and construction costs, asking questions about ownership and infrastructure, and imagining how a space designed for gathering might function not simply as an investment, but as a home for a body of work that has slowly been converging.

Because my journey has been taking a myriad of roads that seem to all be meeting in one pinnacle location, the thing I am imagining has become much bigger than just another retreat.

I have spent more than two decades building a career around movement and years bringing people together through retreats, while writing has slowly become another central language of my life, and more recently strength training has changed the way I understand my own body and what I want to teach women about inhabiting theirs. At the same time, the conversations I have been having on A Man Isn’t a Plan have opened another door entirely, allowing me to speak about relationships, sexuality, independence, aging, identity, heartbreak, money, desire, shame and the complicated process of becoming a woman whose life is no longer organized around being chosen. For a while I thought of these things as different branches of my career, separate rooms I moved between depending on what day it was, but lately I have started wondering whether they were always supposed to live under the same roof.

I keep imagining something like a giant girls’ getaway that incorporates all of it, mornings when we move our bodies and get stronger together, afternoons when we write and journal and excavate the stories we have been carrying around without realizing they were stories, conversations about relationships and identity and the strange, beautiful, disorienting process of becoming older women in a culture obsessed with keeping us young, dinners at enormous tables where nobody is staring at a phone because the conversation is too good, swimming and wandering and laughing and sitting in circles long after whatever scheduled programming was supposed to have ended.

Not a retreat from our lives so much as an opportunity to remember something our lives have been missing.

The more I think about bringing women together, the more convinced I become that one of the great unspoken aches of modern adulthood is how profoundly lonely it can be, particularly for women who have spent much of their lives searching for a kind of sisterhood they cannot quite name. I know that search because I have participated in it myself, and I have watched countless women participate in it around me, moving through friendships and relationships and careers and cities while carrying the vague sensation that there should be more people around us than there are.

Human beings did not spend most of our history living the way so many of us live now, sealed into individual houses and apartments, coordinating friendship weeks in advance through calendars, asking one romantic partner to somehow become lover, best friend, emotional confidant, travel companion, co-parent, financial partner, emergency contact and primary witness to our entire existence. Across cultures and throughout human history, child-rearing and daily survival have often extended far beyond the biological mother and father into networks of relatives and community members, and although I have no interest in romanticizing the past or pretending that historical communities were universally safe, equitable or liberating for women, I do think something essential has been lost in the architecture of modern life.

We have lost some version of the circle, the everyday intimacy of being surrounded by women who know what season of life we are in without requiring a lengthy explanation, who help care for children who are not biologically theirs, who cook while someone else holds the baby, who share labor and stories and grief and knowledge, who understand instinctively that belonging was never supposed to be something a single person could provide.

Perhaps this is part of why romantic partnership has become so extraordinarily heavy with expectation, because when community disappeared, we did not stop needing everything community once gave us, we simply began asking fewer people to provide more of it.

I have been thinking about this especially in relation to women who feel an enormous urgency around finding partnership and creating biological families, because I wonder how often several different longings become tangled together until we can no longer tell them apart. There is, of course, a very real desire many people have for romantic love, partnership and motherhood, and I would never reduce those desires to something they are not, but I also wonder whether some of what we identify as the desperate need to find our person or build our own family contains another hunger beneath it, a much older and broader desire to belong somewhere, to have people who would notice if we disappeared for three days, to have a table where we are expected, to have someone to call when the car breaks down and someone who already knows why December is difficult and someone whose children climb into our lap because they have known us their entire lives.

Maybe sometimes what we are starving for is not simply partnership, but a village.

The distinction matters because one person, no matter how wonderful, was never designed to become an entire community, and a biological family, no matter how deeply desired, cannot necessarily cure the isolation created by the disappearance of communal life. We can love partnership and motherhood while still asking whether we have placed an impossible amount of our need for belonging inside those two containers, particularly for women, who have been taught for generations that the ultimate evidence of a successful adult life is a partner beside us and children who belong to us.

