I have a week and a half left of this long, strange, beautiful year abroad. Tonight, I walked home from dinner with the friends I’ve gathered like wildflowers in the last six weeks — fragile, vibrant, temporary. “Sleep on the Floor” played faintly from someone’s pocket, and the melody felt like a pulse beneath our feet, a quiet anthem for the ache of leaving. Then we stopped. The sky cracked open with silent lightning — no thunder, just light, pure and electric, blooming across the clouds like some kind of divine breath. Fireflies flitted through the heavy air, careless and glowing, like they knew something we didn’t. In that moment, I felt it — that strange, wordless pull that has kept me moving city to city, goodbye to goodbye. I chase this: moments that defy language, that fill the chest with something too large for reason. They justify leaving. They are proof that I’m not lost, but looking. That this life, unfolding in flashes, is worth every fracture.
How rare, how ruinous, to live a year that undoes all the ones that came before it — and every one that dares to follow. A year that split me open not to shatter me, but to let something ancient and luminous pour through. I lived in Florence and in Costa Rica, and somewhere between the echo of church bells on cobblestone streets and the hush of jungle vines curling toward the sun, I shed the thin skin of existing. I began, at last, to live.
Not in the way you live by habit or hunger, but in the way you live when your senses finally stir awake. When your body becomes a compass rather than a cage, when your laugh bursts out before you can catch it, when every meal tastes like a memory in the making, and every stranger feels like a mirror. I learned that I was never broken — only buried. The life I’d wrapped around myself like armor was the thing cracking: a scaffolding built from fear, silence, and the ache of not knowing who I was. Abroad, I dismantled it slowly, reverently, plank by plank. And beneath it all, I found something soft and unshakable — barefoot, blushing, unmistakably alive.
I think we underestimate what it means to feel everything. To be this young and this aware. Of beauty. Of brutality. Of the way time slips through our fingers like water, never asking before it leaves. We are taught to fear our feelings, to temper our desires, to avoid the ache of attachment. But this year, I leaned in. I pressed my cheek to the moment. I memorized the shade of blue the sky turned when we laughed too hard to breathe.
And I fell in love — with people, with places, with versions of myself I never knew existed. I met souls who rearranged my understanding of time. Friends who went from strangers to lifelines within a week. People who looked at me and saw someone worth loving. Who asked me if I was okay and stayed long enough to hear the real answer.
Everything in life is a choice. Who you love. Where you go. What you let change you. And the most terrifying, liberating truth is: no one is coming to save you. You are the author. You get to decide if you will stay asleep or wake up. And if you do, if you really open your eyes, you will grieve. Because joy always leaves a mark. Because nothing this good leaves you unscathed.
And somewhere in the marrow of all that aching choice, I fell in love —w ith living. Not the dainty kind, not the love sold in sunlit reels or stitched into Hallmark phrases, but a wilder, hungrier devotion. I fell in love with strangers who laughed like they’d known me in a past life, with cities that wore their history like perfume, with myself — smeared in salt, sun, and some soft rebirth. The world flung itself open like a throat mid-song and I let it swallow me. I wanted to memorize it all: the gravel under my soles, the citrus taste of late-night confessions, the pulse of the universe inside someone’s fingertips. How wide the world is, how desperate it is to be seen. And I saw it — felt it press against my ribs like a second heartbeat. I loved people for their stories, for the ache behind their eyes, for the courage it takes to stay soft in a world that keeps sharpening its teeth. Life, this vast, furious miracle, had been waiting for me to look up. And once I did, I could not look away.
I’ve watched people weep for places before they even left them. I’ve seen grief bloom in hostel beds, over breakfast tables, on trains heading somewhere new. I’ve seen love in a girl handing me a lighter, in a boy holding a seat for me on a bus, in someone braiding my hair on a Monday morning like it was a sacrament.
There were nights I thought my heart might burst — so full it ached, so raw it shimmered. And in those moments, I stopped trying to hold it all in. I let the tears come when they needed to. I let my joy be big and my sorrow be honest. Because this year taught me that being soft is not the opposite of being strong. It’s just another way to be brave.
There is no clean goodbye when something matters. No tidy ending when your soul grows roots. And I have learned that grief is a privilege — it is love that has lost its home. It is proof that something once belonged to you. How lucky we are to love so much it hurts. To have moments worth mourning. To miss the way the espresso tasted at sunrise, the sound of our footsteps echoing through Florence streets, the wild laughter in Costa Rica hostels where no one remembered your last name but everyone knew your heart.
