❤️🔥 Personal: The Blog Starts Here — Why I Left Everything Behind
A Puerto Rican girl born to teenage parents who moved her across the world more than once. Four kids. A 20-year business. A mom who died at 50. And a bed in the Dominican Republic where a blog was born.
It's 10:16am. Still in bed.
I'm reading moving stories on Quora — one of the handful of emails I actually open. I signed up for their "interesting things" forum during the pandemic, two or three years ago, and it lives up to its name every time. Some scary things happening in the world. Some great things. A lot in between. I like that it reflects the polarity of this universe without trying to resolve it.
I sit here contemplating how long it's "normal" to do absolutely nothing, letting the hours slide by without apology. No answer comes. I keep reading.
I'm in Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic. Three weeks in, one left. The first two weeks, my 18-year-old daughter Isis was with us. She left, and now it's just me and my 15-year-old, Jovan. I have four children total. I call them my 4 little angels — Tristan (26), Josiah (20), Isis (18), and Jovan. My oldest left home years ago; I drove him to college in 2014. My 20-year-old, Josiah, was living with me all his life until this trip. My heart broke as I drove from his new place to the hotel to fly out the next day. I cried and cried. He needs to live with people his own age. I know that. Knowing it doesn't make the drive easier.
Isis leaves me permanently in January 2023 for college in Savannah, Georgia.
I'm finally doing what I always said I would do — living as a real-life gypsy, moving through the world with no finite destination, no home base, no plan beyond the next stop. It is the first time I have ever traveled without a home to return to.
I Was Born Moving
I've been moving through US territory since I was three years old.
My first trip was from the island of Puerto Rico, where I was born, to the state of Massachusetts. My parents were kids themselves — my mom was 15 and my dad was 17. Sit with that for a moment, because I did. They were 15 and 17 and they packed up their lives and crossed the country and figured it out as they went. Whatever they lacked in experience, they made up for in nerve.
It was in Massachusetts that my little brother was born when I was 3. I remember my mom saying she didn't want to come back to Puerto Rico. She really liked it there. I got the sense it was my dad who wanted to return — and so it is there, in that quiet negotiation between two teenagers trying to build a life, where my nomadic existence began.
When we came back to Puerto Rico, we lived in several different places, including my grandmother's house. At some point between 4 and 5 — maybe even 6 — we moved to a house down the main street, closer to town. Then at 8, my parents bought a tiny little house much further from town at a newly built subdivision. The walk to school must have been at least half an hour every day.
They purchased that home when my mother was 23 and my father was 26. Three children already. I never put those statistics together before, not even in my head, until I sat here writing this.
At 11, my parents divorced. At 12, my mother moved my siblings and me to San Jose, California.
I had no idea what waited for me there. I might as well have been moving to Siberia. But something got planted in that particular kind of uprooting — the understanding, absorbed before I had words for it, that the place you're standing right now is not the only option. That your whole life can change with one decision made by someone doing their best with what they have.
That is where my moving a lot began. And my exploring a lot. I never realized, until I started writing this post, that it was because my parents took enormous risks as teenagers to try to live somewhere different than what they had always known.
My Mom Died at 50. She Looked 40.
My international travels didn't begin until my mom passed away in 2012. She had just turned 50 the month before and looked 40.
Nothing makes you stop putting your dreams on hold like losing someone young. Especially someone who was still in the middle of living — someone who should have had decades more. It strips away every "someday" you've been saving and leaves you with just now.
I found notes about my desire to travel as early as 2000. But it was 2012 when I finally decided to build a real plan — and not just to travel, but to move out of the country. I divorced that year as well. Both things happening at once: an ending and a beginning, the way those two things often arrive together. I got my passport. I started planning.
In 2013, my sister and I traveled internationally for the first time, to Panama. Our brother invited himself, on the grounds that two grown women with children clearly needed supervision. We usually went along with his self-appointed rules. He set them up in his own head, all by himself, and we didn't object. It came from a good place — and having a man along wasn't a bad thing, though it is not my standard mode of operation. I don't move through the world in fear because I'm a woman.
Since 2012, I've traveled 9 times to 5 different countries and twice to the US territory I was born in. Panama, Mexico three times, Belize, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic. Seven of those trips were to islands. As you can probably tell, I am obsessed with islands.
After this trip and the next one to Puerto Rico, I might put islands on hold for a while. Even as I type that, I have no idea how long I'll stick to it.
No Home to Go Back To
This trip is different from every other one.
For the first time, there is no home waiting at the other end of it. I picked a starting point and a point after that, and I am taking it from there.
This blog is where I'm going to document all of it — the cities, the costs, the decisions, the grief, the beauty. The version that actually happened, not the one that looks good on the internet.
If you've been doing your own quiet math about what might be possible for your life — the calculation is already started. Welcome to Gypsy Spirit.
