The water that morning was the color of a promise. Turquoise. Endless. The kind of water that makes you understand why people spend their whole lives chasing it.
I was anchored off St. John, the sailboat rocking gently beneath me, and I should have been happy. This was the dream. The actual, literal dream I’d been talking about since I was eighteen years old—sailing away to tropical islands, the horizon stretching in every direction, no one expecting me anywhere. I’d made it. After years of day jobs and routine and the weight of Pennsylvania winters, I was here.
So why did I feel like I was hiding?
The Version of Myself I Was Running From
I didn’t plan to escape. It doesn’t work like that, I think. You don’t wake up one day and decide to be a person who needs to leave. It builds slowly, in small moments—the morning you realize you haven’t written anything substantial in months, the dinner where you nodded along to conversations about mortgages and stability, the mirror where you didn’t quite recognize the woman looking back.
I was a freelance writer. I was supposed to be living the dream. But what I was actually doing was living a very small, very controlled version of my life. I had routines. Rules. A schedule so tight it left no room for the mess of being human.
The sailboat was supposed to fix that.
I’d told myself the story a thousand times: Get to the Caribbean, and you’ll find yourself again. Get away from Pennsylvania, away from the people who know you as someone practical and safe, and you can become Sara the adventurer. Sara the sailor. Sara the woman brave enough to leave.
But a story is just a story until you’re living it. And once you’re living it, you realize the version of yourself you’re running toward is just as constructed as the version you’re running from.
The Realization Hits Like a Squall
It happened on the third week. I’d woken up before dawn—I always do on the boat, something about the water pulls me into consciousness early. I was alone in the cabin, coffee in hand, and I was scrolling through my phone. No signal, but I had some cached photos from home. My parents. A friend’s engagement announcement. A photo of my hometown, Butler, blanketed in fresh snow.
And I felt something I didn’t expect: guilt.
Not homesickness. Guilt.
Because I realized I’d told everyone—my family, my friends, myself—that I needed this. That I was suffocating in my old life. That I needed space and freedom and the open ocean to remember who I really was.
But what I was really doing was running from the parts of myself that I’d decided weren’t good enough. The parts that wanted stability. That loved her small hometown. That cared deeply about people and felt responsible to them. The parts that got tired and scared and sometimes just wanted to stay home and read a fantasy novel with a cup of tea.
I didn’t need to leave because my life was wrong. I needed to leave because I couldn’t accept that I was allowed to want different things in different seasons.
The Hard Truth About Running
When you’re moving, you don’t have to feel anything.
That’s the real magic of travel. Not the sunsets or the new countries or the freedom everyone romanticizes. It’s the permission it gives you to not sit still with your own life.
On land, in Butler, I had to confront the fact that I was a woman with complicated feelings about stability. I wanted adventure and roots. I wanted to write and to have time for friendships. I wanted to be someone people could count on and someone wild enough to chase the horizon.
These things weren’t supposed to coexist. At least, that’s what I’d internalized. The adventurer leaves. The homebody stays. You pick one version of yourself and you commit.
But floating in the Caribbean, watching the sunrise paint the water gold, I understood something that made me deeply uncomfortable: I could sail to a hundred islands and I would still be me.
The woman who wanted things that seemed contradictory.
The woman who got restless but also got lonely. The woman who dreamed of leaving but loved coming home.
The water couldn’t fix that. Distance couldn’t fix that. Only acceptance could.
And acceptance meant stopping the running.
The Shift
This is the part where I tell you that I went back to Pennsylvania and never left again. That the Caribbean taught me to love my small hometown and I became a different person.
That’s not what happened.
What happened is slower. Quieter. I came back to Butler, and I stopped pretending that the life I’d built here was something I needed to escape from. I started asking: What if I could be a woman who loves adventure and loves home? What if I could sail for weeks and then be grateful to return?
The sailing didn’t change. What changed is that I stopped using it as a weapon against myself.
I still go to the Caribbean. I still love the open water. But now when I’m on the boat, I’m not running from something. I’m moving toward something. There’s a difference you can feel in your bones—the difference between flight and flight.
Now when I come home, I’m not ashamed of how much I missed it. I’m not resentful of the people who stayed. I’m not comparing my life to some imaginary version where I’m brave enough to never need a home port.
I’m just a woman who sails. And comes back. And goes again.
The Water Still Calls
Every time I plan a trip now, I ask myself: Am I going toward joy, or away from pain?
It’s not always easy to tell the difference. Sometimes it’s both. But the question itself has changed something. It’s made the running into wandering. It’s made the escape into exploration.
I’m sitting on my back porch in Butler right now, actually. It’s early spring. The snow is finally gone and the trees are just starting to remember they have leaves. I can see my reflection in the window behind me, and for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t look like someone who’s running.
She looks like someone who’s exactly where she wants to be. Which is here. And also, someday soon, out there on the water again.
But this time, she’ll know why she’s going.
Join the Conversation
If you’ve ever had to confront the difference between running from something and running toward it, I’d love to hear your story. Leave a comment below or subscribe to Sara Outdoors to follow my journey as I learn what it means to move with intention—whether that’s to the Caribbean or back home to Pennsylvania.
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