Perhaps one of the reasons adulthood can feel so bewilderingly isolating is that we have constructed lives in which finding a village now requires extraordinary intentionality. Community no longer necessarily happens because we share a well or a harvest or a kitchen or because three generations live within walking distance of one another, which means that if we want it, we often have to build it deliberately, awkwardly and bravely, reaching toward one another despite a culture that has spent enormous amounts of money teaching women to compare themselves instead.

We have been sold competition where we needed connection, taught to evaluate one another’s bodies and marriages and careers and homes and faces and children and childlessness, while entire industries profit from ensuring there is always another woman somewhere against whom we can find ourselves lacking. We scroll through one another’s lives from separate rooms and call it connection, while many of us quietly ache for someone to sit beside us on the floor.

I think this is part of why bringing women together feels increasingly meaningful to me, because after all these years of leading retreats, I know what happens somewhere around the second or third day when the performances begin to soften, when women stop introducing themselves through their jobs or relationships or accomplishments and start telling the truth about their lives. I have watched strangers become confidantes over breakfast, watched women recognize themselves in another woman’s story, watched laughter become completely uncontrollable and grief become suddenly bearable because someone else understands it, and I have watched people arrive believing they needed yoga or travel or a week away from work only to discover that what they desperately needed was one another.

The older I get, the less interested I am in building a career composed of disconnected accomplishments and the more interested I am in creating experiences that feel like extensions of the life I actually want to live. I want to write and help other women find the language for their own stories, I want to move my body and teach women how to become stronger inside theirs, I want to have difficult conversations about the things we have been conditioned to whisper about, I want to travel and wander through places that remind us how enormous the world still is, I want to gather around beautiful food and sit in circles and ask better questions, and perhaps more than anything, I want women to leave something I created with phone numbers in their phones that were not there when they arrived.

Increasingly, I want a physical place capable of holding all of that.

So here I am in Mexico, walking through buildings and looking at walls and patios differently, saving architects and designers to folders on my phone, following construction cooperatives, asking questions about land cost and infrastructure and imagining what could exist inside a structure I have not yet found. I am investigating cities not simply as places I might return to, but as places that might someday hold us, whether through future live events, retreats, gatherings, or some larger permanent home for this work.

I do not know yet whether I will buy something here or exactly what form this idea will eventually take, but for perhaps the first time I understand with surprising clarity what I am actually looking for. I am not searching for another beautiful property simply because I love beautiful places, and I am not interested in building something for the sake of being able to say that I built it. I am looking for the architecture that could bring an idea I have been carrying for years to life without realizing all of its seemingly disparate pieces belonged together.

A place big enough for movement and writing and conversation and contradiction, big enough for women who are married and women who are single, women who are mothers and women who never will be, women whose lives followed the map and women who watched the map burn somewhere along the way, all of us gathering without requiring one another to have arrived at the same conclusions.

Maybe that is what I came to Mexico looking for.

Not simply another place to invest, or another destination to host a retreat, but the possibility of creating a place where women can gather around the parts of themselves that exist beyond partnership, beyond motherhood, beyond productivity and beyond all of the roles we have been taught make us valuable, and remember that sisterhood itself can be one of the great sustaining relationships of our lives.

Maybe we were never meant to do this alone.

And maybe, if the village we are longing for no longer exists in the way it once did, the next question is whether we are willing to build it ourselves.

With Love,

Hannah

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Somewhere from Italy to Peru, Alaska to the Bahamas, and all the plans still unfolding before the year comes to a close, I’ve realized that what I’ve been reconnecting with isn’t simply my love of movement across the globe, but a younger version of myself who once beli…

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I had moved out of my parents’ house, rented my first little apartment, and was suddenly responsible for supporting myself financially. I worked three jobs because I had no other choice, but I don’t remember feeling burdened by it. If anything, I felt exhilarated by the freedom of knowing that every decision, every dollar, and every consequence belonged entirely to me. I drove a little white Volkswagen Cabriolet with the top folded down whenever the weather cooperated, my dreadlocks (they were truthfully more like knotted white girl hair) swinging in the wind with shells and wooden beads woven throughout them, and I spent nearly every spare hour making batik art that eventually found its way onto the walls of a tiny local gallery just a few blocks from where I lived. Looking back now, it all feels wonderfully cinematic, as though I had stepped into the opening scene of a coming-of-age film where the young protagonist leaves everything familiar behind to forge her own path through the world. At the time, I was convinced that was exactly what I was doing.

