Become a Wave

I moved seven times before I finished elementary school.

I always thought of that as a fun fact about myself — a quirky detail, a good party answer. It took me a long time to understand what it actually did to me: it made me crave stability and mobility at the same time. I wanted to stay somewhere long enough to feel safe, and I wanted desperately to choose where that somewhere was. Those two things pull in opposite directions. I spent most of my twenties finding that out the hard way.

I grew up in the D.C. area, and from the time I was in high school I knew I didn’t want to stay. Not because I didn’t love it — I did, I do, I always come back — but because I needed to know I could leave. I needed to choose something. I applied only to schools in New York City, got in, moved there, and lasted one semester. It was really bad. My dad figured out I was unhappy before I fully admitted it to myself, and I came home.

What followed was a long, rocky, nonlinear path to a bachelor’s degree. I did the thing I swore I wouldn’t do — community college, then the University of Maryland, commuting from home. I resisted it. It was hard. But somewhere in there, something shifted. A professor took a small group of us to London for a faculty-led trip, and for the first time I got a taste of what it felt like to go somewhere I’d chosen and have it go well. To leave and not have it fall apart.

That trip planted something. On the flight home, California started whispering.

I knew I needed a master’s degree if I wanted to work in higher education. I knew I wanted the experience of really going away to school this time — living somewhere new, on my own terms, and having it stick. My mom, who has always believed in me more than I believed in myself, told me not to sell myself short. She pointed at USC and UCLA and said: why not look at the best?

My undergraduate years had been messy. Failed classes, false starts, a GPA that told one story while the rest of me was trying to tell another. I didn’t think a school like USC would even look at me.

I flew out to California in 2015 to visit campuses. USC was the only one that felt like home. I walked onto that campus and I just knew — the way you sometimes know things before you’re ready to admit them. It was in LA, and I’d been trying to convince myself I wanted San Francisco (there were reasons for that, which I’ll keep close to the vest), but USC just sat there quietly being the right answer while I tried to talk myself out of it.

I applied to USC and to the University of San Francisco. I genuinely believed USF was my safety school and USC was the reach I’d probably not get into.

In early January 2016, I got an email from USC. I got in. I was shocked in the way you’re shocked when something you wanted so badly actually happens — like some part of you never fully believed it was allowed to. I called my parents. I could hear my mom whispering to my dad in the background. She already knew about San Francisco. She knew about the reasons. She was right, she’s always right, and she kept it to herself.

A few weeks later, I was on a music cruise called the Rock Boat — more on that world in another essay — when I got the email from USF. I didn’t get in. My safety school rejected me. The universe, apparently, was not interested in my plans for San Francisco. It had other ideas.

I moved to California in the summer of 2016. I had my own apartment for the first time in my life. I loved it so much it almost hurt.

I loved the school. I loved the program. I changed my focus from student affairs to educational counseling because I wanted to work in community colleges — I wanted to go back and try to fix what had been broken in my own experience, to be for someone else what I’d needed and hadn’t always had. I went to shows. I had full independence. I lived near my brother Luke, who moved out a year after I did, and we had this one beautiful year of overlap where we chose each other — two adults, choosing to spend time together, in a city we’d both chosen. That year meant everything.

I moved there intending never to come back. I meant it completely.

I graduated in 2018 and started applying for jobs in January. I applied for hundreds. LA, San Diego, Bakersfield, Las Vegas. I was a finalist so many times. I got so close, so many times.

The problem was that everything in my life ran out at the same time. Student housing ended when my degree ended. My graduate assistantship ended. My savings drained. My mom was helping me, tremendously, and I was bouncing between Airbnbs and borrowed spaces, nothing stable, nothing mine. I had no control over anything. I had worked so hard to build something and I could feel it dissolving in my hands.

By October I still didn’t have a job. My mental health was affecting my physical health. I was so depleted I barely recognized myself.

I put my things in storage. I sat on the floor of that storage unit and sobbed. I had done everything right. I had gotten into one of the best schools in the country against all odds. I had earned a degree I was proud of. I had tried so hard to stay, and it just wasn’t working, and I didn’t know how to make peace with that.

Before I left, I drove up to Ojai to see Thorald and Isaac Koren play a show. We weren’t as close then as we are now — this was before everything that came later, before the journey, before all of it. But I told Thorald what was happening. I hadn’t really admitted it to anyone yet. And he looked at me and said: you have to go. It’s okay.

A lot of people in my life wanted me to stay and fight it out. Hearing someone tell me it was okay to leave — that was everything. I needed permission I didn’t know I needed.

I decided to leave. The day I started applying for jobs on the East Coast, doors flung open. My last day in California, I got a call to interview for the job I still have now — counseling at a community college, exactly what I’d gone to USC to do, forty miles from my mom’s house with a commute from hell. It was exactly right and completely impossible at the same time.

My brother Luke drove me to the airport. We were both crying.

The next year and a half were really hard. The commute was brutal — some days three hours each way. I felt like I’d gone backward, like California had never happened, like I was exactly the person I’d been before I left: commuting in traffic, making not quite enough money, living at my mom’s house. I totaled my car almost immediately after moving back. I had to buy one I didn’t love. Everything felt like loss.

One day I was driving home — one of those drives where the traffic doesn’t move and the sky goes dark and you’ve been in the car for hours and your whole body hurts from holding itself together. I had done everything right. I had gotten into one of the best schools in the country. I had earned a degree I was proud of. I had worked so hard to build something and come back with something real. And here I was, in the same traffic, in the same city, feeling like none of it had counted. And a thought floated through, quiet and terrible: huh, being dead would be easier.

It wasn’t a plan. I want to be clear about that. It was a thought — the kind that creeps in when you’re so exhausted that your brain stops filtering. A gray area thought. I’ve been depressed other times in my life, but that was the only time that particular thought was that loud, that audible. I heard it and I knew something had to change.

And then, slowly, things turned. I got promoted to full-time. I got real health insurance. I got a pension. I made enough money to get my own place. I moved into my apartment the weekend COVID started — went to campus one day, and have been remote ever since. That apartment, that independence, that room of my own: I didn’t fight my way to it. I just kept moving, kept trusting, kept becoming.

When I said yes to the Songwriter’s Journey a few months later, California was one of the two clear themes the Brothers heard in my story. They brought me a song about it. And when I listened, I understood something I hadn’t been able to articulate before: I hadn’t lost. I had become.

The song isn’t about defeat. It’s about surrender being different from giving up. It’s about learning to move with something instead of against it — the way a wave doesn’t fight the ocean, it just is the ocean, doing what oceans do.

I go back to California now. Often. Isaac and Thorald are there. My brother Luke is there — still, all these years later, in the city we both chose. My friends are there. I have a whole life there that I visit, that loves me back, that held pieces of me while I was gone and hands them to me a little at a time.

Despite leaving so tumultuously, I found my way back. Not to stay — but to belong to it differently. To be a wave that knows where it came from.