PASSAGES

*A reflection on deferred dreams, the roads we never travel, and the strange grace of discovering that a detour may have been the passage all along.* For a long time, I thought my life had gone off course. I was supposed to be a fashion designer. At least that was the plan. I had other things I was naturally good at, but fashion was the thing I chose. It was creative. It felt expressive. It felt like mine. I applied to FIT in New York and FIDM in California and was accepted to both. New York was the dream. I was supposed to visit the FIT campus on September 14, 2001. Three days before that trip, the world changed. September 11 happened. And just like that, one possible version of my life disappeared. Sometimes I still wonder about her. The girl who went to New York. What did she wear? Who did she meet? What neighborhood did she eventually call home? Did she become the designer she imagined she would become? Maybe she had the life of my dreams. Or maybe that's simply what we do with the roads we never traveled. We imagine only their best destinations. California was still possible. FIDM had accepted me too. But my mother couldn't imagine sending me that far away by myself. One of my best friends was supposed to go with me, and when she became pregnant, my mother's answer became even firmer. No. She wouldn't complete the financial aid paperwork. At the time, it felt like somebody else had been allowed to make a decision about my life that I would have to live with. So I found another way out. Atlanta. I enrolled in a fashion program there that never became what I hoped it would be. Looking back, I can admit that I was disappointed almost immediately. The dream hadn't disappeared completely. It had just started becoming harder to recognize. But I was determined to leave Houston, so I went. And that's where the story gets interesting. Because I can spend the rest of my life wondering what I lost by not going to New York or California. Or I can look at what was waiting for me in Atlanta. His name was David. I had worked at Wilsons Leather through high school in Houston and transferred to a store in Atlanta. One day, this very tall man walked in looking for a coat. He didn't walk out with his future wife. Not exactly. But he met her. We became friends. Real friends. The kind of friendship that slowly makes itself essential before anybody realizes what is happening. David likes to say I was the first girl he ever worked up the courage to ask for her number. I'll let him keep telling that version. We met in 2002. By 2005, we had become something else. And we've pretty much been moving through life together ever since. There is something almost funny about that now. I thought Atlanta was where I went because New York and California didn't work out. For years, I saw the beginning of that chapter through the lens of disappointment. My dream had been deferred. I was behind. Everyone else seemed to have received some manual for adulthood that hadn't been issued to me. David came from a world that sometimes made that feeling even louder. He was surrounded by people who were educated, accomplished, articulate and exposed to things I hadn't been exposed to. They had gone to great schools. They had certain kinds of opportunities. They seemed comfortable inside rooms where I was still trying to figure out where to put my hands. For a long time, I thought they made me feel less than. I'm old enough now to understand something harder. A lot of the time, they were touching a wound that was already there. I already thought I was behind. Atlanta simply gave that insecurity a mirror. So I ran. Not necessarily away from them. Toward proof. I went back to college at 28 with almost the urgency of someone trying to make up for lost time. I completed what was essentially a four-year degree in two years. Then I went straight into an accelerated master's program and finished that in a year. I accomplished exactly what I set out to accomplish. And still, somewhere inside me, there was that girl looking over her shoulder trying to determine whether she had finally caught up. I didn't understand then how much of my life would be spent wrestling with that question. Have I done enough yet? Am I impressive enough yet? Have I caught up yet? Do I belong in the room yet? Years later, I would find myself asking an entirely different question: **Who am I when I'm not proving anything?** Maybe that's why I've become so interested in passages. Because when I look backward now, the defining moments of my life rarely happened where I thought the destination was supposed to be. They happened in between. My mother once moved us from New Orleans to Houston, and without realizing it, expanded my understanding of what the world could look like. I tried to leave Houston for New York. That didn't happen. I tried to leave for California. That didn't happen either. I went to Atlanta instead. And in the place I once considered a consolation prize, I met the person who would become my closest friend, my husband, my travel partner, the father of my child, and the person beside me as we built the life I'm living now. That's the thing about passages. **You usually don't know you're inside one.** It just feels like something didn't work. A door closed. A plan changed. Someone said no. You missed something. You got redirected. You're standing somewhere you never meant to be, grieving somewhere you thought you were supposed to go. And then enough life happens that you are finally able to turn around. You trace the road backward. And suddenly you see it. That wasn't the place where your story stopped. That was the place where another story began. I never became the fashion designer I thought I would be. For a long time, that sentence hurt. There's still a little tenderness there. I loved creating. I still do. There will probably always be some part of me that wonders what might have happened if I'd gotten on a plane to New York. But I don't think I need to erase that woman or pretend her dream didn't matter in order to love the life that came instead. Maybe she wasn't wrong about being a designer. Maybe she was just wrong about what she would eventually design. A home. A marriage. A career. A family. A life across cities and countries and cultures. Stories. Experiences. And now, this place. SapioPassport. A place built around the belief that where you end up isn't the whole story. Sometimes the most important part is understanding what the road did to you along the way. I used to think I ended up in Atlanta because my other plans fell apart. Twenty-four years later, I can see it differently. I wasn't simply being kept from somewhere. I was being led somewhere. **Sometimes the detour is the door.**