I didn’t want the life that seemed to be laid out before my generation, in my geographic location. I wasn’t interested in climbing any corporate ladder, settling into a suburban neighborhood where motherhood would surely follow, or measuring success by promotions, paychecks, or possessions. I wanted to create things with my own hands. I wanted to travel farther than anyone I knew. I wanted to meet people whose lives looked nothing like mine, and I wanted to discover whether there was another way to move through the world that felt more authentic than the one I saw demonstrated all around me. I believed that by rejecting the expectations surrounding my little town, I had somehow escaped culture altogether, as though choosing a different path meant I was no longer being shaped by the society in which I lived. That illusion remained with me for far longer than I care to admit.

For years, I thought of myself as someone who simply thought for herself. I was independent. I questioned authority. I challenged convention. I didn’t blindly follow trends, or at least I didn’t believe I did. I considered myself countercultural, and I wore that identity with tremendous pride because it made me feel as though I had become the author of my own story rather than another character reading from a script someone else had written.

What I couldn’t yet see was that every generation has its own version of rebellion, and every version of rebellion comes with its own language, symbols, values, aesthetics, and assumptions. The people inside those movements rarely recognize them as culture because culture is easiest to identify when you’re standing outside of it. From the inside, it simply feels like common sense. It feels like truth. It feels like your own personality.

It has taken me nearly twenty-four years to recognize that I wasn’t really that far outside the box at all. I was just next door in a different box.

The clothes I wore, the music I listened to, the philosophies I embraced, the communities where I felt most understood, and even the way I presented myself to strangers all carried meanings that existed long before I adopted them. I thought my dreadlocks represented freedom because someone before me had already attached that meaning to them. I believed handmade jewelry communicated authenticity because my corner of the world had decided that it did. Even my desire to reject mainstream society wasn’t an original idea. I had unknowingly stepped into a community filled with people who were rejecting it in remarkably similar ways, and together we convinced ourselves that we had escaped conformity while rarely noticing how closely we resembled one another.

None of this diminishes the courage it took to leave home at fifteen or the determination it required to build a life for myself from such a young age. Those experiences shaped me into someone who learned to trust herself, solve problems, and create opportunities where none seemed to exist. I will always be grateful to that young girl because she possessed a kind of fearlessness that I still admire. What has changed is not my appreciation for her courage but my understanding of how profoundly every one of us is influenced by the world around us, even when we believe we are standing far enough away from of it, not to be influenced by it.

The older I become, the less convinced I am that any of us are nearly as self-made as we imagine ourselves to be.

If my appearance had been one expression of the culture that shaped me, my beliefs were an even deeper one because they lived somewhere far less visible than dreadlocks or handmade jewelry ever could. Looking back, I can now see that while I believed I was carefully choosing every opinion for myself, many of the convictions that would define my twenties had settled into me long before I ever thought to examine them. They weren’t imposed by my parents, nor were they dictated by school, because I had never experienced a traditional education. Instead, they seeped in through conversations, books, friendships, magazines, films, and the broader cultural atmosphere surrounding the generation I came of age within, becoming so intertwined with my own thinking that I eventually stopped recognizing them as influences at all. They simply felt like me.

One of the strongest beliefs I carried was that a truly empowered woman needed no one. Independence wasn’t simply something to strive for; it became a moral virtue, almost a measure of character. I wanted to earn my own money, solve my own problems, travel the world alone, build my own career, and prove to both myself and everyone around me that my life would never depend upon another person. At fifteen, supporting myself financially wasn’t a philosophy as much as it was a necessity, but over time that necessity slowly transformed into an identity, and identities have a curious way of becoming difficult to question because they begin to feel less like ideas and more like facts about who we are.

