Hello! Thank you for reading. I’m not quite sure what, exactly, this Substack is fully yet about—but I imagine it’ll be threads that you’ll find in this first (albeit, probably the longest) piece—travel, culture, politics, memoir, class commentary, identity crises. It will also probably be about less serious stuff, too, like 90 Day Fiancè, recipes, absurd Reddit threads, and more. Please subscribe so I stick with this. I will not charge you, at least not at first, because I do not know how.
For the first time in over two and a half years, I don’t have my next flight booked.
This morning, I put my suitcase—a black monogrammed Tumi Voyageur Léger Continental Expandable Carry-On with gold details—in the back of my closet in New York. I bought my first Tumi on sale from the outlets in Vacaville, CA in 2018 when I began frequently traveling for work with my new billionaire boss and quickly gathered that my canvas zebra print luggage from TJ Maxx just wasn’t going to cut it.
That suitcase and I went everywhere together the last seven years. First on many cross country work trips to New York and D.C. from San Francisco, where I then lived. Then to Katowice, Poland during my first trip to Europe for COP24, then to Paris on a stopover back home, where a friend living in Berlin met me to explore Christmas markets and walk the Seine and drink champagne under the Eiffel before a five course tasting menu—my first—at Le Châteaubriand where I confirmed that I, despite my desire to be seen as someone with an advanced palate, do not enjoy sweetbreads, even in the most glamorous of circumstances.
It came with me to my first adult vacation, to Maui—on United miles and Marriott points —and on my first trip to Italy with colleagues when we had some downtime after that same boss decided he was in fact not going to run for President (but before deciding that he actually was going to again). It came with me on weekend trips to Vegas and Cabo. To London and Oxford and Dublin, on my last work trip for that job.
Leaving that role was hard. Not just because I loved living in California—which I did—or because of the friends and community I had—which I also did. It was hard because, for the first time, I felt like I was getting to be the type of person I thought I had always wanted to be.
Before San Francisco, I was rooted in Pittsburgh—a three bedroom house with red shutters and Magnolia trees in the front yard, an incredible professional and personal network cultivated by years of local political organizing and late nights with the same friends I’d grown up with, a community that I knew and knew me. My family was near, only an hour away in the small rust belt town I was from.
Everyone else’s lives started to fall more permanently into place —weddings with tiered cookie tables made up of pizzelles and lady locks, babies tucked into onesies that resembled Terrible Towels, baptisms with the same priests who had dunked us, screaming, into holy water, too – but I didn’t yet feel ready to really put down those kind of roots.
The San Francisco job came —bigger and better paying that I thought possible. I left my little house in Pittsburgh, and moved across the country to San Francisco—which I’d only visited once, for the interview. The night before I left, my friends came over with dinner. I was quiet, shaky. At some point, I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I found both of them– one in bed next to me, and one on the couch, still there, curled up in whatever comfortable clothes of mine they could find. They didn’t leave until I pulled out of the driveway, car full.
With that move, came things that helped me form my new identity: a national role in politics, access to elected officials, CNN reporters, a blue check mark on Twitter. Weekends in Napa and Tahoe. Peers who had Ivy League degrees and trust funds and parents with Wikipedia pages. And, the first time, maybe smugly–I didn’t just feel like I had a seat at the table—I felt like I had a place in the larger, real, world. That I had made it out.
When the opportunity came for an even higher profile national job, I doubled down and took it. My suitcase, of course, moved to El Paso with me, riding in the back of my 2014 Ford Escape, stopping first in Joshua Tree where I cried over my last California sunset, and then to a five star resort in Scottsdale (Amex points — great deals in Scottsdale in the dead of summer FYI– who else in their right mind would go?) where I spent the fourth of July alone.
New Castle, where I grew up, has been dubbed the firework capital of America because of the two major fireworks factories— Zambelli and Pyrotecnico that are headquartered there. That time of the year is really New Castle’s best– festivals and church bazaars with fried dough and homemade cavatelli in red sauce made by little old church ladies sold by the quart, high stakes poker games under tarps in parking lots, and the annual “Baby Doll Dance,” when a man in a giant, red, white, and green dress—the colors of Italy—with a papier-mâché baby doll head marches into the middle of a large, blacktop parking lot, with people gathered around. When the tarantella starts, the doll begins to dance, and its arms– sticking straight out and strapped with fireworks, begin to explode. In America! To this day. In 2025.
