I was leaving behind my home and my identity as an achiever, a safe refuge which had gotten me to this point but was no longer serving me.

This is why when people ask me, “How can I do what you’re doing?” I can’t tell them what they want to hear. They want easy answers, a shortcut to a future state of success. But the path that will lead us to the life we want is uniquely our own, inevitably filled with the exact challenges we’d rather avoid.

I knew I wanted freedom. Not freedom to travel. I still don’t go many places. Not freedom to work whenever I wanted. I still work set hours during the day. I simply wanted the freedom to make those decisions myself. I wanted to live a life where nobody could make a claim on my time without my approval. I was also realizing I wanted to do something

Aspirational pursuits go hand in hand with the pathless path because they can appear incomprehensible to others and even yourself, sometimes for years. Callard argues that the aspirant’s understanding of the value of their pursuits “is characterized by a distinctive kind of vagueness, one she experiences as defective and in need of remedy.”⁠