To be clear, I remain profoundly grateful for the capability that season of my life cultivated within me because it became the foundation upon which so much of my life was later built. That young woman eventually backpacked alone through countries near and far, built multi-6-figure businesses that continue to support her today, purchased four acres of raw jungle on Hawaii Island without waiting for someone else to help make that dream possible, and slowly learned that almost anything can be figured out if you’re willing to remain curious for long enough. Capability has given me freedom, and I would never wish to surrender it.

What I have begun questioning, however, is something far more subtle than capability itself. Somewhere along the way I unconsciously accepted the idea that strength meant self-sufficiency, that needing people was weakness, that receiving help somehow diminished independence, and that the highest expression of womanhood was proving that I could build an entire life without relying on anyone at all. I never stopped to ask whether those beliefs had originated within me because they had become so thoroughly woven into my personality that I mistook them for my own voice.

It is remarkable how rarely we examine the beliefs that receive applause from the culture surrounding us because affirmation has a way of disguising conditioning. We tend to scrutinize the opinions that make us unpopular while rarely questioning the ones that earn admiration, and yet both are equally capable of shaping our lives. The beliefs we inherit most deeply are often not the ones forced upon us but the ones rewarded, celebrated, and repeated until they become almost impossible to distinguish from our own thoughts.

As I have grown older, I have become less interested in defending the identities I spent so many years constructing and more interested in asking where they came from in the first place. I no longer assume that every conviction I hold originated with me simply because it feels familiar, and I have begun wondering how many of the qualities I once described as my personality were actually reflections of the era, the communities, and the conversations that formed me while I believed I was forming myself.

Although I had been slowly questioning many of these ideas for years, I don’t think I fully appreciated how deeply identity shapes our thinking until I watched the world become increasingly polarized. It seemed as though overnight, every conversation demanded that you choose a side, every disagreement became evidence of someone’s moral character, and every issue was flattened into a simple choice between right and wrong. Nuance disappeared, curiosity became increasingly rare, and certainty was rewarded in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable. What fascinated me most wasn’t any particular position people held, but rather the confidence with which nearly everyone believed they had somehow escaped bias while those on the other side had fallen victim to it.

The more I observed, the more I recognized something painfully familiar. Every group believed they were the independent thinkers. Every community was convinced that they had broken free from propaganda while everyone else remained trapped in it. Every movement believed it had finally uncovered the truth that others were too blind, too stubborn, or too indoctrinated to see. Although the slogans, values, and conclusions differed dramatically from one group to the next, the certainty itself looked remarkably similar. It was as though every tribe had developed its own version of the same story, with different heroes and villains but an identical conviction that they alone were seeing reality clearly.

As strange as it may sound, I began recognizing pieces of my younger self in all of them. I remembered how convinced I had once been that I was thinking entirely for myself, never stopping to consider that my confidence might itself have been shaped by the environment I inhabited. It became increasingly difficult for me to look at any group with judgment because I had already begun realizing how profoundly I, too, had been influenced by the culture that surrounded me. If I could spend decades believing I had escaped the box while unknowingly carrying so many assumptions that had been handed to me, why would I imagine I had suddenly become immune to the very same process?

That question has stayed with me because I suspect the most influential forms of conditioning are rarely loud enough for us to notice. They do not arrive introducing themselves as ideology or manipulation. More often, they simply become the air we breathe, repeated so consistently that they begin to feel indistinguishable from common sense. Once an idea has been absorbed deeply enough, we no longer experience it as something we believe. We experience it as reality itself, and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to examine.

Somewhere along the way I stopped feeling interested in defending a particular tribe and became much more interested in defending my ability to remain open. I no longer feel compelled to immediately form an opinion about every cultural debate, nor do I feel the need to publicly announce where I stand before I have taken the time to understand why I stand there at all. There was a season of my life when certainty felt empowering because it gave me a sense of identity and belonging, but today I find far more peace in admitting that I don’t know everything and probably never will.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of growing older. The older I become, the less interested I am in collecting certainty and the more interested I am in asking better questions. I have discovered that curiosity requires considerably more humility than conviction because conviction often asks very little of us beyond choosing a side, while curiosity demands that we remain willing to disappoint our own assumptions. It asks us to revisit beliefs we have held for years, to consider that people we disagree with may still possess pieces of truth we have overlooked, and to accept that changing our minds is not evidence of weakness but evidence that we are still paying attention.

