To my fellow travelers, I see you.
To my fellow adventurers, I feel you.
To every inner child who just wants to play, I love you.
To my fellow nomads, I feel your pain and I know your joy. I know your relentless quest for freedom and the primal free-falling, unsettled feeling it is often accompanied by.
And maybe for the first time, I have mustered up the courage to stare the nomad straight in the eyes. And I’m here to share with you what she has to say.
But before I do… what even is a nomad?
Well, surely early humans lived this way. It’s how we naturally evolved. There are still ethnic groups around the world who live this old ancestral way. Many animals are nomadic as well. It’s pretty much nature.
But the majority of modern humanity is different. We’ve built something called civilization that moves parallel to nature (sometimes very much against it): structures, conditions, rules. Within that, each human has a function, a sense of belonging, a container. A foundation that is reliable and generally unmoving. Reflective of that is a physical home, and a role within the greater community.
By nomad, I’m referring to the traveler type. And it’s a wide spectrum. There are fancy and not-so-fancy digital nomads, often staying in one place for long stretches while working on their projects. There are nomads like me who are not even that digital.
There are travelers on months-long holidays, knowing there is an end point and that they will return back home to the old script (or have come to realize there is no going back to it). There are those who have given up everything, carrying both grief and hope, and are learning to move with the unknown. There are those escaping war, whether in their home countries or within their own lives. There are those who used to travel constantly and are now more settled, where travel has become a formative chapter rather than a current lived experience. There are “expats” who moved somewhere for quality of life, cost, or because they just vibed with it.
It is not black and white.
But to me, no matter the type, it’s like a karmic disposition. If it’s in your code, at some point, either for a little or a long time, this will play out. Life and home will be transient. You will leave things behind, gain things along the way, leave things behind, gain new things, uproot, settle, think, this is it… but never mind, it’s not (or not right now), uproot again, settle once more, and so on…
Many nomads I’ve met along the way have said the same thing: It didn’t feel like a choice. It didn’t feel like I woke up one day and wanted to live this way. I feel the same. For me personally, it’s just how life has unfolded so far. Step by step, without any clear vision or decision of a certain lifestyle…
If you really stare long and hard enough into your life… your behavior, your thoughts, your joy and pain, your endless loops… things will start to rise to the surface. You can run away, try to solve, wiggle around, shake it off, avoid, recalculate, edit, scratch the itch, rewrite the story… or you can just keep looking and looking and looking… until you finally see.
When I meet people, especially those who follow the normal script of life, and they ask me simple questions like “Where do you live?”, “Where are you from?”, “What do you do (for work)?”, I know it isn’t going to be a short conversation… unless somehow I manage to duck out of it. I have absolutely no simple answers for them. I don’t even have a simple answer for myself. If I start to answer these questions, they will almost always be met with more follow-up questions. People often react with awe, disbelief, confusion, the need to process, and very commonly, some sort of hyper-charged projected admiration.
If they say, “Wow. How amazing…” I usually respond with, “Yeah… I don’t recommend it,” and I chuckle. Because I’m not kidding… I don’t actually recommend it.
But that’s not to dismiss the abundance of beauty and gifts that come with this path.
We are masters of adaptation, changing circumstances, navigating the unknown. We understand people, the way the world works. We’ve seen it from so many angles. We can have deep talks with absolute strangers from all walks of life and be invited into their home for a meal and to meet their family soon after. We have an ability to take the temperature of the group-mind psychology of an entire people and understand immediately how to navigate their cultural terrain. We learn to ask strangers for help, but also can usually discern a scam pretty well. We know how to drive on both the left and the right side of the road. We know how to say hello, thank you, and I love you in dozens of languages. We can navigate any train system, bus system, or ferry system no matter the region. We have friends scattered all over this planet. We know how to turn sweatshirts into comfy pillows. We know how to fall asleep in the oddest locations, sometimes in public. We’re remarkably resourceful. We’re fluent in both hello and goodbye. Life is real. Life is transient. Everything is moving.
So many ordinary moments become alive. So many colors, smells, horns honking, tranquil peace… sometimes a totally wrecked nervous system, sometimes a lot of energy, sometimes exhaustion. We’ve stayed in the most luxurious hotels and slept on mats on the beach. We know how vast this world is, and at the same time how small it really is. And we have the absolute best stories.
But that light also casts a shadow.
