Leaving

I didn't leave because I was unhappy. That's the part people get wrong when I tell this story short. I had a house, a marriage, two kids, eleven years climbing an IT ladder toward a pension I assumed I'd collect one day, the way you assume the sun will come up. By every measure I'd been handed for what a good life looks like, I had one.

Then my father died at 54. He'd worked his whole life for a retirement he never got to have.

I didn't quit the next day. It doesn't work like that. It was months of circling the same ugly question — if the same thing happened to me, at the same age, would I have any regrets? — and not liking any answer I came up with. I already had 47 states behind me by then, driven to on weekends and vacation days like a man collecting them instead of living in them. I got my first passport in the summer of 2014. I still hadn't used it.

What actually moved me wasn't the fear. It was my kids. They wanted to see the world, and — this is the part that still gets me — they wanted to see it through me. Not send me postcards. Watch me do it. So I quit the job, picked up a camera, and started a vlog for exactly two people: my son and my daughter. Everyone else who ever watched a single second of Deaf Wanderer was a bonus I didn't plan for.

I told people at the time I wasn't running from anything. Most of them didn't believe me — you don't announce you're backpacking through a region the State Department half-warns you about and expect a warm send-off. I got a lot of "just be careful," which is a nice way of saying this seems reckless. I remember writing this back, more or less, on Facebook, to someone who couldn't understand why I'd go for that long:

It's fun to travel? It's fun to see what's not in USA? It's fun to try exotic food? It's fun to meet locals and chat with them with gestures? It's fun to see beautiful things? It's fun to learn all about different things that you cannot learn in USA?

There's nothing to survive here. Those people who are stuck in USA aren't actually living their lives. They're just trying to do what they were taught: listen and do what they are told to do.

I still stand behind every word of that, even the parts that read a little sharper now than I'd probably phrase them today. I wasn't trying to convince anyone else to leave. I was trying to convince myself I was allowed to.

The two people this was actually for.

March 2015. I crossed into Mexico at Laredo with a backpack, a camera, and no return ticket. I had no idea it would take almost two years and take me through more than two dozen countries before I'd see my kids again in person. I don't think I would have believed you if you'd told me.