Go Wander (Abroad, Ideally)

The case for living abroad and detaching from your default scripts

Six years ago this week, I took the 7 train from midtown Manhattan one stop to my apartment in Long Island City. It was the final commute home from the office. I haven’t done anything like that in 2,190 days since.

When I was making that final trip home I had little to no vision of what might come next. I was running away. I had spent my final year of that last full-time job dealing with the frustrating bureaucracy and failure of grown men to make decisions and my own inability to put up with it. It nearly broke me.

It’s funny how naive I was about what might come next. I had done the tactical things one might do like registering an LLC and creating a website for my consulting brand but I had somehow overlooked the fact that my entire mental model for how the world worked might get burned to the ground and need to be rebuilt.

My writing has been the main tool I’ve used to rebuild. It’s a slow process but each week I learn a bit more. I look back and try to increase the resolution of what happened in the past and then look forward, trying to experiment with new recipes that might enable me to stay energized, creative, and inspired.