Our last full day in America is today, the Fourth of July. Our one-way flight to CPH is tomorrow.

It wasn’t planned that way, it is simply how the flights worked out. But it feels fitting in a way: leaving on the one day of the year built entirely around the idea of this freedom. America doesn’t feel free right now—not to most Americans. And oddly, Denmark, a socialist society, feels more liberated to me. The street we are moving to is actually “Frihedsvej”— literally translated: Freedom Street.

People often assume we are fleeing. That the country is badly broken and we are getting out while we can. I won’t discount the privilege embedded in that assumption, because it is a privilege: moving to a country that is consistently ranked among the happiest in the world, choosing a softer landing when so many people do not get to choose anything at all.

But our motivation was never only about the current reality of living here. Ras is from Copenhagen, his family is there, a community of sisters and 30 first cousins, free healthcare, affordable daycare and free college for our kids. Bicycles instead of cars. A life built around living instead of working hard to scrape by. This was always where we were going to end up, on some timeline, for reasons that have nothing to do with any administration. The politics did not write this chapter, they just happened to be the backdrop while we lived it.

Still, it is a complicated feeling, loving the country I grew up in and everything it meant to me, while mourning what it has become: hate that has risen to the top and settled there like it belongs. This is the country where I built my career from nothing, where I made the friends who feel more like family, where I met my husband (who by the way, is celebrating his first Fourth of July as a citizen tomorrow). This is the country where I gave birth to my daughters. It is not abstract to me, I do not take her for granted: she is the actual shape of my life.

And yet loving her now comes with a kind of gut punch. I do not support this administration. I do not support the hatred aimed at immigrants, the erosion of rights for my daughters and for me because we are women, the bigotry, the racism, the homophobia, the transphobia. I do not support billionaires accumulating more while so many people cannot afford to eat. I do not support checks and balances being treated as a suggestion rather than the structure that was supposed to hold all of this together. I do not support war, money-hungry power or the dismantling of basic human rights. I do not support children being separated from their families, or teachers being told what books they’re allowed to hand a curious kid, or doctors being afraid to give women the care they need.

I do not support the way cruelty gets rebranded as strength, the way fear and blind loyalty gets rebranded as patriotism.

This isn’t what our founding fathers wanted. I don’t think it’s what the majority of Americans today wanted. Saying I love this country does not sit comfortably next to any of the horrors of headlines that bubble up on my phone daily. But I have stopped believing the two are supposed to cancel each other out.

I try to remember, too, that America is young. 250 years, which sounds ancient until you compare it to almost anywhere else. Denmark’s monarchy has been intact for over a thousand years. Most old nations, when they were the age America is now, still had kings who jailed the people who spoke against them, aristocracies that called for someone’s head the moment it protected their money or their power. Cruelty at the top is not a uniquely American invention: it is closer to a phase a country moves through on its way to becoming something else, though I know that offers little comfort to the people living through this phase right now. I am not trying to excuse it: I am trying to remember that broken is not the same as finished.

So how do you love a place and grieve it at the same time? How do you feel relief and sorrow about the same departure, on the same day, in the same breath? I don’t think there is a clean answer. I think you just hold it the way you hold anything too large for one hand: the joy of what this country gave me and the heartbreak of what it is choosing to become, the excitement of Copenhagen and the ache of everything I am not bringing with me.

Today, we will watch fireworks somewhere over American soil for the last time in a while, and I don’t expect the feelings to resolve into anything simple. I expect to tear up, possibly more than once, for reasons that won’t sort themselves into neat categories. Grief for the phase it is in, gratitude for the life it gave me. Relief to be leaving. Shame that leaving feels like relief at all. Responsibility to instill the concept of the American Dream alive for my girls, so they can believe they can be and do anything.

The people I trust most in my life have never been the ones who only tell me what I want to hear. They are the ones who show up without condition and still tell me the truth when I am wrong, who hold me accountable in the moments I would rather not be held accountable, who love me enough to put me in my place instead of just cheering me on. That is what real love looks like to me now, in a friendship or a marriage or a country. Not blind support. Something closer to being challenged toward your best self, again and again, by people who refuse to let you be anything less.