The hidden costs of “freedom”: Accepting admiration for something that often feels untethered and unsettled. No real sense of home or belonging. Being perpetually in transition. Exhaustion from constant uprooting. Exhaustion from resettling. Existential questioning. Both a familiarity with and discomfort with loneliness. Free-falling. Always being a guest, never fully inhabiting. The ability to carry everything you own, yet somehow feel like you’re carrying too much. Time limits. Visas. Money. Decision fatigue. Where next? For how long? Missing weddings and funerals without being able to explain why to those who don’t understand the limitations of this lifestyle. Having many homes, but none at all.
I’ve been called courageous a lot for this. And maybe I am in some ways. But a part of me rejects it because deep down I know that at least part of this adventurous, yet uncertain life is a program that’s been running me.
Recently I’ve had to ask myself, am I really that free? Or am I running from my own limitations?
Maybe it’s both. But in the name of freedom, I must separate the wheat from the chaff.
If light casts a shadow, then what is the obstruction of this so-called freedom? I have the “courage” to live this way, but do I have the courage to really look at why?
Freedom was always my strongest current. Even as a small child. I wanted to understand the reality (seen and especially unseen) that we’re a part of. I wanted to be free in my experience and perceptions. I wanted to make art, play in my room, play outside. I would close my eyes and meditate into outer space until I reached the limits of my own comprehension.
I was well looked after by my family. Nothing is ever perfect, but at baseline, I was loved and nourished.
As I got a little bit older and entered the school machine, I was met with a profound disappointment and the unfortunate realization that adults no longer ask questions, they just provide answers to questions they don’t even know. Not only that, the outside world wanted me to sit at a desk for hours at a time, not make art (or only for an hour a week), not play (or only for 15 minutes twice a day at recess), go home and do more sitting and more thinking and more working.
You are seen and validated for your ability to do things a machine could do, and how well you perform them. Only productivity. No more exploring. Just being obedient.
That pained me in ways I couldn’t even process. I protected myself the best I could. I zoned out, didn’t listen. I rebelled and I refused to the best of my ability, but it came with a cost… and it cost a lot. A lack of a container. The beginning of the story titled, I Don’t Belong. A story I’ve unconsciously worn as both pride and existential terror.
But once you start to see a story as a story, you don’t take it as seriously. When you wake up from a dream and realize it was a dream, you start to relax. It slowly sinks in… a tiger isn’t chasing you anymore. You’re in bed on a random Tuesday and there are birds chirping outside.
The irony is, in my teens and early 20s, I dreamed of becoming a traveler, but I didn’t quite have the “courage” or the tools to make my life so. But slowly, and without any clear decision or plan, my life unfolded into that, step by step.
I’ve been nomadic to varying degrees since 2017. There have been times when I’d be somewhere for a year, give or take, but I always knew it was temporary. There was a mission to complete, and I knew I’d move on. Not always necessarily because I wanted to… but somehow, either circumstantially or out of necessity. Recently, in the last two years, I’ve become more severely nomadic, not just within a continent, but across several… and not just within a yearly period, but often in spans of several weeks to months at a time.
Let’s draw it back to the endless search for a container.
Somewhere in my mid to late 20s, something magical happened. After years of feeling like I don’t belong, or attempting to belong somewhere and failing (or it not working out how I expected), I finally found a container that fit. Birth. I became a doula.
It wasn’t something I chased or strategically built. In fact, I had zero ambition about it. I didn’t have to lift a finger; it was coming for me. And for the first time, I wasn’t trying to squeeze myself into someone else’s shape. It asked for exactly what came naturally to me: presence, intuition, information, advocacy, reverence for mystery, an open heart, novelty, and present-moment navigation of life’s unfolding.
Not only that, I was being paid well… for being me and doing something that I loved. I loved women. I loved birth. I loved being in service to something so raw and real. I loved the adventure of standing at the edge of life and physical existence. I loved that I could finally say, if only for a while, I belong here.
It felt triumphant. Not because I had found success in the material sense, but because I had found a place to shine, to be of service, and to do something I love while being myself. And I no longer felt invisible. The world finally saw me being me.
But the currents of my life continued to change, and eventually I realized something: I wanted things for myself. I wanted to live my own life. I couldn’t live entirely for others. I couldn’t organize my life around everyone else’s seasons while limiting my own freedom of movement. I didn’t want to be tethered to a city anymore. I couldn’t be endlessly on call to life while never leaving room for my own. I still attend births, just not all the time. I still deeply love birth, and I still find it genuinely exciting. But I can no longer ask it to be my identity, my stability, my belonging, my reason for being here.
Don’t get me wrong, objectively my life is good. I am very fortunate. I am deeply grateful for the freedom that has been gifted to me by circumstance, and the freedom I have cultivated from within. But I am also limited. A dog needs space to play, but it also needs a fence so it doesn’t get lost.
