Last year, on my 25th birthday, I wrote that I had grown into “the most me version of me.”
I meant it.
What I didn’t know was that I was about to spend the next year finding out whether that version of me could move across the globe—whether she could hold when everything around her was unfamiliar. Whether she could stay intact while learning a new language, new rhythms, new ways of belonging. Whether she could recognize herself in a life that no longer looked like the one she had built before.
Twenty-five took me to North Macedonia, into the Peace Corps, into classrooms and campgrounds and long conversations with young people figuring out who they are. It also took me into a quieter, less visible landscape: loneliness that arrived without warning, phone calls home that ended in tears, stretches of feeling unmoored or misunderstood, and the strange disorientation of building a life that was both full and unfamiliar at the same time. A life that could feel so close to normal that when it strayed from it, the unfamiliarity was almost more disorienting.
I learned quickly that knowing yourself is not the same as staying comfortable in yourself. It is not just understanding your preferences or your values or the shape of the life you want. It is learning who you are when none of those things feel stable. It is learning who you are when you are far from the people who have always reflected you back to yourself. It is learning when to adapt and when adaptation starts to feel like erasure. It is learning that uncertainty is not always a sign you are lost. And it is learning, over and over again, to trust yourself anyway.
I used to think trust was something you arrived at. Something solid you could stand on once you had figured yourself out. Now I think it is more like something you practice. Sometimes it feels steady. Sometimes it feels like guessing. Sometimes it looks like calling your mom and asking what she thinks, listening carefully, and then trusting your gut enough to go in the opposite direction.
But it is still yours each time you choose it.
This year also changed the way I understand connection. I have always been someone people talk to easily. I listen closely, and people tend to tell me things quickly—sometimes things they have not said out loud in a long time. For a while, I thought that was just coincidence, or circumstance, or luck. But I have started to understand it differently.
I create space.
I ask questions. I stay present. I remember.
And in that space, people often feel safe enough to be honest.
That realization has stayed with me, especially in moments when I have been surrounded by people in all kinds of settings—camp, classrooms, shared meals, long bus rides, late-night conversations. I have come to understand how much I care about the conditions that allow people to feel seen. How much I care about belonging, not as an abstract idea, but as something you can actively build in a room.
And I have started to see that this is not separate from leadership.
Leadership is not only direction or certainty. Sometimes it is noticing who is quiet. Sometimes it is making space for someone to speak. Sometimes it is asking the question no one else thought to ask. Sometimes it is simply making someone feel important enough to answer honestly.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I also started to understand that I was not just observing connection—I was participating in it. I was building it. Not in a perfect or constant way, but in real, ordinary moments that added up.
Sitting around a table with people whose lives were completely different from mine. Becoming part of a Macedonian family. Listening to young people talk about their futures. Finding friendships in places I never expected to feel known. Attempting conversations in Macedonian when I only had half the words I wanted. Looking out a bus window at a country that once felt completely foreign and realizing, somewhere along the way, that I knew where I was.
And slowly realizing that “home” was no longer a single place I returned to, but something that appeared in fragments: in a phone call answered, in a shared meal, in someone saying my name like it belonged to me there.
At the same time, I learned that a life built on yes is not always as clean or cinematic as I once imagined.
Saying yes also means saying yes to discomfort. To logistical chaos, missed buses, language barriers, exhaustion, and the particular humility that comes from not knowing what you are doing much of the time. It has meant saying yes to things that excite me and, occasionally, saying yes to things that trigger every instinct in me to turn around and go home.
It means learning that meaningful does not always mean easy. That a life that feels full is not necessarily a life that feels orderly.
And yet leaning into yes almost always leaves me with something I did not have before.
Sometimes I think this experience came into my life specifically to teach me. About the world, certainly, but perhaps even more about myself.
There are still things I do not fully understand—about work, about relationships, about what comes next. There are friendships that have shifted in ways I am still learning how to hold. There are parts of this experience that have been harder than I expected. There are days when the future feels both wide open and completely undefined.