Maybe that is the only kind of patriotism I have left, and the only kind worth keeping: loving America the way I love the people closest to me, which means I do not get to stop telling it the truth just because I am leaving. I will always be from America. I plan to carry the criticism and the love together, the whole distance, for better or for worse.

Happy Fourth.

We bought it in early December 2021 when I was six months pregnant with Josefine, just in time for Christmas, just in time to exhale after years of a pandemic in a Boston apartment, living on top of one another. We both wanted space then, and this house delivered.

Standing in that living room with my hands on my belly, eating a fruit tart with Ras since we couldn’t split a bottle of champagne: I looked around and wondered how we would fill these rooms, what memories we would make, how we would make it ours.

What I didn’t expect was that years later, I would stand in that same living room on the eve of leaving, trying to locate the deep pull of nostalgia I longed to feel.

But no matter how much life we poured into it—two pregnancies, two newborns, years of ordinary Tuesdays—it remained too much house, too much lot, a dream in a size that was never quite ours.

Maybe the nostalgia feeling is waiting for the sale to close, for the moment it stops being a financial weight we’re carrying across an ocean. Maybe it will find me later, when we’re settled into our small Copenhagen house, the four of us suddenly aware of every wall, and I’ll look back at all that space and square footage and finally understand what we had. Maybe distance will do what proximity never could.

But when I close my eyes and try to locate what I’ll actually grieve, I always land in the same place: the screened-in porch.

From day one until day 1,638, that porch was my favorite place in the whole house, and I retreated there every chance I could: for work calls and long friend calls and morning coffees. When both of my girls were growing in my belly and I needed a nap, and when they were earthside and we could nap together.

I watched them both smile at the trees dancing outside, saw the reflection in their sweet eyes, willing my brain to put the image in my long-term memory. They both wobbled on toddler legs here, drinking their milk and mouthing words only I could understand.

Charli had her spot on the end of the indoor couch we made an outdoor couch, often overlooking what we called “Her Kingdom.” She became a big sister out there, sniffing and then licking Josefine’s two-day-old toes to welcome her to our family.

Maya, our November baby, spent most of her naps under the safety of the porch, still benefiting from the cold air for her lungs, as her Nordic dad wanted. I closed my eyes and listened to the rain splashing around us, I watched a mama bear take care of her cubs just beyond our fence.

I admired my husband, the father of my children, holding our babies with the sun shining a spotlight behind them.

I took high chairs and bouncers, toys, books and dolls outside—anything to entertain to spend more time in the fresh air. I wrote countless essays. I sat out here with Ras with a glass of wine or just be quiet together. I listened to music and podcasts, folded laundry, cried through anxiety, mourned chapters of my life, and felt it all on this porch.

That porch is the only place in my mind where I go when I think of our first home together, the only place that hurts a little to leave.

A screened-in porch is its own kind of grace: it lets you be outside without being exposed, holds the breeze and the birdsong and the green smell of a Southern summer while keeping out everything that could sting or bite or drench you. It is shelter that doesn’t make you go inside.

And maybe that’s exactly what this season of our life was, too: we were held close enough to feel protected while the world kept moving just beyond the screen, and somewhere in all of it, without quite realizing it, we grew and changed and became who we are now. The house was never the forever kind for us.

And that porch knew that and held us as we figured it out.

It held us in a deeply tender and transformative season where we became parents, where we became a family. And maybe that’s the nostalgia I’ve been waiting to feel: not for the house, but for this time, for the me I was on the porch, for the version of us who needed exactly this, and found it here, and now we are off to stand in another empty house.

We lucked out with a pergola in the tiny yard of our new home in Copenhagen. It has a roof that keeps the rain out, so I can sit beneath it through the long Danish winters and the precious Northern European summer days that feel like a gift. But unlike our screened-in porch, it’s open on the sides, no mesh between us and the rest of the world, nothing to keep out what wants to come in.

The porch held us close when we needed shelter, wrapped us in something protective while we were still becoming. We don’t need that anymore. The pergola invites us to explore something, somewhere, someone new. We’re ready to be a little more open to the elements, a little more exposed, a little more alive to whatever comes next.

