the girl who came for the ocean

but is leaving with so much more

9 years ago, my then-fiancé and I booked a flight to Charleston. I was 23 and clueless: mostly wearing my rose-colored glasses of new love and the idea of a fresh start. I’ve been looking back to this girl a lot lately, remembering the simple dreams she came here carrying. I wonder what she would think of me now—

It’s just after 6 a.m., and sunlight is beginning to spill through the crack in the door as I quietly slip outside onto the hotel deck. The concrete is cool beneath my feet as I reach for the railing, squinting while my eyes adjust. I smell the ocean before I see it. That familiar, salty air wraps around me like a memory. The sound of the waves reaches me next—soft and meditative, like the memory I can’t quite place. My breath slows without effort. I stand there for fiftteen minutes, barely moving, my face towards the sun, mesmerized by the waves rolling toward the shore with a kind of quiet persistence. For a February day, the air is thick with warmth and a soft yellow glow. 

I’ve been chasing this feeling since I was a child—the way the ocean makes me feel. Weightless. Small, but safe. Calmer somehow. Like summer, stretched out forever. My favorite season of weightlessness exists all year round here. The lack of the brutality of winter doesn’t force a hardness out of you. There is only softness. 

I wonder what that would feel like. 

Each summer, my family and I would pack our minivan and make the 13 hour drive to the carolina shore. I felt the breath out from my parents each time we arrived, the thick humidity wrapping up their life stressors and wringing them out, allowing us to be present. We would spend 8 full hours on that beach every day… building sandcastles, swimming in the inlet, playing tag in the ocean with my dad swimming underwater to catch us off guard. 

And now at 23 years old, I long for it once more. 

My fiance opens the door around 7, asking me what I’ve been doing out here all this time. “Can you believe we really get to move here?” I ask, staring out to the ocean that will now be a stone’s throw away. A move like this feels like something out of a fairytale. How is it possible people live by the ocean? The idea was so foreign to me… a girl so desperate to leave her small hometown ghosts behind.

And to leave it for the beaches that have held me for so many years of my life? 

There could never be a better plan.

So we went back to our 1950’s apartment in Goshen, New York.. and began to pack our boxes and load them into the uhaul. 

*this is the first Instagram post of living in Charleston in 2016 (I used instagram for friends and silly photos back then. I had no idea what a significant part of my life it would become…)

Six months later, we’re back on the crosstown, our beloved cat curled up on my lap. We take the wrong exit, winding our way through West Ashley instead of heading straight to Folly. But I don’t mind. My stomach flutters as we turn onto Folly Road, the palms swaying above us like a welcome. We’re almost home….to our new apartment just a stone’s throw from the ocean. The possibility is endless. I’ve never been happier to be so far from home.

We’re driving an 18-foot U-Haul packed to the brim with hand-me-down furniture salvaged from his parents’ divorce. Hitched to the back is my purple 2011 Mazda3—the first car I ever owned. It carried me through college, my first classroom, and now this new beginning.

We’ve finally made it. He grabs my leg in excitement as we pull into the driveway of our brand new apartment building… It just opened last month, and we were among the first to sign the lease.

I remember my 23-year-old self twisting the engagement ring on my finger, a nervous habit I never quite outgrew. Even now, a decade later, my thumb still reaches for it sometimes—out of instinct, out of memory—only to find the space empty. It hasn’t been there in years. I smirk at the habit when it comes back out of nowhere….

Reminding me of that lost 23 year old girl and all I’ve done to make sure she had the dream life she deserves. I’ll give up that ring time and time again if it means I get this in every lifetime.

But at that moment, I was still her. Still hopeful. Still gripping tightly to the story we thought we were writing.

We don’t know a single person here in Charleston. Just one another. My world was so insanely small, and I believed it to be good that way. I was on a simple track: accept the teaching job that had been offered to me last month, work as an art teacher full-time, save some money in order to get married sometime soon, and begin building a life as a mom.

What an insane moment to look back on.

(Luna as a baby, and the beginning of painting…)

She has no idea that in just two months, her soul dog would appear out of nowhere and change her life forever.

That this city will both undo her and become her safest place. That she will outgrow the life she thought she wanted.. To fall flat on her face at 28 with nowhere to run. 

She doesn’t know yet that Charleston will raise her—through heartbreak and reinvention, through leaving a career and beginning a new one, through the first years of her womanhood. 

She’ll know heartbreak and depression intimately. She’ll learn debt and financial ruin. She’ll pull herself out of it, day by day. To breaking toxic patterns in relationships and ending ones she thought she could never live without. 

She cannot yet see the friendships that would change her world forever. I picture Bri’s face backlit in Colorado building a campfire, in Italy as we summit a peak, on a Folly evening as she cuts me fruit and hands me wine. Keira and Barkley walk into the sunset with Luna, they meet me with homecooked food, they listen when I need it the most, they feel like home. Maddy and Zac and Jordan and AJ and Liv always show up for Thanksgivings and Birthdays and important milestones everyone else forgets. I cannot yet picture a life without Kelly Jean’s yoga classes, her voice bringing me back into my body for the first time. The collectors turned friends who fill the studio, eager to learn and play and laugh as a community should. 

How do you even begin to tell her… How good it is going to get? 

(Keira and I on the beach in 2017, the first friend, the first feeling of home— still is)

Her dreams of seeing the world one day will not only come true, but she’ll make it happen for other women just like her. She cannot know the joy that comes with each retreat she hosts and each mountain top she summits, surrounded by community. 

The long beach days. The planning of retreats and businesses and heartbreak and intense joy of the start-over. The studio lease that once felt like an unachievable daydream.

That one day she’ll stand in rooms filled with collectors and art and immersive exhibitions she funded and curated. To experience a love she dreamed impossible, out of reach, not for her in this lifetime. To be held and respected for who she is, rather than caged because of it.

She'll live just a drive away from where she stood on that deck on that feb morning, – writing a book, painting in her dream studio, helping other women remember and reclaim their own stories. 

And she certainly doesn’t know that the life she’s building will be more beautiful than anything she could plan. She came here to be a teacher, a wife, a mom. 

But life had so many other plans. Ones she cannot fathom living without. 

The tenderness and slowness of Carolina will give 23-year old Sam the space to reconnect to those parts of herself. Because the people here will always give her the space to soften, to be held. 

And as she stands on the beach on an early morning in 2017, walking her new puppy to take a break from the unpacking of boxes and settling in… 

She has no idea what’s coming. And that’s what makes it so sacred.

There are some containers and people and places who treat you so well there’s no way to fully describe the gratitude you have for them.

Since I was 3 years old, these Carolina shores have held me in each new step of my life– whether I was visiting, wishing to return, or stepping into my womanhood.

Carolina has given me everything I’ve ever asked for. Every single thing.

How do you walk away from a place that has made your life’s dreams come true? 

How do you justify leaving her behind?

With only two months left here in Charleston, after 9 years and a life I cannot replace–

I wonder how I’ll ever repay her for making me the woman that I am x

I’m leaving Charleston. I’m not sure what to do with all of the love I have for her just yet.

More soon x