These days, I spend far less time thinking about who I am and considerably more time thinking about what is right in front of me. There is something profoundly grounding about caring for a piece of land because the land has absolutely no interest in the identities we spend so much of our lives constructing. It doesn’t care whether I describe myself as progressive or conservative, independent or traditional, spiritual or skeptical. It doesn’t ask who I voted for, what books I read, or which conversations I participate in online. It simply asks me to pay attention.

The avocado trees don’t care about my opinions. The bananas continue growing whether I am certain or uncertain. The rain falls on every roof equally, and the jungle patiently reclaims every inch of ground I neglect for too long. If I install a water line incorrectly, the water leaks. If I forget to stain a piece of wood, the Hawaiian sun and rain slowly weather it away. If my hot water heater refuses to ignite, it doesn’t matter how passionately I argue with it. Reality has a way of humbling all of us because it remains wonderfully uninterested in the stories we tell about ourselves.

Living this way has quietly changed me in ways I never anticipated. Years ago, I felt an almost unconscious desire to communicate who I was before anyone had the chance to know me. I wanted my appearance, my travels, my beliefs, and even the way I spoke to signal something about the kind of person I hoped others would perceive me to be. I don’t think there was anything inherently wrong with that because, like most young people, I was trying to answer one of life’s oldest questions: Who am I? What surprises me now is how much less urgency I feel to answer that question at all. The older I become, the less interested I am in defining myself and the more interested I am in becoming someone whose life speaks more loudly than any identity ever could.

That doesn’t mean I have abandoned my convictions, nor does it mean I have somehow risen above the influence of culture. If anything, I have become increasingly convinced that I am still being shaped in countless ways I cannot yet recognize. Every generation believes it sees the world more clearly than the one before it, and I have no reason to believe mine is any different. Somewhere, even now, there are assumptions I hold so naturally that they feel inseparable from my own personality, and perhaps twenty years from now I will look back on them with the very same surprise I now feel toward the fifteen-year-old girl driving her little white Volkswagen, utterly convinced she had escaped the box.

That realization no longer embarrasses me. Instead, it fills me with a kind of humility that I wish I had discovered much earlier. It reminds me that certainty is often far more seductive than curiosity because certainty allows us to stop asking questions, while curiosity requires us to live with the uncomfortable possibility that we may be mistaken. It asks us to loosen our grip on the identities we have so carefully constructed, to become less defensive when our assumptions are challenged, and to remain open enough to let new experiences reshape us without feeling as though we have somehow betrayed who we are.

Perhaps that is what growth has come to mean for me. It is no longer the pursuit of becoming someone entirely new, nor is it the endless search for the correct ideology, philosophy, or community that will finally explain the world once and for all. Instead, it has become the practice of paying closer attention, questioning my own certainty more often than everyone else’s, and remembering that every chapter of my life has been written by a version of me who sincerely believed she understood far more than she actually did.

I no longer believe the goal is to escape culture, because I’m not sure any of us ever truly can. I think the goal is simply to notice it. To become curious about the assumptions that feel most obvious, to question the identities we’ve worn for so long that they’ve begun to feel like skin, and to remain humble enough to wonder which of today’s unquestioned truths I might one day look back on with the same surprise I now feel toward the fifteen-year-old girl driving her little white Volkswagen, convinced she had escaped the box, never realizing she had simply found a different one.