Florence taught me I was lovable — and not in some glittering, movie-scene way. In the quiet, human way. In the way someone reaches for you without thinking. In the way they save you a seat. In the way they remember how you take your coffee. I had spent so long believing I was too much or not enough — never the right shape of woman to be chosen. But there, in that golden city, I was looked at like I mattered. Like I was soft, and brilliant, and worth returning to. I laughed louder. I let people see me. And the ache of being seen didn’t burn — it healed.
And Costa Rica — Costa Rica taught me that fate isn’t some myth we invent to soothe ourselves. It’s real. It’s blood-deep. It’s in the eyes of the people you were meant to meet all along, waiting for you on the other side of your fear. That place was wild, and so was I. The rainforest didn’t ask me to be smaller. The people didn’t ask me to explain. I was just…enough. And it hit me one morning — feet muddy, heart wrecked with joy — this is where I was always meant to be. Not because it was perfect, but because it was real. And the people, they were proof that I am exactly where I need to be. That the universe had been listening the whole time.
I want to remember everything. But I know I won’t. Because the brain is greedy — it loops the pain but forgets the tiny joys. So I write. I write it all down, desperate to hold on to how full life once felt. To the days I felt invincible, and the nights I felt loved. To the magic of waking up with purpose, with softness, with the kind of wonder that makes you weep.
Some mornings I wake up with a lump in my throat and the taste of another country still on my tongue. It’s not homesickness, exactly. It’s the ache of belonging to too many places. Of having left pieces of yourself scattered like breadcrumbs across oceans and train stations. But maybe that’s what it means to live fully — to never again fit into a single place, because your soul has learned to stretch.
Being this young is a strange kind of magic. You can taste the edge of what life could be. And I want everything. I want to report wars and build sanctuaries for sloths. I want to whisper stories into microphones and write books that make people cry. I want a house full of children and art and jazz and people who stay. I want to fall in love with someone who never underestimates my heart.
But I’m also learning to stay. To be present. To sit in the sun and taste the fruit and not rush toward the next ambition. I’m learning that the present is not purgatory — it’s the point. The whole point. And how tragic it is to want so much, when wanting pulls you from the now. But how lucky, too. Because it means we are still curious. Still hopeful. Still hungry for life.
This year made me softer. Wilder. I cry more and laugh harder. I say I love you when I feel it. I forgive faster. I choose peace. I choose passion. I want to use my empathy as a weapon of radical love — for women, for children, for animals, for anyone who has ever been made to feel small in a world that refuses to see them.
Because love, real love, is the only thing that matters. And we are all just people trying to find meaning. Trying to be held. To be known. To be chosen. And I think the most sacred gift you can give someone is your full presence. To listen when they speak. To show up when they need you. To say, without words, “I see you.”
Sometimes I think joy is just a slow preparation for grief. But maybe grief is a slow preparation for joy, too. Maybe they are twins, holding hands when we’re not looking. And maybe being alive means learning to hold both. To laugh while crying. To dance while aching. To look at the world and still believe it’s worth loving.
This year, I fell in love with my life. Not because it was perfect. But because it was real. Messy. Tender. Alive. Because I met people who made the world feel less lonely. Who reminded me that softness is strength. That depth is not a flaw. That joy is a practice, and love is a choice you make over and over again.
I want a life of contradictions. Hot tubs and protests. Forests and festivals. Quiet mornings and wild nights. I want to be surrounded by people who remember that we are made of stardust and saltwater. That we are dying every day and still laughing. People who know that cloud-watching is a valid use of time.
I have learned that time is not a thief, it is a mirror. It reflects what we were brave enough to give. So give it everything. Love recklessly. Forgive easily. Cry when it hurts. Let yourself be changed. Let yourself be ruined. Let yourself be rebuilt.
Because nothing is ever truly lost. Not when it’s been felt. Not when it’s been lived. The heartbreak, the joy, the laughter, the sunrises — all of it lives on in who you are now.
So how lucky am I?
To have known these people.
To have danced in these places.
To have wept for the right reasons.
To have remembered what it means to be alive.
How lucky we are,
To be this young and this alive.
To love recklessly, grieve constantly, grow quietly.
To have been changed by joy.
To have paid the price for beauty, and still said yes.
To have felt it all.