That year, 2019, I wasn’t in a plastic lawn chair, splitting cavatelli out of a container with two forks, watching sparks fly past a painted doll face with the people I loved. I was in between homes, watching fireworks in a robe from a hotel balcony while eating room service, both excited and scared for what was yet to come, hoping the tiny collection of Napa wine in my trunk didn’t explode from the heat… and that I wouldn’t, either.
I made it to El Paso. The suitcase was with me in Las Vegas during my first work trip with my new boss, nestled in the back of the staff van while we were at a labor union event when we got the news that there had been a mass shooting – at a Walmart in El Paso, his hometown and my new residence– that left 23 dead. It was in the overhead compartment on the first flight out when a young man approached us and told us that he was headed back because his mother, grandmother, and aunt had all been shot – and he had no idea who was still alive. It rode again in the van that picked us up from the airport and took us to the hospital to meet the young man, waiting for news in the waiting room, watching the door swing open with priests delivering last rights, surgeons running, sons and daughters and mothers and friends sobbing, gulping for air on their knees.
After the primary, it came with me to my mother’s house in Western Pennsylvania, where I spent the bulk of 2020 during the pandemic, where I worked on my fourth presidential campaign—this time, the general, working on strategy for Pennsylvania from a desk made out of a cardboard box in her spare bedroom, while she still went in full time to the Post Office. I told myself it was the right thing to do because she needed help with the dogs and the house. That may have been true, but the more pressing truth was that I, at 32, had nowhere else to go.
The suitcase sat in the corner of that room in a town full of working class swing voters that I had grown up with who we were so desperate to reach. I saw them, masked, at the grocery store. I waved to them on their porches while walking the dogs, Trump signs blowing gently in their yards. I answered their questions, with space between us, about why I was back in town. Stuck between two worlds and socially distanced from everyone and anyone at all, I still pored over the data as if I didn’t know exactly what they were eating for dinner or where their children went to school.
I was different, too. It wasn’t just the zebra suitcase that I had shed—it was the thicker black eyeliner, gold jewelry, demeanor that often got me labeled by a manager (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) as too emotional. I had a new diet, my groceries untouched by anyone but me, tucked away in a drawer in our now shared fridge, next to leftover meatballs and pierogies, and a new wardrobe, useless, now packed away due to remote work.
The suitcase’s contents—along with a few bags in my SUV—were most of what I owned. I was still paying rent in El Paso, thinking I’d go back during the pandemic. I never did. I left the keys to the apartment with my former boss to use as an office, and a coworker graciously cleared out the rest. But then, finally, the suitcase and I moved to Washington, D.C., after a win in Pennsylvania that tipped the electoral college, to a loft where, for the first time in years, I slowly filled a home with furniture of my own, and went to work at the White House, which, for a moment, made all the upheaval feel worth it.
I stayed in D.C. for four years—the longest I’d lived anywhere other than Pittsburgh. I don’t think I realized, at the time, just how much of my new identity had become tethered to movement—forward, upward, elsewhere. And even when I moved into a new job I loved – without a campaign or the White House or the next goal, the weight of the last years sank in: leaving Pittsburgh, San Francisco, El Paso, New Castle. Three failed campaigns and one winning one. A pandemic full of week-long stretches and holidays spent totally alone. An upward trajectory that had delivered me—but then slipped out quietly.
And I was left with a beautiful loft, bills that were paid, a dialed back tone of voice, and a quiet grief for the version of myself who brought me to the gate, and then didn’t get to come.
When I first arrived in El Paso, I used to drive down I-10 and look through the fence at the colorful houses. There’s no way Mexico can be that close, I thought. It was! It is! How different any of our lives– our identities– could be if our mothers simply started labor on the other side of a border – a made up line that exists only because humans insist it does.
My blue passport, my white skin, and my green dollars allow me to pass freely through borders with ease. Not just physically, but mentally, too. Through no doing of my own. Pure luck, privilege, chance.
Borders are man made constraints. They tell people who they can be. How they can move.
Identity is man made, too.
We all deserve the freedom to move through both—borders and identities—on our own terms.