It’s a Friday in early May, and I’m sitting at my computer with a Google Doc open, attempting to bare my soul. It’s something I’ve done since I was sixteen, when my feelings were eruptive and emotive, pouring out uncontrollably. Writing has built my career, healed me, helped me process change and muster up courage. Through every chapter—big and small, meaningful and forgettable—I have turned to it like a compass.

And yet, the past four months have surprised me.

They have been some of the most challenging and clarifying of my life, and I have been afraid to put them on paper. The same vulnerability that launched a once-viral dating blog, built a freelance career, taught me brand strategy at a unicorn fitness startup, chronicled eighteen months of travel across the world and helped me find my way through the darkest tunnels of grief and motherhood, has felt strangely out of reach. Every time I try to locate it, I come back to the same two words:

I’m scared.

Admitting that feels like defeat. Like I need to immediately follow it with a list of reasons, a defense, a justification for why I have spent 2026 rearranging my entire life. Fear makes people uncomfortable. They want to fix it, dissolve it, talk you out of it. And when the fear is attached to a choice you made—a choice you would make again—it becomes even harder to hold in public without someone reading it as doubt.

But what I’ve started to come around to is that being scared doesn’t mean something is wrong or that you made a mistake. In fact, having no fear would be worrisome: almost like going blindfolded into a battleground, hoping you don’t step on a grenade. Fear means a healthy sense of self, a grounded view of reality and the knowledge that something important is at stake.

For me, everything feels like it is at stake. Because, well, it is.

A dear friend, in an effort to help me make sense of what I’ve been feeling, reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a psychological framework that maps human motivation as a pyramid.

At the base are the most fundamental needs: safety, shelter, food, warmth. The things that have to be in place before anything else can function. As you move up the pyramid, the needs become more complex: belonging, love, esteem, and at the very top, self-actualization—the pursuit of your fullest potential, the version of yourself you are always reaching toward.

The idea is that you cannot reliably access the higher levels when the lower ones feel unstable. When your foundation is shaky, your nervous system is too busy managing the shake to let you think clearly about meaning or growth or who you want to become.

What my friend was gently pointing out is that I am, at this particular moment in my life, voluntarily dismantling several of my bottom layers at once.

I am selling my home. I am leaving the community I cultivated in Asheville, the friends and mothers who have held me through some truly identity-reorganizing chapters. I am leaving my country, and while I have done this before, it was always for a period of time, not a permanent relocation. I was a digital nomad, not an expat, and I underestimated how different those two titles would feel.

While Zoom and LinkedIn and digital networking will make certain things easier, in many ways I am also leaving my professional network behind. My interests and my career have evolved significantly over the last year, including leaving a business I founded and believed in, and repositioning myself in a new direction.

While it was the right choice for me, it has also been confidence-shaking: a hurry-up-and-wait sensation in every sense. I can’t “go big or go home”... when home is in flux. I can’t throw myself into building a new client base when my daughters need me present through the transition and daycare isn’t guaranteed right away. My husband agreed to a pay reduction to make this move possible, which means the financial pressure of rebuilding falls on my shoulders, and yet my work, which has always been at the core of who I am, simply cannot be the priority right now. For someone with a lifelong and extreme diagnosis of ambition, that is a particularly tough pill to swallow.

All of this is happening simultaneously. And all by choice. Of course I am scared.

I have temporarily loosened my grip on the very things the pyramid says I need in order to feel safe, and I am doing that while raising two young children who depend on me for every single one of their own needs. The fear is not irrational. It is, in fact, exactly the appropriate response to what I am doing.

And yet, it is still deeply uncomfortable. It still, somehow, feels like failure. Like taking ten steps back, when I know I’m actually moving forward. My therapist encourages me to sit with this discomfort, to lean into the fear and describe it. Where does it come from? How does it feel? What is it, exactly, that I’m afraid of? Unsurprisingly, this is not a practice I enjoy, but one I recognize as essential, especially since becoming a mother. I have to put on my oxygen mask first and all that jazz.

My fears are less about specific events or scenarios and more tied to an undercurrent of unknowing.

