Here’s what I haven’t shared 🙊

Hi,

If you’re reading this newsletter, thank you for being a subscriber. I hope to make this space a bit more of an authentic way for me to share what’s going on outside of social media.

I’ve been struggling with how I want to show up in the world for quite some time (let’s say, truthfully, the entirety of my 20s), and that includes the content I put out for Alta Adventures.

The world is inundated with travel bloggers. You have to capture the perfect photos, learn SEO and constantly changing Google, stick to a niche and figure out and appeal to the aesthetic that everybody likes.

You look at all of the other travel creators that have been doing this forever and are “actually” traveling and backpacking around the world instead of stuck behind a computer screen for 8 hours a day. It’s exhausting. 

When I started Alta Adventures, my “why” was: I wanted to help people realize that following your dreams of travel and living abroad is easier than it looks.

But over time, my unfulfilling corporate job, my seemingly never-ending visa headaches, my slowly deteriorating relationship, and my unhappiness about where I was calling home were proving to me that it’s, in fact, not as easy as I was making it all out to be.

It was actually becoming really f*cking hard.

I felt like a complete fraud.

People said to me all the time when I was living in the South of France married to my Italian husband:

I felt like I had to keep up those appearances.

Spoiler:

I didn’t tell the world or even some of my closest friends and family how deeply unhappy I felt inside because I felt like an ungrateful brat. I was living in one of the most beautiful, popular travel destinations in the world and my life looked the way my younger self would have given anything for. I thought if I just held on for a little longer and fought a little harder maybe it would feel that way too. 

But when things aren’t aligned, they aren’t aligned.

I have never been a Francophile, I have known since I was at university that I can’t fit into a corporate mold, and I had one of the loudest intuitive hits of my life one month before my wedding date that I shouldn’t marry this person and I moved forward with it anyway.

I couldn’t show up for myself, and therefore I couldn’t show up for a personal brand I wanted to create and I put it on the back burner. My mental health was crumbling and I was barely keeping it together. 

Something in me finally broke and I knew I had to make a change. 

So I planned to fulfill a 6-year-long dream of mine for my 30th birthday in May of this year. I was determined to walk the entirety of the French Way of the Camino de Santiago—an 880 km (550 mile) hike across northern Spain—solo. As I suspected, but in ways I could never have imagined, it changed the entire course of my life.

I pushed my body and mind to their limits, I met the most incredible people who taught me lessons I didn’t know I needed to learn about myself, I was in a profound state of flow and found awe in the simplest things.

More on that adventure next month. 

Thanks again for being here.

I hope you can make someone smile today.

Holly x