With Love Always,

H

(Eugene, Oregon, following SCI ‘06)

Although my parents raised my sister and I to question just about everything, including many of the stories that culture handed us so effortlessly, I do not think any of us are entirely immune to th…

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There is something deeply comforting about believing this because friendship feels permanent when we are young, and the future still appears spacious enough to accommodate everyone’s dreams at once. We cannot yet imagine how careers will diverge, relationships will form and dissolve, opportunities will appear for one person and not another, illnesses will interrupt carefully laid plans, priorities will evolve, and entirely different versions of happiness will begin calling each of us in directions we never expected. We assume that timing will somehow be universal, when in reality timing is one of the most deeply personal things any of us will ever experience.

For a long time, I believed my life would unfold that way too. When I was eighteen years old, I dreamed of moving to Venice Beach, California, but even that dream carried an invisible condition. I didn’t simply want to move; I wanted my friends to move with me. Before that, as a teenager, I spent countless hours imagining myself disappearing into the world with nothing more than a backpack, but every version of that fantasy included a friend walking beside me. It never occurred to me that the life I wanted might require me to go ahead before anyone else was ready.

I spent months trying to convince friends to make the move. I waited for people to save enough money. I waited for someone to decide they were ready. I waited because I believed that beginning such a big chapter alone would somehow make it less meaningful or more frightening, and I couldn’t yet imagine that the very thing I was trying to avoid would become the greatest gift my life could ever hand me.

Looking back now, I realize that Venice was hardly the first dream I delayed because I didn’t want to go alone.

As an adolescent, long before Instagram transformed travel into something everyone imagined themselves doing, I would sit with maps and guidebooks, daydreaming about throwing a backpack over my shoulder and disappearing into the world. I wanted to wander through countries whose names I could barely pronounce. I wanted to hear languages I didn’t understand, eat the food I loved in the places it originated, and discover spots that no one around me had ever seen. Yet even then, every fantasy contained another person. I imagined a best friend beside me or a boyfriend who shared my curiosity because I assumed adventures were meant to be shared, and that somehow they became less worthwhile if you experienced them on your own.

So I delayed my own progress. I waited for someone else’s timeline to align with mine. I paused for someone else’s courage to become my own. And I sometimes halted for someone else’s certainty to give me permission to go.

What I couldn’t understand at eighteen, or even twenty-two, or in other ways, twenty-eight, was that waiting has a strange way of disguising itself as practicality. It sounds responsible. It sounds patient. It sounds like wisdom. We tell ourselves we’re simply waiting for the timing to be better, for the finances to improve, for the relationship to become more stable, for our friends to be ready, for life to settle down. But sometimes waiting is just fear wearing a much more acceptable outfit.

I can see that now because the pattern repeated itself throughout my life in ways that had nothing to do with travel.

For years I dreamed about owning land. Not a house. Not a condo. Land. I wanted trees that I would know individually. I wanted fruit that took years before it ever appeared on a branch. I wanted muddy boots by the door and projects that would never truly be finished. I wanted to wake up every morning with something tangible to care for, to repair, to nurture, to improve. Long before I could articulate why, I knew that tending to land felt deeply connected to tending to myself.

Still, I convinced myself that this dream, too, required another person.

Buying acreage seemed like something couples did together. It seemed too expensive, too complicated, too physically demanding for one woman. Surely I would meet the right partner first, and together we would build this life that lived so vividly inside my imagination. Again, I hesitated.

The irony is almost funny now because eventually I did buy the land while I was in a relationship, believing that I finally had the partnership I had always imagined would accompany that dream. Then life unraveled in ways I never could have anticipated, and suddenly the future I thought belonged to two people belonged only to me.

At first it felt devastating. Now I see it as one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.

Because standing alone on four acres of overgrown jungle, staring at broken fences, neglected buildings, impossible projects, and an endless list of things I had absolutely no idea how to do, I reached a crossroads that every person eventually faces.

I could spend the rest of my life waiting for someone else to come rescue the dream.

