“You’re from Queens??!” she exclaimed. “Like in ‘Coming to America’!” I stared at her blankly, then exploded in laughter. That an Eddie Murphy comedy could make my hometown exciting and exotic to someone in Australia was the punchline to a wonderful joke that I was only just beginning to understand.

It is strange, after 20 years of perpetual motion, to find myself, along with everyone else, suddenly stilled. It is sadder still to be looking back on this particular faded snapshot and feel that the expansiveness I had the privilege of experiencing may never again return. Those months on another continent opened my eyes to the world, and to what was possible in life. I was a person who’d always lived in my head and in books. In the planning of that first trip abroad, I learned how to make the thing I wanted to happen happen. I write this in recognition of the opportunities lost, or at the very least postponed, for countless nascent adventurers grounded in our midst.

I can trace so much of what I love in my life now to that trip, because it was the first time that I was really and truly left to my own devices. Everyone I knew and trusted was a day behind and a crackling phone line away. If I had a problem, I was forced to solve it. When I realized that my white male professors had the unfortunate tendency to assign reading that fetishized Southeast Asia and its women, I ditched the study part of being abroad. I got a job at The Sydney Morning Herald and learned how to be a journalist instead.

And I learned how to give myself over to possibility. Here I was, in a new, beautiful, sun-spackled city. My journalist mentors saw my restlessness and knew what to do with it, sending me far and wide to explore that city. The country’s obsession with swimming was something I could get behind. When a hunky Swedish guy offered to take me to the beach on his motorcycle, I accepted. (Sorry, Mom — I know, I know, motorcycles are dangerous.) And when an intriguing girl in painting class invited me home for dinner with her family, I went. We’re still friends today.

Eventually, I worked enough to earn passage up the coast to Cairns, the jumping-off point to the most famous coral reef in the world. I remember the moment I first sank into a pool with a scuba tank and made myself take a breath underwater. My body tensed, resisted. Not once had it ever been fully submerged and told to breathe in at the same time. It took deliberate thought, a conscious wrestling with primal, instinctive fear. That first inhale through the scuba regulator in my mouth was deafening to my ears. It opened the portal to the undersea universe.