The Journey is the Destination

I’m currently sitting in the middle seat of a budget airline heading back to the United States as I write this.

I haven’t showered in a week after unexpectedly ending up in the Amazon Rainforest before catching my flight home from Cusco. If you think the smell alone is enough punishment for the poor mother and grandmother sitting next to me, it gets worse. I’m also covered in mud, have no shoes, and am currently battling food poisoning from eating a street sandwich in Bogota during my layover.

The mother probably doesn’t even mind getting up every ten minutes so I can sprint to the bathroom to throw up and destroy it. The poor lady can finally get a chance to breathe.

Try to imagine the absolute worst person to sit next to on an international flight.

I’ll top it every time.

And honestly?

It was all completely worth it.

I’ve never once returned home from traveling feeling refreshed physically. Usually, I’m exhausted, sleep deprived, broke, and wondering if I contracted some new disease that modern medicine hasn’t discovered yet.

But every single time, my soul comes home feeling lighter.

This trip was different, though.

This trip completed something in me.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t searching anymore.

Somewhere between Portuguese hostels, Japanese temples, Peruvian mountains, and conversations with strangers I’d never see again, I found what I had spent my entire life looking for.

I found meaning.

People always say your thirties are better than your twenties. I’m only a year into mine, but I’ve experienced more in the past twelve months than I did in the twenty-nine years before.

The funny thing is, I never planned to make it this far.

And can you blame me?

I literally almost died in quicksand less than twenty-four hours ago!

But before all of this, before the hostels, the mountains, and the near-death experiences, I had built a pretty good life.

At least that’s what it looked like from the outside.

I had my dream job at the company I’d wanted to work for since I was three years old. I was in a long-term relationship. I was debt free. I had good health, good friends, and every reason to be happy.

To most people, that’s the dream.

And don’t get me wrong, I have been given more than I deserve in this life.

But something was missing.

I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t even describe it. I just knew I wasn’t ready to move on to the next chapter of life until I figured out what that thing was.

I didn’t want to get married.

I didn’t want kids.

I didn’t want a house.

At the time, all of those things felt like permanence, and permanence felt like a death sentence.

I thought settling down meant settling.

The irony, of course, was that I had never really taken a risk in my entire life.

I talked a big game.

I dreamed about adventure.

I judged people who lived predictable lives.

Yet every time something threatened the stability I’d built, I avoided it like the plague.

I didn’t understand why then.

I was about to find out.

Because without realizing it, I had built my entire identity around one thing:

Work.

I had spent my life trying to prove that I mattered.

Growing up on Long Island, I was a pretty average kid. I wasn’t particularly good at anything. I was insecure, self-conscious, and constantly felt overshadowed by everyone around me, including my parents.

My dad pitched professionally and built multiple successful businesses. My mom dedicated her life to raising me and my siblings.

I grew up believing hard work was everything because my parents were living proof of it.

Long Island is an interesting place to grow up. What I miss most are the people. The accents, the personalities, the ability to turn a minor inconvenience into a full-scale scene, usually ending with fists being thrown around until at least someone is on the ground.

What I don’t miss is the pressure.

It’s a place that constantly asks you who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and whether you’re measuring up.

I spent most of my life trying to answer those questions.

When I moved to Florida for college, I saw it as my chance to start over.

Nobody knew me.

Nobody knew who I was supposed to be.

I became student body president. I was on television, spoke at political press conferences, became graduation speaker, and somehow ended up in tech despite being an art major.

I had finally become the person I always thought I was capable of being.

The problem with reaching the top of college is that it only lasts four years.

Then it’s over.

And suddenly you’re just another person again.

I realized I had spent four years building achievements instead of building myself.

Without accomplishments, I didn’t know who I was.

I was lost.

Again.

A few years later, I had the dream job, the salary, the relationship, and the stability.

I had achieved everything my younger self had wanted.

And I still felt empty.

I remember thinking:

This can’t be all there is.

I had never traveled internationally before. It felt inaccessible, like something other people did.

So with nobody to go with and no idea what I was doing, I booked a solo trip to Greece.

At the time, it was the craziest thing I had ever done.

I wasn’t just going to another country.

I was flying somewhere that nobody knew me.

No accomplishments.

No resume.

No expectations.

I thought I was going there to become someone new.

Instead, I discovered who I had been all along.

That trip changed everything.

And this book is the story of everything that happened after I stepped on that first flight.

The countries I visited.

The people I met.

The mistakes I made.

The things I survived.

The questions I asked.

And ultimately, how I went searching for meaning and found it in places I never expected.

If you see yourself anywhere in these pages, if you’ve ever felt successful but unfulfilled, stable but restless, or like there has to be something more to life than checking boxes, I hope my story reminds you of one thing:

You’re not behind.

You’re not lost.

You’re just searching.

And sometimes the answers only reveal themselves when you’re willing to leave everything familiar behind.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to run to the bathroom again before I throw up on this poor grandmother’s lap.

The journey IS the destination.

— Scud