After years of living abroad, I started to wonder if I had confused being rooted with being stuck.
In February 2019, I was on Zoom with my therapist in Georgia, sitting in my villa in Bali.
I was telling her about some of the things I was dealing with at the time. I was dating a French guy and communication was part of the fun, but also part of the frustration. With work, I was also having some problems with a client.
At one point in the conversation, she says, “You need to be rooted somewhere.”
And I immediately felt a rush of anger. It wasn’t just her words, but what I thought she meant.
I felt misunderstood and immediately became defensive. I never talked to her again.
What I heard was that I was running away from my problems. That I had left America because I didn't want to deal with what was happening at home. And living abroad was somehow a way of avoiding my life rather than actually living it.
It was hard for me to understand how she could see it that way.
I had left America for the first time ever in 2017, and it had completely changed my idea of what my life could look like.
By 2018, I was freelancing for several clients and working remotely. My lease ended in September. And my mom had surgery in October, so I spent that month at home with her while she recovered. Then, at the end of October, I flew to Bali.
For the first time in my adult life, I didn't have a lease to worry about.
I had sold most of my belongings and stored others at my sister’s in Atlanta and my Mom’s in Cleveland. I had mail going to 2 locations. I had work I could do from anywhere and finally had enough money to travel.
I could live wherever I wanted. So that’s exactly what I did.
I had just discovered how much freedom there was outside of one place
In 2019, I spent 7 months living out of a carry-on suitcase. I have no idea how I made that work, but I did. And honestly, it was one of the most fun times of my life.
I loved not being tied to a particular location. Freelancing gave me the opportunity to choose who I worked with. And I could structure my days around my own schedule. Think mid-day yoga, working from aesthetic coffee shops, and waking up to a slow morning of meditation and low stress.
I was grateful to create the type of regular Tuesday I had always wanted when I was working my last corporate job.
Leaving America had given me something I didn't know I was missing: autonomy.
So when my therapist told me I needed to be rooted, I didn't hear a suggestion to find more stability. I heard that I needed to give up something I had just fallen in love with.
At that point, being rooted meant 2 things to me: traditional and boring.
It meant staying in one place I could barely afford. Having a regular job I hated driving to. Staying close to home and family. And building a life around a particular city and accepting that as your life.
There's nothing wrong with that…for the people who want it. But I didn’t.
And I still don't.
What I didn't understand then was that I had bundled all of those things together. I assumed that if I wanted one, I had to accept the rest as “normal.”
It took me a few more years to realize what I actually missed
Living out of a suitcase was exciting, but eventually I started wanting some things I hadn't expected to want.
I became a minimalist because it made my life and travels easier, not for any philosophical reason. Everything in me wanted to buy clothes and home decor I loved from the countries that influenced me. I wanted to take the knick knacks home to show my Mom. But the logistics felt like an obstacle I never wanted to overcome.
I also wanted friends who weren't constantly leaving.
There’s nothing like immediately forming an intense and meaningful bond with a newfound “BFF” only for them to be hopping on a flight 6 weeks later. I started wanting a community that had some consistency to it.
By 2025, I realized I wanted a home base, which was a surprising thing to admit to myself.
I didn’t suddenly want a forever home. That hadn’t changed at all. I still like knowing that I can change my mind about where I live.
But what I wanted was somewhere my belongings could live. A place I could return to after being away. A home where I knew the people, the neighborhoods, the restaurants and the places I needed when I was there. Somewhere I could have a TCM doctor instead of figuring out where to go every time I landed in a new city.
I did want roots. I just didn't want the version of roots I had imagined in 2019.
I wasn't rejecting roots. I was rejecting the blueprint attached to them.
That's what I understand now.
I thought I was rejecting settling down, but really I was rejecting building a life in a way that seemed normal by someone else's standards.
Those are not the same thing.
I can have a home base and still travel. Just like I can build a career around location independence instead of organizing my life around a job that requires me to stay somewhere. I can have friends around the world and still have people nearby who I meet up with for game night.
And my husband didn't change my mind on being rooted vs. anchored either. He and I actually share a lot of the same ideas about freedom. He had lived abroad long-term before we met and we met in Thailand. We both love being somewhere new, experiencing different cultures, and having that feeling of being dropped into a place we don't completely understand yet.
We just don't want to live out of a suitcase anymore.
We want to build a home together that gives us somewhere to come back to without making it difficult to leave.
That distinction matters to me because I still don't think about my life in terms of permanence. I don't want to decide where I'll live forever. I also don't want to promise that today's version of my life will still make sense to me 10 years from now. It may not…and that’s perfectly ok.
I like having the freedom to evolve.
And that's probably the part of this whole thing I understand differently now.
I'm allowed to make a different decision with new information
Changing your mind gets a bad reputation.
They say it’s fickle, flaky, or noncommittal. But at this point, who cares?
We're supposed to know what we want and then stick to it, like changing your mind means your original decision was a mistake.
I don't see it that way anymore.
I'm not the same woman who made the decision in 2018. I couldn't be because I've lived more life since then.
I spent months moving between 7 different countries with everything I owned in a carry-on. I learned what location independence actually felt like. And how much I loved the freedom and novelty of it. But during that adventure, I also learned what I missed.
I didn't figure that out by thinking harder about what kind of person I was supposed to be.
I lived it.
That experience gave me information I didn't have before. So when I changed my mind about having roots, I wasn't somehow betraying the woman who didn't want them.
She wasn't wrong. She just hadn't lived enough of this life yet to know what she would eventually want. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I thought choosing roots meant giving up the other options.
Now I understand that I can choose what my roots are.
I can create a home base that supports the kind of life I want instead of treating home as the thing that keeps me from having that life. I can build a life that lets me leave and gives me somewhere to come back to. That feels very different from settling down.
This isn’t an AND/OR situation anymore. It feels more like intentionally choosing.
And maybe that's what I was trying to protect the whole time. It wasn’t about not planting roots, but the freedom to decide what they would look like.
