2024 Adventures to Self Discovery
Las Vegas was an odd place to start. I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. But it was a city of reinvention, of illusion, of people pretending to be things they weren’t. And maybe that’s why I went. To stand in the middle of it all and acknowledge what I had become: a person shaped by someone else’s desires, detached from my own.
Switzerland was different. The silence of the mountains had a way of pressing in, forcing me to confront the noise in my head. There, alone in the vastness, I realized how much space I had given away, how much of myself I had shrunk to accommodate someone else. In the cold, crisp air, I began to breathe fully again.
Through Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, the landscapes stretched wide and unforgiving, a reminder that the world was not made to be contained. Neither was I. The stillness of Yellowstone forced patience; nothing in nature rushes, and yet everything finds its way. I sat by a river one evening, watching the current carve its path, and understood: rebuilding myself would not be immediate, but it would be inevitable.
North Lake Tahoe reflected a version of me I was beginning to recognize. There was something steady in its depths, something unmoved by the chaos around it. I stayed there longer than planned, letting the quiet do its work.
In Anaheim, the Women Leaders in Law Enforcement conference was a reckoning. Sitting in that room, surrounded by strength, I realized I had been operating on autopilot, living out a version of life that wasn’t fully mine. The words of women who had fought, endured, and risen made me question everything: I lost touch with my “why.”
Back in Montana, I let myself move in a different way. Country swing was unfamiliar, full of momentum and trust, of letting go at just the right moment. I had been so accustomed to holding myself rigid, bracing for impact. Learning to dance meant learning to release, to lean into rhythm rather than control. It felt ridiculous at first. And then, it didn’t.
Yosemite was humbling. The scale of it, the weight of time carved into stone, the way the waterfalls carried the past forward without resistance. I stood beneath El Capitan, dwarfed by its sheer presence, and understood that some things endure not because they refuse change, but because they allow it.
Italy unraveled me in a different way. The richness of it—the food, the art, the unapologetic way life was meant to be savored—made me question how much I had denied myself. How often I had settled for survival instead of living.
Switzerland, again. This time, the mountains didn’t feel like a confrontation, but a conversation. I no longer felt the need to answer every question they asked of me. Some things were meant to remain unanswered, unfolding in their own time.
And then, Paris. The city of promises unkept. People had told me they would take me there. They hadn’t. But I had taken myself. I walked along the Seine, past lovers and artists and strangers who owed each other nothing, and I understood: I was not lost. I was never lost. I had only been waiting for permission to belong to myself again.
The journey didn’t fix me. That was never the point. But it gave me back the pieces I had been convinced were gone. And that was enough.