At 21, on my first trip to Vegas, my best friend Tara, always down for the ride, and I, forever looking for guidance, usually from women, drunkenly stumbled behind a beaded curtain at the Palms, where we found a small woman named Rowena with a sign that said ‘Fortune Teller.’
Tara asked, “Who will I marry?”*
And when she looked at me, what did I ask?
Fuck love, I thought! “Will I ever travel?”
She said yes.
In late 2022, a chapter I didn’t plan for, but welcomed: extensive travel. Most was slower this time around, and less obvious in its purpose. A girl’s trip to Sedona. A month back in California for multiple weddings. A long bachelorette in Mexico City. A road trip through Sicily. An international client that took me to Asia repeatedly. Buenos Aires. Guatemala for no real reason, really, except that I had a friend who wanted to go. Me and my suitcase were back together—but now, it carried far nicer outfits and travel-size toiletries tucked neatly into packing cubes. A universal travel adaptor. And probiotics. Lots of them.
Travel, in this way, had always been the real dream. Not while chasing a well-intentioned yet overbooked man running for office with a Le Pilage on my shoulder overflowing with talking points and extra ties and Larabar wrappers– only seeing the insides of remote TV studios and union halls and vans– but real travel– to spend time in different cultures, learning and lounging, exploring. When I was five, I got a cat and named him Mexy Lex—after Mexico, of course, which I only knew from the occasional episode of Barney. In my kindergarten journal, I wrote that when I grew up, I wanted to go to China. I knew nothing about China, other than that I loved the placemats at the local buffet and memorized every Chinese zodiac sign on it. To me, it was another world, and I wanted to be in it. I wanted to be in them all.
And with each trip, with no core anchor to work or former self, I began to curate an identity based solely off of my own whims of the day, anchored yet again in movement. With no real next obvious goal to achieve, no real next self to curate, focusing on travel allowed me to suspend my two selves – the old and the new– or not be either at all. But curiously, they both found a way of popping up.
At first, especially after being cooped up in the pandemic, I wanted to go to every trendy, TikTok famous, Michelin-starred restaurant. I was on the constant search for the best restaurant possible– the best experience possible. I wanted to add it to my list, to be someone who had been to the right places—not only the current trends but the institutions, the bookmarks. When someone I knew from work asked, “Have you been to Pujol? Chez Panisse? Mother Wolf?” I wanted to be able to say yes.
And while I still do love going, especially when traveling with friends for a fun night out, I’ve found that even more, I love local, simple food. Bright red, fresh tuna poke from the deli counter at Foodland in Maui. A cannoli from a tiny shop in Scopello eaten in a bathtub. Matcha whisked in front of you from a market stand in Tokyo. Wine tastings in Provence at a back road, family owned Chateau that will stay open late for you. Dinner on the beach in Jimbaran, a spread of grilled fish and vegetables and rice, eaten with your hands and accompanied by water straight out of the coconut.
In the Mediterranean—I’ve loved going to beautiful hotels and beach clubs. Hotel Corazón, Dimora Delle Balze, Cap d'Antibes Beach Hotel– all stunning and worth planning a fake wedding around in your head. As someone whose vacations as a child were limited to a road trip to Lake Erie or Ocean City, Maryland, they are the types of vacations that were once as likely to me as living out a Hans Christen Anderson tale– my very own episodes of White Lotus, minus the murders (fingers crossed).
But in Sicily, the South of France, most recently Mallorca—I also like to find a low key, mostly locals beach, rent a chair, buy a Magnum ice cream bar from a corner market and then toast in the sun lathered in sunscreen purchased at the French pharmacy on arrival while reading the most charming yet silly romance novel I could find at the airport (think Emily Henry or Jasmine Guillory). I love to be around families, women in their 50s in one pieces, deeply tanned skin covered in tanning oil, playing with their grandchildren under straw umbrellas, listening to them speak in Italian or Spanish to their daughters and friends– not understanding most words but being familiar with the cadence, the tone, the love.
The last two and a half years, one trip led to the next—I said yes whenever I could, packed my suitcase, boarded United flights and zoned out (yes, I am a flight raw-dogger) without much of a plan beyond movement itself. Without campaigns or a defined role, even work travel felt unstructured; I wasn’t anyone’s staffer or angling for the next step—I just existed. When I add it up, I think I spent close to 7 months of that period on the road. And slowly, not belonging anywhere turned into belonging to myself, whoever that was at the time.
