The Art of Watching a Room
I'm a people watcher. Give me a restaurant or a party and a decent vantage point and I'll happily study the room, the people I know and the strangers both, while conversations blur together and everyone performs the social waltz we all pretend comes naturally.
Maybe it's because I've spent so much of my life watching people in unfamiliar places, but I notice more than what's being said. I watch the energy, the body language, and especially the quiet negotiations women make with space.
There's the woman near the edge of the room who checks her phone every few minutes so her hands have something to do. There's the one who clearly gave herself a pep talk in the car: she compliments the earrings, laughs easily, orders her own drink with great calm, and every so often a flicker in her eyes gives away the rehearsal underneath. There's the one everyone secretly wants as a friend, introducing people and filling silences and keeping the conversation alive, making sure everyone else feels seen.
The Woman Who Takes Over the Room
And then there's the woman who takes over the room. Not the loudest or the prettiest, not even the most charismatic. She's just fully occupied herself. She laughs without checking who's watching. She tells a long story without apologizing for the time it takes. She dances when she wants to dance. She isn't asking the room for permission to exist, and everyone can feel it.
I don't think women are born like that. I think a lot of them arrive the long way, after years of caregiving and accommodating and postponing themselves so everyone around them could thrive, until something finally shifts and they think: I want more life than this.
How Travel Rearranged Me
I got there through travel.
Long before I built a business around it, travel was already rearranging me. It taught me how to be uncomfortable and curious at the same time, how to sit across from someone nothing like me and still find something familiar. It showed me how small I could feel, and how much bigger a life could get the moment I stepped outside a routine I'd assumed was permanent.
It was also the best thing I ever gave my kids. Not the luxury kind, not the look-where-we-went kind. I wanted them to know the world was bigger than they were, that people eat and believe and love differently than we do.
The Parasailing Moment
I have never been the adventurous mother. No rollercoasters, no extreme anything. But in 2017, on a trip to California with my son, I let myself get talked into parasailing off Newport Beach.
I sat on the back of the boat with genuine panic climbing my chest as they strapped us in. Every instinct said this was a terrible idea. But my son was thrilled, and I didn't want my fear to become his ceiling. So up we went. The second we lifted off, I shut my eyes and regretted all of it. Then my son grabbed my hand and said, "Mom, please open your eyes. It's beautiful." I opened them. The boat had shrunk to a speck in the middle of an endless ocean. And then the other thing: silence. Not ordinary silence. The kind that feels like a different dimension. We'd gone up near sunset, and hanging there holding my son's hand, the world went quiet of noise and urgency and time. I will never parasail again as long as I live. I will also never forget it.
The Generation That Did Everything
Years later, I'm in a different stage of everything. The kids are older. I'm older. For a long stretch in between, work was the whole identity. I was on the hamster wheel, sure that if I just achieved enough and built enough financial security, the rest of life would sort itself out. And in a lot of ways it worked.
Mine is the generation of women who did everything. We built the careers and carried the second shift waiting at home. We were told we could have it all, and nobody mentioned that "all" meant all of it, the whole load. I don't say that bitterly. A lot of us signed up gladly.
The Question That Finally Turned Around
Then, like a lot of women in midlife, something cracked it open. A divorce. A pandemic. Grown kids. A health scare. Burnout. Or just the plain terror of noticing how fast it's all going. And the question we'd spent decades aiming at everyone else finally turned around: what do I want?
A Movement, Not a Niche
It turns out a lot of us were asking it at once. Women now drive around 80 percent of travel decisions globally and make up the majority of solo travelers, and the female solo travel market is projected to pass 900 billion dollars by 2033. That is not a niche. That is a lot of women deciding, at the same time, to stop waiting.
Travel isn't a business or an escape for me anymore. What I've landed on is less flattering and more true: building things and achieving things stops feeling like enough without someone to share the table with. The part that lasts is the conversation with a stranger, the meal, the small shock of realizing you're both looking for the same thing.
Who's Coming with Me?
So here is what I've stopped doing. I've stopped waiting to be chosen. For the invitation, the right partner, the better timing, the someone who finally says yes so I don't have to go by myself. The woman who takes over the room didn't get there by being asked. She got there by going.
Who's coming with me? The honest answer is, maybe no one. Maybe not the partner, not the friend who keeps almost booking, not the life that was supposed to have shown up by now. You stop waiting to be chosen when you understand the invitation was never coming. So you strap in, you open your eyes, and you go up anyway.
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