Without containment, there is a tendency to search for it outwardly. In relationships, in future outcomes, in achievement, in meaning, in the idea that something will eventually arrive and make life feel whole and held.
But these things are not designed to do that. They cannot carry that weight.
At some point, the search itself becomes the ongoing pattern. Running toward what might complete the story, waiting for what might resolve it.
But life is not asking to be resolved. It is asking to be lived. To participate fully, without postponing presence for a future that never quite arrives. This is where things truly stagnate when we forget, when we fail to pay attention.
Remembering feels less like a choice, and more like something I keep forgetting and returning to.
As a child, it was a battle. A war between being myself (and potentially invisible) and being a machine (and validated). Of course I wanted the validation, but never at the expense of being myself. I internalized the grief of feeling like I had to choose at all. I was forced to participate in systems that weren't right for me. I was forced to meet other people's deadlines and requirements. I battled well, and I protected myself as best I could. But I'm no longer a child, and I don't need to keep fighting an imaginary war against something that isn’t here anymore.
For so long, I've refused. It's protected me and helped me. It helped me as a child to refuse to listen to what the world was asking me to become. To betray my own heart for some sort of societal sense of security and conformity was a hard-no. I wouldn't do it. But when does refusal become an identity? When does it cease to protect and begin to limit, even paralyze?
I've had to reach a sort of stillness. Not because I found peace, but because I had begun to feel the pressure of it all. Reaching. Resisting. Refusing. Waiting. The same circles, over and over again. At some point, the machine starts to crack. I pretty much gave up trying to pretend I wasn’t exhausted from it all. I had to stop and ask myself, what exactly am I still protecting?
It’s come with a lot of tears and feeling, but also a determined inquiry underneath it.
Because the nomads, the travelers, the artists, the healers, all children… we just want to play. We want to explore. We have so much to give, but we don’t have to keep refusing everything. We can create something. We can participate. We can actually just be.
Belong. Long to be. To just be.
To stop trying to be someone, to achieve something, to make something fit. To stop trying to be the friend, good-listener, wife, husband, mother, homeowner, enlightened master, athlete, crypto master app developer bro, free person, spiritual person, sold-out master healer coach, author, desirable person, likable person, greatest artist known to man.
Imagine the relief of not needing to be anyone anymore. Not needing to earn your value from something outside yourself. Imagine the pressure removed. How much more space would you have to create? To play. To be of service. To smile at strangers. To feel your own breath.
I've noticed a lot of nomads are very picky when it comes to everything: relationships, jobs, home, values. And that's beautiful. They won't settle. Things must feel deeply meaningful and aligned.
But all light casts a shadow when we stand in between.
What happens when the refusal to settle hardens into an identity? Waiting for some future to come along and save it. To finally make it choose. To finally make it willing. To settle it once and for all.
To finally create the boundaries their inner child has so desperately longed to play within.
So when I've said things like, "I don't recommend it," or, "I didn't really choose this, it's just how life unfolded," what I've really been saying is: I haven't found a container I can fully inhabit yet.
And if you look into my eyes underneath those comments, there has always been unease.
Because the search is relentless. Like chasing a rainbow, hoping something out there will finally stabilize what feels unsettled within.
Perhaps it's time to stop waiting for the outside world to do what it was never designed to do.
Not because love, home, family, meaningful work, purpose, and belonging aren't important. They absolutely are.
This is not saying I don't want those things, or that I'm now so hyper-independent that I don't need anything or anyone. I'm just no longer expecting them to redeem me. I don't need to wait for them to create the container for me, because they were never truly designed for that.
I absolutely invite love, union, life, presence, adventure, vision, projects, success, total awareness into my life, but not as redemption. I invite it in to play. To dance. To grow.
I know how to play. I know adventure and spontaneity well, but without a container, I can become a lost dog.
Woof. Woof.
For a long time I've been at war. I thought stability meant betraying my own heart. I thought needing to consistently earn money meant slavery. I thought committing to a career meant replacing the space for love and union. I thought standing on my own two feet meant betraying my own femininity. Everything began to feel like a compromise, as though saying yes to one part of life required abandoning another.
But maybe I can build something to play within.
Maybe I don't have to squeeze myself into something already built.
Look. I'm not much of an engineer, but I am a visionary. I am an explorer. The blueprint is the heart, here and now.
I have zero clue how to do this or what it should look like. I don't know how I'm going to pull it off, or if I even will. I don't even know exactly what this asks of me. But I'm willing. Because I'm no longer waiting.
I honestly don't know much of anything. All I know is that I am willing.
...And what about you?
Can you look into the mirror of your life, into your own eyes, and see the child looking right back at you...