I’m writing this from my parents’ house, frustrated, with a broken phone and a list of things I can’t move forward on. This is not the glamorous part.
There is a version of this nomatic life that I post about and a version that I do not. The surfing in Mexico, the South America trips, the boat at the marina, the bartending season that funds five months of freedom. That part is real and I am grateful for every bit of it. But there is another part that does not make it into the photos and I want to talk about it because I think if you are considering this kind of life, or already living it, you deserve the full picture.
I am talking about the in-between.
The weeks between Mexico and the boat. The days between the road trip and the start of work. The limbo that happens when you do not have a set home, a set schedule, or a set version of yourself that fits neatly into the life happening around you. I have been doing this for five years and the in-between is still the hardest part. Not the travel. Not the work. The in-between.
The Packing and Unpacking of Nomatic Life Never Ends
Here is something nobody warns you about when you sign up for a nomadic life or seasonal life: you will spend a significant portion of your life packing and unpacking the same bags.
I just got home from four months in Mexico. Before I could exhale I was already sorting through everything. What stays at my parents’ house, what goes into the four rubber bins in the attic that hold my entire off-season life, what goes on the boat when it goes in the water in a few weeks. I do this every single transition. Mexico to home. Home to boat. Boat to Mexico. Every time I look at my seven long sleeve shirts and ask myself if I really need seven or if four will do.
I write articles about minimalism and how freeing it is to live with less. That part is true. The part I leave out is that arriving at minimalism requires constant editing of your own life, and after five years of doing it, the process is exhausting even when the outcome is worth it. You get good at it. You get fast at it. You do not get to the point where it does not cost you something.
Coming Home Does Not Always Feel Like Coming Home
My parents are wonderful. I want to say that clearly before I say anything else. They pick me up at the airport, they make me dinner, they give me a room and an open door and ask nothing in return except my company, which I am always happy to give. I am internally grateful in a way that is hard to put into words. Having people who will take you in, no questions asked, is not something I take for granted.
And still. Coming home to your childhood bedroom as an adult who has been living in Mexico for four months is its own kind of disorienting. It is not their fault and it is not mine. It is just the reality of living between two worlds. You stop fitting perfectly in either one.
In Mexico I have my routine. I surf in the morning. I work on the blog. I cook my own food in my own kitchen. I answer to nobody. My agenda is entirely my own and I have built a life there that feels genuinely mine even though I rent it by the month and leave it every spring. When I come home that structure evaporates overnight and I have to build it again from scratch in a space that is not designed for the person I have become.
The Friend Situation Is Complicated
The people I love most in Philadelphia and New Jersey are still there, still living the lives they were living when I left, still working their nine to fives and making dinner plans on Wednesdays and going to the same bars. I love those people. I want to see those people. And every time I come home I have a compressed window to fit everyone in before I leave again.
What I have learned, slowly and with some frustration, is that this does not work the way I want it to. My friends have jobs. My brother has two kids. My family has plans that were made before they knew exactly when I was landing. The world does not pause while I am away and then reorganize itself around the week I happen to be home. I know this intellectually. In the moment, when someone cannot move their schedule, I still feel it.
What I am working on is being honest with myself about whose fault that is. I chose this nomatic life. I chose the flexibility that comes with it and the complications that come with it too. I cannot choose adventure and then resent the people who chose stability for not dropping everything when I show up. They are not doing anything wrong. Neither am I. We are just living different lives on different timelines and sometimes they do not sync up and that is nobody’s fault.
This Easter I had been home two days and I was already in my head about everything I had not managed to do yet. And then my friend called. She had driven down from New Jersey to see her family and I went over and we sat outside for an hour and talked. Just talked. And it was a lot. It was exactly what I needed. I forgot about it almost immediately in the spiral of everything else I was frustrated about, and I had to consciously remind myself: you have been home two days and you already saw someone you love. That counts. Let it count.
The Nomatic Life Momentum Problem
In Mexico I am productive in a specific way. The blog, the side projects, the creative work I cannot seem to do when I am in bartending mode. It all happens there. I have time and space and a version of myself that is wired to create. Then I come home and the momentum hits a wall.
Part of it is practical. My phone broke in Mexico and because my accounts are tied to a family business setup I cannot do anything without passwords that nobody can find right now. I have a list of things I want to move forward on and I am sitting completely still. That specific frustration is temporary but it is sitting on top of a more structural one: every time I transition between lives I lose the thread for a little while. The routine I built in Mexico does not transfer. I have to build a new one.
What has helped me most is not trying to recreate the Mexico productivity. It is finding two small anchors and letting those be enough at first. The gym in the morning, any gym, any workout, just getting there, gives me a reason to get up and a framework for the day. The library gives me a workspace that is not my parents’ house, not a friend’s couch, not a place with the distractions of someone else’s life. I go there to work and something about the library, maybe just the implicit social contract that you are there to be quiet and focus, helps me reconnect with the working version of myself. I do not need to pick up all the momentum at once. I just need somewhere to sit and something to start.
The Road Trip Is Not Avoidance. It Is Necessary.
I am about to get in my car and spend a couple of weeks driving around looking at land and seeing what exists out there. Some people would look at that and see someone who cannot sit still. They would not be entirely wrong.
But I have learned something about myself over five years of this life: I am not built for open-ended waiting. When I am home between things with no structure and no purpose I spiral. The road trip gives me a purpose. It gives me something to plan and execute and look forward to. It is not running away from the discomfort of the in-between. It is a tool for moving through it without losing my mind.
There is no surfing here. There is no mountain biking or hiking or ocean to throw myself into when I need to reset. So I make my own version of those things. I get in the car. I drive somewhere new. I sleep in a hotel room and wake up in a different place and that sense of forward motion, even slow, even directionless, is enough to keep me from the particular kind of stagnation that is my personal nightmare.
I will come back. I will spend a few more days at home. I will make sure I see my brother and his kids. I will go into the city and see the Philadelphia friends. And then the boat goes in and I have my home back and the season starts and everything makes sense again. I just have to get through the in-between first.
What I Would Tell Someone Considering The Nomatic Life
The travel is as good as it looks. The freedom is real. The financial model works if you are disciplined about it. All of the things I write about on this blog are true.
And the in-between is hard in a way that nobody posts about. It is the weeks when you do not fit anywhere. When your phone is broken and your accounts are locked and your family is wonderful but you are sleeping in your childhood bedroom and trying to remember who you are outside of the places that make you feel most like yourself. When you want to see everyone and can see almost no one and feel guilty about both. When the momentum you built over four months evaporates in forty-eight hours and you have to figure out how to build it back from scratch.
It gets easier. Not because the in-between stops being hard but because you get better at navigating it. You find your anchors. The gym, the library, the road trip, the one friend who calls on Easter and gives you an hour on her porch. You learn to measure the visits differently. You get a little kinder with yourself about what you can actually accomplish in a compressed window before the next thing starts.
The nomadic life is incredible until you come home and realize you do not quite fit anymore. The answer is not to force yourself to fit or to squeeze everyone in or to feel guilty about the time you cannot give. It is to build small rituals that let you live authentically in the in-between without apologizing for it.
Your brother is not upset. Your friends understand. You are only upset with yourself.
So maybe the real skill is not traveling the world. Maybe it is learning to be kind to yourself when you are stuck between two lives and doing the best you can with the time and the space and the broken phone you have right now.
The boat goes in soon. I will be okay.