Or I could become the person capable of building it myself. No one ever tells you that this is how confidence is actually created because we tend to imagine that confidence appears first and action follows afterward, when in reality confidence almost always arrives as the reward for repeatedly doing things you once believed were beyond your abilities. Mine was built through mistakes, through projects that failed before they succeeded, through wrong measurements, leaking pipes, unfamiliar tools, frustrating afternoons, phone calls asking for help, and countless moments of standing in front of a problem with absolutely no idea how to solve it before deciding that I would simply learn. Somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, every challenge stopped feeling like evidence that I wasn’t capable and instead became proof that I was capable of learning, and that subtle shift transformed my life far more profoundly than any destination I have ever visited because I stopped asking myself whether I could do something and began asking how I could learn to do it, and those are fundamentally different questions since one assumes that our abilities are fixed while the other assumes that we are capable of becoming someone we have never been before.

That realization has slowly become the lens through which I now understand almost everything because whenever someone tells me they wish they could travel alone, leave an unhappy relationship, start a business, buy property, change careers, or finally pursue the dream they have carried quietly for years, I rarely believe they are lacking the ability to do those things, but rather that they are still waiting to feel capable before they begin, when my own life has taught me that capability is almost never the prerequisite for action but rather its consequence. Every skill I value most today was once something I knew absolutely nothing about, and I certainly wasn’t born understanding off-grid systems, water lines, solar equipment, construction projects, gates, tools, or land management, but I became the woman who could navigate those responsibilities because life placed them in front of me and each challenge quietly asked the same question, which was not whether I already knew enough but whether I was willing to learn.

Perhaps that is what purpose has always been asking of us, because I no longer believe it is something we discover fully formed before taking the first step, but rather something that slowly reveals itself as the path reshapes us into the kind of person capable of walking it. We spend so much of our lives believing that our dreams require certainty, companionship, or permission before they can begin, even though courage so often arrives disguised as something remarkably ordinary, like buying the plane ticket before anyone else agrees to come, signing the paperwork while your hands are still shaking, picking up a tool you have never used before, or simply deciding that although fear may continue walking beside you, it no longer gets to decide whether you move forward.

The greatest surprise of my adult life has been discovering that every time I stopped waiting for someone else, I met a version of myself I had never known before, a woman who was stronger, more resourceful, more patient, and infinitely more resilient than I had ever imagined, not because she had somehow become fearless, but because she finally understood that fear and forward motion were never meant to be opposites.

If I could sit beside that eighteen-year-old girl dreaming of California, I would not promise her that everything would unfold according to plan because it wouldn’t, nor would I tell her that one day she would visit more than one hundred countries or find herself living on four acres in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but I would gently remind her that the life she keeps waiting for is not waiting for another person to be ready before it can begin, and that the woman she hopes to become is not waiting somewhere on the other side of her dreams but is instead being built, quietly and patiently, every single time she chooses to stop waiting and simply start.

Confidence arrived after the mistakes. After the wrong cuts. After the leaks. After the tools I didn’t know how to use. After the projects that took three attempts instead of one. After the power went off multiple times. After the phone calls asking for help. After figuring it out anyway.

I wasn’t born knowing how to manage an off-grid property, install hardware, troubleshoot water systems, maintain equipment, or navigate the endless responsibilities that come with caring for four acres on Maui. I became the woman who could do those things because life asked me to, and each time it asked, I answered by learning one more thing.

We spend so much of our lives believing our dreams require certainty, companionship, or permission. We imagine that courage belongs to extraordinary people, when in reality courage often looks remarkably ordinary. It looks like buying the plane ticket before anyone else says yes. It looks like signing the paperwork even though your hands are shaking. It looks like picking up a tool you’ve never held before because no one else is coming to finish the job.

If I could sit beside my fourteen-year-old girl self I wouldn’t tell her not to be afraid. I wouldn’t tell her that everything would work out.

I would simply tell her this; The life you’re waiting for is waiting for you.

And the woman you keep hoping will someday appear fully formed on the other side of all your dreams does not exist yet.

She is created every single time you stop waiting, and go anyway.

With Love,

H

It’s been an intense year, as have the last few before it, yet somewhere within that intensity my life has blossomed into something I continue to be surprised by, humbled by, and deeply grateful for.

