Taking leaps

People who know me now might mistake me for someone who has always been brave.

I learned early in life to seek comfort and stability, not change. By the time I met Tony in high school, I had lost my mom a few months earlier and had built a fierce set of boundaries that kept me safe. Pretending I was fine had become second nature.

I ate the same few foods, stuck to what I was good at, and said no to anything that scared me.

Tony was the opposite. Challenges have always given him energy. Yet, somehow, at sixteen, he was already patient enough to coax me out of my shell.

In the beginning, pushing those boundaries was excruciating.

I once panicked and cried on a hike in the Grand Canyon. The trail narrowed to one person wide with icy switchbacks and nothing to hold onto. I froze. To make it worse, I was wearing a Nike shirt that said “Just Do It.” A man in his sixties squeezed past me on his way up and read the words on my shirt aloud, while I cried.

A lot has changed since then.

In 2021, I left an impressive-on-paper career to start a company. Two years later, I took a solo trip to Indonesia with seven major client projects underway, to test if I could run the business from the road. I could.

Last year, Tony and I sold everything we owned (yes, everything) to travel full-time with no home base. That was the biggest leap to date, and it gave me the headspace to take more.

Then, I got scuba certified despite fearing the ocean and discovered, for the first time in years, an interest that was personal rather than professional. I ran off the top of a mountain in Slovenia to paraglide over the Soča Valley. I applied to the Asia School of Business, which means I’ll soon be in Kuala Lumpur and traveling around Asia for a year, much of it on my own.

None of these leaps were easy. I still panic before the thing, even if my heart (or shirt) says “Just Do It.” But every time, I find what’s on the other side of the fear: abundance.