And maybe more to the point: not having the ability to do anything to cultivate change. I simply have to live in unknown until it is known. On a drive to the River Arts District to pick up a piece of artwork we commissioned from a local artist—something to bring a little of the Blue Ridge Mountains with us—I described it to my husband like this:

“It’s like I’m standing at the base of Mount Everest and I can’t climb it yet, nor can I really train.”

He said, “Yeah, you just have to stand there and look at it, with a broken ankle, waiting for it to heal so you can get started.”

We have a view into what our life will look like in Copenhagen—and finally, a beautiful home of our own to rent—but most of the pieces of the puzzle are still scattered all over the coffee table. What it looks like on the other side is not only out of eyesight, but out of reach for us to design. The pieces are lost about the house and sure, we’re finding them—but it’s a slow process. (And the dog ate one. The girls put one under a pillow.)

We don’t know when our home in Asheville will sell, despite countless showings and a price reduction. The market is hard, and so is the waiting, and the financial anxiety it carries. We know our children will eventually be accepted into a daycare in Denmark, but there is no exact timeline to point to and plan around. So someone—mainly me—needs to stay flexible to care for them until they are settled.

The 80-year-old me knows I will look back at this time with my four-year-old and eighteen-month-old and cherish every moment of it: our first summer in Denmark, biking to playgrounds, all three of us newly repotted, figuring out where our roots will grow. But thirty-seven-year-old me—who has felt caught in the middle of a career and identity reckoning since becoming a mother—sees it as another setback. Another rock added to the not-so-invisible load of motherhood, weighing me down from pursuing my own next chapter.

Plus, once there is daycare and routine, I am not stepping into a promised new role with a bright, shiny title. I am building a new client base in a country whose language I do not yet speak, whose professional network operates differently. I am up for the challenge—I have done it before, in New York, in Boston, all over the globe—but this time the learning curve is a little steeper. Like I said, the stakes are higher.

And then there is the immigration piece, which I never fully understood until I started the process. As the only one in my nuclear family who needed a visa, I feel the vulnerability of our relocation acutely. My right to stay is tied to my daughters, which offers real stability—I will always be their mother—and yet it also feels like something I did not earn, not in the way my husband earned his citizenship through years of school and work. There is a subtle fear of getting something wrong, of not understanding a system I was not raised in, of navigating a culture that is not entirely my own.

These are all steps along the trek to the top of the mountain, but I cannot start the journey yet. We still have weeks of decluttering and unraveling this home we have curated over five years. Then the shipping container will come and go. We will move out of this house and into a rental that will be comfortable but not yet home, just enough to get us through the remaining weeks in Asheville (with daycare!), while our belongings take six to eight weeks to arrive at a port in the Baltic Sea.

And then we will land in Copenhagen and begin the process of rebuilding.

The trail will be blocked until it isn’t. I can see it clearly: I know where it leads and I know I am capable of walking it. I also know it’s the right trail for me, for my family. That is almost the hardest part. This is not uncertainty about the direction or doubt about whether I belong on the path. It is the particular frustration of someone who can see exactly where she is going and cannot yet take a single step toward it. I am ready and I am not allowed to be ready yet, and somewhere in that gap lives most of my fear.

The fear, at its core, is about control. And releasing it is a lesson I have been learning for as long as I can remember. This time, though, I cannot hustle my way out of it. I cannot work myself to the bone and see the results. I cannot make markets and systems move faster than they are designed to move. Much of my own life is out of my hands right now, and that is a particularly daunting place to be.

But today, writing this, feels like progress. Like putting into words what 2026 has actually felt like, behind the romantic-sounding allure of what “moving internationally” sounds like from the outside. On the inside, it is more complex and nuanced, more tender and brave. My goal is to share more of what is actually happening: not just the fun parts, not just what sounds good on paper.

And maybe, to remind myself to dream a little. On the other side of fear is hope, and it has been a while since I have allowed myself to daydream.

There was a twenty-something Lindsay who chronicled her dating life, wondering when she would meet her person, never losing faith that she would. (And she did, three months after turning thirty.)

There was the wanderlust Lindsay who was fascinated by the planet and its people, took a chance and left New York City to travel with strangers. (And the risk paid off: it built a travel journalism career that took her further than she could have imagined and introduced her to lifelong friends.)

