One of the reasons I tell myself I don’t want kids is because I want to leave.

Not escape, exactly. More like… drift. Move through the world without anchors digging into me. I want to see it properly. Not the curated version—no resort wristbands, no all-inclusive blur where every country tastes like the same buffet.

I want the real thing. To sit at tables where I don’t speak the language and just figure it out as I go. To get lost and realize, somewhere in the middle of it, that it’s not actually a problem. To breathe air in mountain towns I can’t pronounce. To move through cities that are still alive when I should’ve stopped moving hours ago.

It costs money. Of course it does. The kind of money I don’t have yet. But that hasn’t really stopped anything. I build itineraries anyway. Type A in a way that feels almost cruel to myself, Google Docs full of flight paths I can’t book, hostel lists I can’t confirm, train routes that only exist as highlighted text on my screen.

Bucket lists like that feel like a second life. One I keep open in another tab, waiting for some version of me that can afford to exist inside it.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, which makes all of this worse in a quiet way.

It’s beautiful here. The kind of beauty that doesn’t ask for attention. There are mountains that sit in the distance like they’ve already decided your problems are small. The hiking culture is real, almost gentle in its insistence that you belong outside.

And for a while, I did.

I used to hike.

Not anymore.

That part is harder to say out loud than it should be.

Because the truth is simpler and uglier than any aesthetic sadness: I’m 220 pounds. Not catastrophic, not headline-worthy. Just enough. Enough to make clothes fit wrong. Enough to make stairs feel like negotiation. Enough to turn “go outside” into a calculation instead of an instinct.

People don’t always see it, but I do. Constantly. It changes the geometry of my choices. It turns trails into questions I don’t want to answer.

So I stay in bed most days. Not because I’m tired in the normal sense, but because leaving feels like stepping into a version of myself I don’t want to confirm.

That’s the quiet form of self-destruction nobody warns you about. Not chaos. Not collapse. Just postponement. Just waiting for a “better version” before you let yourself live.

As if life is something you earn through optimization.

As if travel is a reward for being smaller, lighter, easier to carry.

But that logic is broken. I know it is. Rationally, I know it doesn’t hold up, people at every size hike, travel, live, eat, stumble through cities and still belong there. The math of worth doesn’t actually change with weight. It just feels like it does when you’re the one doing the counting.

And still, knowing that doesn’t always fix it.

I still make itineraries. Still map out countries I want to touch someday; real someday, not the vague kind. I still save trail photos and city guides like I’m collecting proof that I’m the kind of person who goes places.

Maybe that’s what it is right now.

Not action. Not yet.

Just evidence gathering for a future self I haven’t fully stepped into.

And sometimes I think: the problem isn’t that I can’t travel.

It’s that I keep waiting to deserve it first.