It took me a couple of years to track down the lie I’d been telling myself that was holding me back (there are lots of them and like you, I’m a perpetual work in progress). The first year I lived in Finland was tough. Honestly, what helped me through the uncertainty loneliness was something I told myself over and over again…

Time travel is an unreliable form of transportation. When we look at our pasts, we don’t experience them exactly as we do while remembering them now, from the comfort of the present. But today I wanted to time travel back to 2010 anyway, in light of my birthday having just passed, in order to see what I could piece together from that time.