There was the fragile new mother Lindsay who needed a way to articulate the complicated, conflicting feelings of a new identity, so she stepped back from her traditional work to build something for other mothers who felt the same. (And she did, and then she knew when it was time to move on as her life grew in a different direction.)

Now I just need to figure out how to push past the fear enough to dream about what this next chapter will look like.

So here is my first attempt:

A year from now, my Danish husband and I are sitting at our favorite café with Aperol spritzes and olives, people-watching. We are talking about how hard the move was, laughing a little at how scared I was, how overwhelmed he felt, and marveling at how beautifully it worked out.

Across town, our two girls are at daycare, speaking Danish in the unselfconscious way children do, already more at home than we are, already building the friendships they will have for the rest of their lives. Our house back in Asheville that sold for what we hoped it would. Our extended family is a bike ride away, stopping by on a Tuesday afternoon for no reason other than that they can, the cousins giggling into the garden while someone opens a bottle of wine and orders a pizza. We often have a group of friends around our table who appreciate fine wine like we do, some of them we know and love, some of them are new and expats like me who found their footing here and reached back a hand.

Our artwork—what we picked up on that drive talking about Mount Everest seems far away now—is on the walls, maybe with the beginning layer of dust. Our things unpacked and exactly where they belong. The long gray Danish winter behind us, and the Nordic spring light is pouring through the windows.

I have work that matters and clients who feel like true partners. Bylines from a place that gives me more access to the world than I have ever had. We have a village, a big family. We have a life that is fuller and stranger and better than anything I could have imagined with a broken ankle from the base of the mountain.

The fear is still there. But so is everything that’s waiting on the other side of it.

I remember the day we bought this house: a chilly morning in December 2021.

We went to the bank to write the largest check I had ever seen in my life and arrived at the lawyer’s office masked up because of COVID, filled with the kind of nervous, elated energy that makes your hands shake a little when you try to sign your name. Josefine danced in my six-month pregnant belly the entire time, maybe already knowing we were buying the place we would bring her home to. I had designed her nursery in my head a hundred times: soft pinks and white, wildflowers everywhere. I thought of her room the entire time.

Signing my name on a mortgage felt surreal. Up until that point, the greatest investment I had ever made in my own life was $7,000, paid to secure my spot on Remote Year. That leap felt wild and a little reckless, which was entirely the point. But this felt different: less wild, more deliberate, requiring a new kind of courage altogether. Ras and I were choosing something intentional: roots, community, a family, a place to belong to. We drove to the house afterward and walked through the empty rooms, and I thought: “We are going to fill this with something real.”

We did.

Somehow, we are now in the last month of living in this house. And while I know moving to Copenhagen is the best decision for our family, and I am thrilled to become an expat and raise my children in a country that was built with families in mind, I find myself feeling a twinge of nostalgia going about daily life here. These walls—the ones that for whatever reason never felt fully ours in the way I always imagined a home would—carry so much life. So many memories.

Here is where I spent hours obsessing over wallpaper and colors. Here is where I selected art and photos to bring life to a home I owned. Here is where I was held through the rawest, most vulnerable season of my life: motherhood.

It was in the living room where I felt my first real contraction, rhythmic and distinct, more intense than the Braxton Hicks I’d been having for weeks. I labored in the bedroom, in the bath, in the kitchen bent over the counter, in every room of this house for two days before we finally drove to the hospital and Josefine arrived: the little wildflower who made me a mom. Those two days are inside these walls somewhere, I am certain of it.

It was on the screened-in porch where I sat for long April afternoons in the weeks after she was born, staring down at this perfect, terrifying person I had made, trying to figure out who I was now. I sat there crying with a glass of wine at six weeks while Ras got her through a crying fit upstairs.

I sat there a year later with a cup of coffee watching her waddle across the porch on her two unsteady feet saying “mama, mama, mama!”—grinning that enormous toothy grin and my heart tripled in size.