Each time I’ve landed in Paris, I’ve headed first to Breizh Café in Le Marais, originally a recommendation from a colleague I worked with in San Francisco, and ordered a buckwheat galette, and sat outside watching people and drinking coffee until my room is ready. Before I leave, I get a stick of Bordier butter (okay two) from the gourmet grocery store next door, and keep it in my hotel fridge and eat it for breakfast on a baguette I get from a nearby boulangerie deemed worthy. This past trip, it was Utopie in the 11th, who also makes an éclair sesame that might be my new favorite dessert in Paris.
In Bali, there’s a yoga studio that I’ve gone to most mornings in Penestanan, a small village only accessible by foot on the outskirts of Ubud simmering with incense, the offerings to the Gods decorating the stone paths, full of colorful fruit stands that are honor system only. It’s on the third story of a building built into the hill with floor to ceiling windows that overlook the top of the jungle below, and when it rains, you can hear the sound of the drops on the leaves, the smell of rain and volcanic ash and flowers seeping in.
Because I pack light— always with the Tumi—I rarely bring anything back. Instead, I collect perfume: hard to find in the U.S. or that smells unmistakably like where I’ve been. My dresser now holds Acqua di Noto’s Marzamemi, Le Labo’s Tokyo-exclusive GAIAC 10, Maison Godet’s Fleurs de Reine from Saint-Paul de Vence, and my favorite—Xerjoff’s Casamorati Italica, impulse-bought in Rome after a morning walk through Villa Borghese.
I never get homesick when I travel. In fact, I rarely think of home at all. The more I did it, the quicker I learned to settle in—finding tiny rituals, trying on life as a local, centering immersion (or at least my imagined version of it, stitched together from Bourdain episodes and TikToks and obsessive Google searches). Scenes that let me try on different selves, low-stakes identities slipped into for moments that were never meant to last. I became like the perfume I collected: curated, but ephemeral, never a signature scent, a series of suspended whiffs that could be recalled but always faded off by the end of the day.
In Ibiza, on the last day of a 2 week trip to Europe, I woke up tired. We had a big day planned – to take a boat to Formentera, beach hopping, day clubs. All things I love. Instead, I asked to stay back, and spent the day at the beach near the hotel, alone, forgoing lunch for a Magnum bar– my usual– and spent most of the day in the water, swimming. First as far out as I could, and then as far down as I could, and then just bobbed, looking at the coast line, blinded by the sun and the shimmer of the water, and then up at a lush, green, hill littered with white villas that overlooked the sea. I wondered who was in them. If they were vacation homes, or year round residences. I pictured families dressed in linen carrying colorful serving dishes full of bright, salted, tomatoes to a long table on the patio with a centerpiece of lemons and a faded, blue, tablecloth, lapping softly in the breeze. How nice it must be for them to have nowhere else to go, no one else to be.
In Bali in 2024, ever on my quest to seek guidance from small, mystical, women– my driver drove me deep into the jungle to visit the home and temple of Bali’s highest ranking woman priestess. Although I was skeptical, she was recommended to me by a trusted friend– a local. We drove up a dirt road and he dropped me off at the bottom of the driveway and told me he was off to find lunch and would be back in 2 hours and I– rarely scared– but a little hesitant, wandered up the hill and was led into the woods by the priestess and her assistant. After a long meditation with her and a water purification ceremony (a quite long one– my Catholic guilt really filled in the blanks there), where I tried with all of my might to keep my eyes squeezed shut so I didn’t lose a contact and tried to think not too hard about when it would be over, we sat down on cushions to talk– me, still soaking wet, disheveled, and her, poised, curious, open. “You still don’t trust people,” she said, curiously. “Or yourself.”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue alone in a jungle with a priestess on her own turf. “I know.”
“You can’t worry about that. There’s no point. The past does not carry into the future. You can trust someone one moment, and then not the next– because they no longer exist. People can change. They do change. All of the time.” I somehow knew what her next words were going to be, and I knew she was right, because there I was, not in New Castle, not in Pittsburgh, or San Francisco, or El Paso, but alone in the jungle with no cell service, no witnesses, sitting on a battered cushion in front of an altar in Bangli, Indonesia after letting a woman I’d never met pour water and chant over me for 10 minutes straight.
