525,600 Minutes...

It’s been 365 days since I left New York City.

A year ago I was sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn with my closest friends, waiting with one massive duffle for a town car to whisk me away.

To JFK.
To Upstate.
Eventually, to Namibia.

I’d quit my job. I’d moved out. I’d spent two weeks couch surfing (an urban rite of passage) and filled my social calendar with more dinners and drinks that I thought humanly possible.

I’d even bought cargo pants.

I smiled through the tears when we hugged goodbye, mostly because I knew exactly what I was leaving behind: A city I loved. Friends and family I adored. A career I enjoyed.

At the time, I had no idea what I was heading towards: A place where everyone (including me) clicks. Where taps run cold and showers are a myth. To a town where families cook outside, teachers arrive drunk to school, and the color of my skin is the first thing people see. Where hospital patients have to sleep on floors, medicine runs out too soon and an old flatbed truck is the closest thing to an ambulance.

A place where most of what I thought I knew doesn’t make much sense anymore.

And even though I’m different from that girl I was a year ago today, sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn—naïve but certain, excited yet still somehow afraid—remembering her makes me smile.

Not because she’s gone. (Trust, I haven’t changed that much.) But because I’m certain that even now, given the same choice—between staying in a place she loved with the people she loved, or embarking on the unknown—despite the hardships, frustrations and sacrifices that lie ahead—she’d do it all again.

Without so much as a second thought.