The Nomad with a Nest

I was digging through an old hard drive last week when I found a blog post I wrote in December 2013.

I don't remember writing it. I definitely don't remember publishing it. But there it was — 1,200 words about the exact life I wanted to build someday.

The thing is, I built it. Almost word for word.

And I did it completely by accident.

In December 2013, I was living in Fort Collins, Colorado. Eighteen months into my first house. Seven months into my first startup — a yoga travel company that seemed brilliant until it mostly wasn't. I was deep in startup hell at the time, running on caffeine and bad odds, and whatever I wrote that day got buried under a decade of pivots, moves, and identity crises.

The post was called “A Nomad with a Nest.”

I'd been trying to articulate something I'd noticed about myself: that I genuinely loved being home, and I genuinely couldn't stay there. I wrote about my 5:30am yoga routine, my stocked kitchen, my back patio. Then I wrote about needing airports and train stations and immigration checkpoints and the specific humbling feeling of being completely lost somewhere I'd never been.

I need to be a nomad... with a nest.

At the time, it felt like I was asking for too much. So I hit publish, and I moved on, and I forgot it entirely.

Thirteen years later, I have the nest — a house in Kansas City, a remote job I genuinely like. And somewhere between then and now, I racked up 32 months of digital nomad stints across 30+ countries, from Lisbon and Lima to Bangkok and Budapest. Always with a home base to come back to.

A cozy place to land. A suitcase that was never fully unpacked.

She knew exactly what she was describing. She just didn't know she was describing her actual life.

What gets me is that I didn't execute some grand plan. I didn't print that post out and tape it to my mirror. I wrote it, forgot it existed, and then spent the next thirteen years making decisions — some deliberate, some desperate, some just lucky — that kept pointing in the same direction without me realizing that's what I was doing.

It took longer than I thought it would. There were years where the nomad part felt very far away, and years where the nest part did. The through-line was real, but it wasn't clean.

But I got it.

I'm sharing this not because I have a tidy lesson to wrap around it — I don't — but because finding that post genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

Some version of me, running on caffeine and bad odds in a Fort Collins kitchen in 2013, already knew what she was building. She just didn't know she knew.

I keep thinking about what I'm writing right now that I'll find in 2039 and think: oh. yeah. that one came true too.

What a weird and wonderful thing — to have more decades ahead to fill in. On to the next...

Remember — the yellow brick road was just the beginning.