There was no CNN, no voter file, no aspirational goal here. There was no zebra TJ Maxx suitcase or anyone that knew that I didn’t have a passport until 2016. No friends, or suitcases, or dinner reservations. No resume or proof that I was somehow better connected to everyone in the room. There wasn’t even a room– just my choices, the things that had happened to me, the grass and weeds and an open blue sky thick with humidity and big black ants, marching in a line towards the altar.
She spoke. “You change, too. You’re not who you were even 30 minutes ago.”
If I’m being honest, the only reason I didn’t move to New York sooner was driving. The thought of not having a car, or dealing with the logistics of one in New York, made me feel claustrophobic and overwhelmed. I am, like most non-cosmopolitan of origin Americans, a driver. I have no aversions to being behind the wheel—in fact, I prefer it. Driving gave me freedom, but also suspension– when you’re in motion, you don’t have to be anywhere at all, and more importantly, you don’t have to be anyone at all. In the car, music up, windows down, destination unimportant – that is always how I have done my best thinking. With no pressure of perspective. Just as someone who exists without the constraints of who we are when parked.
Last fall, in DC, it was time to get a new car. The Ford Escape —along with my suitcase, a trusted companion, after two cross country drives, six homes, and countless roadtrips –had 140,000 miles on it and was beginning to show signs of old age. The undercarriage was dragging. I ziptied it, but then just had the mechanic take it off fully. It was making weird clicking noises when I turned.
I began car shopping, but nothing felt right. I got close to buying one—a used Cadillac CT4. American made, small for the city, an upgrade from the Escape, and I figured a small homage to my Italian-American roots. Still, I hesitated.
When it became clear the Escape wasn’t going to make it much longer, I knew it was time. I’ll go this weekend to buy it, I thought to myself.
Or, I could just move to New York.
When I arrived at the Newark Airport in January, the handle snapped off of my Tumi upon arrival. I thought it poetic. I took the strap off of my other bag and fastened it to the top, and then wheeled it through to the taxi stand, almost as if it were a dog on a leash on its final walk before being put down— my most trusted companion. I carried it in my arms up to my new empty apartment and laid it down gently in the middle of the living room, unzipping it one last time.
It, as always, was packed with what I was too scared to put into storage or wanted with me at all times, even as I was in transition — the handful of things that had survived every move, every transformation. The journal my grandmother, who raised me, left for me when she died when I was 21. My perfume collection. A copy of the New York Times from the day the vote was certified in Pennsylvania in 2020. A framed photograph of my childhood best friend, Quitisha, who has since passed, smiling in jean shorts on our vacation to Ocean City. A small box full of forever stamps that my mother gave me years ago that I still haven’t used. An announcement card from my goddaughter’s baptism. And my long wooden spoon, bought from a market in Napa, that I use to make sauce.
My apartment in New York has a pink couch, a bed, and a few other pieces of furniture. Since moving in at the beginning of the year, I’ve been slowly collecting art for the walls. So far, I have a large, framed picture of Mick Jagger with a chrome frame found at the Grand Bazaar on the Upper West Side, an original canvas done by Pittsburgh artist Baron Batch, thumbtacked to my wall until I remember to drop it off at the framers, and a quadriptych of black and white photos I took of desserts in my hands in Italy in the kitchen.
Somehow, growth no longer feels like grief.
When I bought a new suitcase from the Tumi store in Grand Central Station, the cashier asked if I wanted a bag. “No, thank you,” I told him. I wheeled it out, empty, and took it home.
*I feel obliged to tell you that this Las Vegas psychic, this small woman named Rowena, not only predicted the exact physical appearance of the man who Tara married, she also predicted the first initial of his first name. She also accurately predicted that they would work together. She also predicted some stunningly accurate details about me, including that I’d live in San Francisco and would work in communications. She did, unprompted, end up telling me about my love life, despite my indifference at the time and that I would end up later in life with someone older, well traveled, with an olive or darker complexion, who worked in business and that he would possibly have a son. I have yet to meet this person, so, if this sounds like you, please reach out. Thanks.