Coming Home to Yourself
I wrote this at my hotel in Kota Kinabalu, then finished it at Singapore airport waiting to fly out. By the time you read this, I'll be somewhere over the Indian Ocean, heading home after weeks in Borneo. Very soon, I'll be home, remembering what it feels like to just be instead of perform.
Two weeks at home. Fourteen days to remember who I am when nobody's watching.
There's something about travel – especially the kind we do, where we're responsible for other people's experiences – that acts like a mirror. Not the kind that shows you what you look like, but the kind that shows you who you are. Or maybe more accurately, who you've become.
When you're constantly adapting to new places, new people, new challenges, you start to see the edges of yourself more clearly. The parts that are performance and the parts that are real. The boundaries between who you think you should be and who you actually are when everything familiar gets stripped away.
I've been thinking about authenticity a lot lately. Not the Instagram version – the real thing. The messy, complicated truth of being human in a world that rewards us for being what other people need us to be.
Travel forces that conversation with yourself. When you're sitting alone in a tent at 3AM, listening to lions in the distance, or at an airport surrounded by strangers, there's nowhere to hide from your own thoughts. No familiar routines to distract you. Just you and the weight of whatever you've been carrying.
The question becomes: who are you when you can't be who you've always been?
If you're willing to let it, travel will strip away the layers of who you think you're supposed to be and show you who you actually are underneath. But some people will never see it. They're too busy worrying about how they look, about always being right, how important they appear, what other people think of them. They travel with their ego as carry-on baggage and never put it down long enough to discover anything real about themselves.
The magic happens when you stop performing and start paying attention. When you let the unfamiliar make you uncomfortable enough to question the familiar. When you realize that the person you are when everything is stripped away might be the most honest version of yourself you've ever met.
Two decades of this life has given me more than I ever imagined possible. I've witnessed moments that changed people forever, been trusted with dreams and fears and wonder. I watched a young Canadian guest see elephants for the first time last year, and something shifted in his face that I'll never forget – like he'd just remembered something essential about being alive. That privilege – being the bridge between people and wild places – I don't take lightly. I never have. The gratitude I feel for every single person who has trusted me with their journey is real and deep.
But I've also learned that you can be grateful for something and still recognize when its season is ending. You can love what you do and still acknowledge what it costs. The most authentic thing you can do sometimes is admit when the weight has gotten too heavy, even when you're carrying something beautiful.
Here's what I know to be true: somewhere deep down, every single one of us feels this tension at some point. The gap between who we are and who we think we should be. The cost of our choices. The weight of living authentically in a world that rewards performance. It's how you act on that feeling that determines whether you find peace of mind.
Two things matter: First, be honest about what your life actually costs you, not just what it gives you. Second, remember that you can change direction without losing respect for the path that brought you here.
I wrote something earlier this week about that weight. About the cost of living other people's adventures while missing your own life. About the geography of missing – all the spaces where we should have been but weren't. It's raw and honest and probably harder to read than I intended.
But it's real. And sometimes real is what we need to hear, even when it hurts. Sometimes the most important conversation we can have is the one where we stop pretending everything is fine and start being honest about what we actually need.
Sometimes the most important journey isn't to somewhere new.
Sometimes it's back to yourself.
You can read The Geography of Missing here.