Where it All Began

In tenth grade, it all began with a magazine. No, not that magazine. I had just picked up my first copy of Condé Nast Traveler and as I thumbed through its glossy pages (mostly looking at the pictures), I landed on a story about a college student who spent a weekend in Spain with just $28.

It was one of the first times — but definitely not the last — that I wondered, Why should white people get to have all the fun?

I didn’t have the language for it then, but that question wasn’t really about a romantic trip to Spain, trading and bartering for a weekend full of survival and adventure. It was about access. About imagination. About who gets to see the world, and who gets to feel at home in it.

That curiosity sent me down a series of non-linear paths. I studied ethnography in college and later lived in Istanbul, where I studied at Boğaziçi University, coached American football, and fell in love once… okay fine,I fell in love twice. Istanbul was the first place that truly unsettled me — not in a dramatic way, but in the quieter, more permanent sense. It challenged what I thought I knew about faith, love, and belonging, and showed me how much of life opens up when certainty loosens its grip.

After college, I moved to Chicago, worked for a national nonprofit, and somehow also found time to do stand-up comedy. Late nights in dimly lit bars reintroduced me to a feeling I’d first encountered abroad: belonging that doesn’t announce itself, but sneaks up on you — built through proximity, shared laughter, cheap whiskey and showing up again night after night after night.

I eventually moved to Los Angeles where I wrote for network television, booked on-camera work, and developed a deep appreciation for residual checks (IYKYK). It felt, briefly, like arrival, but then the world reminded us how fragile that idea is.

OutKast’s Aquemini (1998) put it plainly: “Nothing is for sure. Nothing is for certain. Nothing lasts forever.” The 2019 Covid pandemic — followed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes — heard that and said, Print it on a T-shirt.

So I chose to pivot again, returning to home to Atlanta to work as an editor at EBONY, where I get to write travel, sports and human-interest stories. I don’t really consider myself a traditional journalist or reporter. I’m an observer. I’m interested less in conclusions than in moments. Less in mastery than in what happens when you stay long enough to be changed by what you’re paying attention to.

And yes, I’ve been fortunate to see some incredible places, but travel isn’t about destinations or stamps in a passport. It’s a privilege. It’s never really been about where I’ve gone. It’s about the people I’ve met along the way — people living full, complicated lives, chasing dreams, each searching for community in unfamiliar places.

My work exists to make those lives — and our shared humanity — a little more visible, a little more familiar, all with a place to belong.