And sometimes, because I am me, I feel an overwhelming need to solve all of it in thirty minutes just so I can feel a little less adrift.
But strangely, I feel more grounded in that uncertainty than I expected to.
Not because I have answers, but because I have a clearer sense of what I am building toward.
I want a life that is full of people and ideas. I want work that feels meaningful and alive. I want to keep telling stories, keep moving, keep learning from places and people that challenge me. I want a life that asks something of me, and one that I can contribute to in return. I want to be useful in ways that feel human and connected.
I want to stay interested in my own life.
And underneath all of that, I have learned something quieter but more foundational: independence has never meant not needing people.
When I first moved to Macedonia, a lot of people told me I needed to learn how to sit with myself. But I don’t think that was ever the issue. I can sit with myself. I enjoy my own company. I can build routines alone, travel alone, eat alone, spend an evening alone, and be perfectly okay.
I would still much rather have people I love beside me.
I have stopped thinking that there is something I am supposed to outgrow about that.
If anything, being far from home has made it clearer how deeply I am shaped by the people I come from. My family has remained my anchor through all of this—not as something I left behind, but as something I carry with me. There is something grounding about realizing you can build a life on another continent and still want to call your mom at the end of the day.
Those things are not in conflict.
Neither are strength and softness, confidence and doubt, independence and needing people, certainty and change.
I think adulthood has been, in part, the slow dismantling of the idea that these things have to be opposites.
You can love your life and still struggle in it.
You can be deeply connected and still feel lonely.
You can be brave and still be afraid.
You can know yourself and still be surprised by who you are becoming.
You can choose something wholeheartedly and still admit that parts of it are not working.
You can love someone and still change the way you understand them.
Nothing about that makes the experience less real.
So much of the beauty of living is in the dichotomy.
Maybe growing up is less about resolving those contradictions and more about becoming comfortable enough to hold them.
If anything, this year has made me less interested in the idea of getting life “right” and more interested in living it honestly.
Asking for help when I need it. Changing my mind when I have to. Resting without guilt. Leaving when something is not working. Saying what is true even when it is uncomfortable. Letting myself miss people without always needing to reach for them. Letting life be what it is instead of constantly trying to force it into what I thought it should look like.
Last year, I wrote from a place of certainty.
I still feel certain in some ways, but it is quieter now. Less like a declaration and more like something I carry with me.
I know I am curious.
I know I care deeply about people.
I know I am resilient, even when I wish resilience were assigned a little less frequently.
I know I need beauty, movement, conversation, and purpose.
I know I am most myself when I feel connected to something larger than me.
I know I can start over.
I know I can find my way into unfamiliar places and eventually feel at home in them.
And I know I do not have to shrink myself to make other people more comfortable.
At 25, I said I trusted my foundations.
At 26, I have learned that trust is not about standing still on them. It is realizing they hold even when you are far from where they were built.
I did not become someone entirely new this year.
I became more aware that I can keep becoming without losing myself in the process.
There is still so much I do not know.
And I am grateful for that.
I hope 26 continues to surprise me. I hope I keep meeting people who shift the way I see the world. I hope I keep going places I cannot yet imagine. I hope I become more generous without becoming less discerning, more courageous without becoming reckless, more confident without becoming rigid, and more myself without believing I am finished.
Last year, I wrote that I had become the most me version of me.
I think I was right.
I just understand now that there will always be more versions.
The foundations are still the same. But every place I go, every person I love, every disappointment, every beautiful surprise, every uncomfortable lesson teaches me something new about the way I want to move through the world—what I like, what I don’t, what I need, what I can let go of, and what I am no longer willing to accept.
I am not becoming someone else.
I am becoming more acquainted with myself.
So here is to 26.
To becoming.
To staying open.
To loving people well.
To trusting what I know, and staying curious about what I don’t.
And to finding out, gently and honestly, who I am still becoming.
With heart,