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Lately, I have found myself looking around at my life w…

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For more than a decade I made my living online. I built businesses online. I built friendships online. I shared my travels, my work, my relationships, my opini…

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Maybe it is the lack of sleep that inevitably comes from crossing oceans and time zones, maybe it is the way the body struggles to reconcile sunrise and sunset after days spent moving through airports and airplanes, maybe it is the pile of responsibilities that impatiently accumulates while I am away, or maybe it is something much more complex than any of those things, because I am beginning to suspect that what I am actually feeling is life shifting a bit.

Over the past two weeks I crossed three countries, moved through at least eight cities, rode six airplanes, took two trains, rented a car and a scooter, spent a day on a boat beneath the cliffs of Capri, wandered through Florence, E-biked the winding roads of Umbria, stood in places that have existed for centuries before I arrived and will continue to exist long after I am gone, and eventually made my way back through Iceland and across twelve time zones before landing at home again.

For the last year I have been booking out month after month of travel.

Two weeks in Italy, a short return to Iceland, my retreat in Peru, a few days in Santa Monica, a writer’s retreat in Alaska, and two new cities in Mexico, a country I keep returning to. I’ve been traveling nearly every month since March of ‘25, and anyone who knows their geography knows that nothing is close to Hawaii, so when you travel, you are typically going FAR, and getting back in under a week is nearly impossible.

More and more I am being called off the island, a trend that has only been accelerating over the last year as my calendar fills with trips, retreats, podcast filming/recording excursions, visits to friends/family, and opportunities that seem to pull me farther and farther from the middle of the Pacific, while simultaneously making me more aware of just how geographically isolated Hawaii really is.

The reality is that every destination feels a little farther from here than it used to. The flights in any direction are thousands of miles long just to a larger airport. The recovery time is harder on my body as a result of cumulative hours in the air. The jet lag is often disproportionate to the trip.

And somewhere between crossing oceans and adjusting to time zones and spending increasing amounts of time on the mainland, I have found myself sitting with a few questions that feel larger than travel itself.

Questions about where I feel most energized. Questions about where I feel most connected. Questions about what I am being called to build next. And perhaps most importantly, questions about whether the things that once felt like the entirety of the dream are meant to remain the entirety of the dream forever.

The older I get the more I realize that purpose is not a fixed destination that we arrive at once and then spend the rest of our lives carrying out, but rather a conversation that continues evolving as we do, with different seasons of life calling different parts of us forward and asking different things of our time, attention, energy, and imagination.

There have been several seasons now when nearly all of my energy was directed toward creating a life in Hawaii, toward building a home from raw land, establishing roots, learning how to care for a property and a community, and creating a version of stability that I had never experienced before.

Those seasons have given me more than I can adequately express.

And yet lately I have noticed parts of myself waking up that seem interested in something more expansive. I have felt myself come out of survival mode, and start dreaming bigger. I remember when I used to think about having a mountain home and a beach home idealistically, but now wonder if my outlandish dreams just may be well within reach.

I have noticed how energized I feel spending time in Colorado, how much I enjoy the dry air and crisp mornings and mountain towns, how much possibility I feel when I imagine longer stretches of time exploring parts of the sunniest state that are still unfamiliar to me, and how much I have come to value the friendships that are quietly taking shape there.

At the same time, I have also become aware of changes happening closer to home.

Some friendships on Maui have deepened into something extraordinary, while others have naturally drifted apart or moved away altogether, and there is something both beautiful and bittersweet about realizing that after seven years in one place I am finally experiencing the kind of depth and continuity in relationships that only time can create.

What makes this season feel unique is that I do not feel torn between those realities. I do not feel that one is right and the other is wrong. I do not feel that I need to choose between being rooted and continuing to explore.

I simply feel aware that the version of myself who arrived in Hawaii seven years ago is not the same version of myself writing these words today, and that perhaps the strange feeling I experience when I return home from traveling has less to do with the places I am visiting and more to do with the quiet realization that I am still learning, changing, evolving, and growing.

Perhaps what I am feeling is not the end of anticipation.

Perhaps it is the beginning of a new chapter whose shape I cannot yet fully see.

With love,

H

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