My Passport

My Passport and My Promise

I love traveling.

Not just the stamps or the photos, though I keep both. I love what travel does to me. It stretches me. It quiets me. It reminds me that the world is bigger than my small Northern California town, bigger than the shelter, bigger than the labels people put on a girl who learns differently.

I experienced a trip to Copenhagen, Denmark for my work with young people as a young person. I was 17. A Noxzema Extraordinary Teen finalist out of 10,000. I’d gone from Barbies and pen friends to boarding a plane, representing something bigger than myself. Copenhagen was cold and clean and full of bicycles. The air smelled like bread and sea. I walked streets older than my country and realized: I belong in rooms like this. In countries like this. My mother put me in that yellow VW 1974 Bug to see culture, and here I was — living it.

As an adult I traveled to Denmark again when I attended Diablo Valley College. Attending school in Copenhagen was a wonderful experience. I sat in classrooms with students from everywhere. I learned history not from a textbook but from the cobblestones under my feet. I learned that discipline looks the same in any language — 5AM still comes early in Danish. I learned that being shy doesn’t disqualify you from being global.

And I vowed one day to travel more places.

That vow became my compass. I have been fortunate to work with amazing companies and organizations that allowed me to travel representing those brands as a teenager to adult. From teen magazines to postal work, from Toastmasters to community programs — each door opened another country, another conversation, another chance to see and be seen.

Travel taught me I’m not behind. I’m developing. It taught me that a girl who didn’t go to prom could still go to Europe. That a woman who was unhoused could still have a passport. That being comfortable with myself, means I don’t pack shame in my suitcase anymore. Just faith.

I travel for the work. I travel for the writing. I travel for the woman I’m becoming. Because every trip reminds me: I rose from the ashes. I finished high school. I kept the promise my mother planted when she said, “You’re not hopeless, you’re developing.”

Copenhagen was my first yes. It won’t be my last.

I’m still that girl who loves to read, write, and just be a kid. But now I’m a woman with a professional website, a book in progress, and a public page. And every mile I fly is for her — the shy one who wrote letters to the world and finally got to answer them in person.

I love traveling because traveling loves me back. It gives me back to myself.

And I plan to keep going.