Chapter VI: I arrived in Nashville defeated. I had crawled through San Francisco and Chicago amidst the worst of the Great Recession and come out the other side, officially in the latter half of 10 Cities/10 Years; I was drained, bitter, and ready to give up.
Chapter V: Chicago brought its share of challenges for Selene and me, financial and personal, but whereas in San Francisco there were common foes and foils to unite us, in Year 5, it was just the two of us.
Chapter IV: It's hard to express just how disastrously those first months in San Francisco went for us, but consider this: we moved to one of the priciest cities in the world in the month that economists have identified as the nadir of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. So, not great.
Chapter III: At 24, I was single, young (not that I knew it), and living in the land of milk and silicone.
Chapter II: I chose Philadelphia for my second year specifically so I could push myself, test my mettle. In that sense, it fulfilled every expectation.
Chapter I: Loss is a fundamental part of traveling; people rarely tell you that.
If you stay put, you might have a happy life, you may avoid hardships. Your life very well may avoid all the road blocks and problems that come with relocation. But if you never move, you will remain an incomplete person.
It's something to accept - when I'm broke, when I'm sick, when I'm uncertain how far away from normalcy my next detour will take me - that every path leads to regrets, if I allow it to. I don't know how this one is going to turn out.