I rebuilt myself in this house. The business fell apart here and came back together here, more than once, at the desk in the front office with the three big beautiful windows and the view of the driveway. I sat at that desk through the uncertainty and the pivots and the slow accumulation of something that finally felt solid, and the light through those windows was there for all of it. The postpartum fog lifted slowly in these rooms, and my sense of self came back to me gradually and then all at once, the way things do when you stop forcing them. We hosted dinners that went too late into the night, long tables of people we love, the kind of nights that make a house feel like it has a heartbeat.

We made this place ours in the truest sense, not through ownership but through all the living we did inside it.

Ras and I fought in this house the way people fight when they are exhausted and in love and trying to build something together that neither of them has built before. We fought in the kitchen and made up in the kitchen, standing at that island that became the center of everything: the late-night work sessions and the meal prep and the long conversations after the baby is asleep over a glass of wine. We made big decisions between these walls: the move to Copenhagen started there, as an idea floated one afternoon and felt instantly right. We cried here too, the particular relief of two people who have just decided something hard and true together.

And then Hurricane Helene came through.

I was 32 weeks pregnant, enormous and exhausted and not at all prepared. I woke to trees swaying outside in a way that trees do not normally sway. Twenty trees came down on our property but not one of them touched the house. We lost power, lost cell service, lost any sense of what was happening to the city but we gathered in the basement playroom and we waited, Ras and me and Josefine and the baby not yet born, all of us held by these walls while the world outside changed in ways we couldn’t yet see. The house held us. It wrapped around us and did not let anything in. I have not forgotten that. I don’t think I ever will.

And then Maya came, a few weeks later, and with her, we held even more. We watched Josefine become a sister here, the fierce and tender way she looked at her the first time, marveling alongside us.

We witnessed them both take their first steps on this same stretch of hardwood floor, each of them finding their legs and their balance and their confidence in the same place. We became a family here, not in the abstract sense but in the daily, accumulating, unglamorous and beautiful sense. Breakfast and bedtime and all the ordinary hours in between. Ras and I becoming parents twice over and becoming, in the process, an older, wiser version of us than the ones who signed those papers in December 2021.

I see it all as I walk these halls, as I do the laundry and clean the kitchen and steal a moment outside to look at the trees and the Carolina blue sky and breathe in the mountain air. And for whatever reason, lately, I think of my dad singing “My Girl” by The Temptations to me. He is gone now, but this song is one of the places where he still lives for me, clear and close. I sing it to my girls now, both of them, my two girls, the ones this house made me brave enough to become a mother to. I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day, I’ve got the month of May.

It feels like more than a coincidence that our last month in this house is May. That the song my father gave me and that I have passed down to my daughters maps exactly onto this particular season of leaving and loving and looking around at what we built and feeling quietly astonished by it. April showers bring May flowers, and my garden grew here, not in the literal sense but in every sense that matters. I grew here, I bloomed. I became someone I recognize and trust inside these walls, and I will carry that with me in a way that has nothing to do with square footage or a mortgage or what we ultimately sell it for.

Last week, on May 1st, we found out our application was accepted for our dream rental in Copenhagen. A hop and a skip—or a bike ride, as it will be—from Ras’s family. A slightly longer ride into the city center. Central, everything walking distance, but still some greenery. Still some space. Our ideal neighborhood, our ideal everything, and somehow, after all of it, we found it.

But here is the thing that made me catch my breath when I first saw the photos: there is wildflower wallpaper right when you walk in.

And not the soft pinks and whites I chose for Josefine’s nursery in this house, the palette of a woman who was just becoming a mother, still tender and uncertain and finding her way in the dark. These are rich, vibrant corals and greens and blues, bold and alive in a way that feels like a declaration.

Turns out, the wildflowers grew with me. What started as something delicate and quiet in those early postpartum days, something that needed gentle colors and soft edges and a lot of grace, has become something more confident, more rooted, more sure of itself. The new wallpaper knows that. Somehow it already knows.

This house was my soft pink and white season: the one where I was cracked open and rebuilt and learned, slowly, what I was actually made of. The next one gets the full color, the bold version, the woman who came out the other side.

For five months, I have been living with a question that had no answer yet.

A question that would direct the course of my life and my family’s life. But it wasn’t a question I could follow-up on or one I could check the progress of. It was just a question that had to be left lingering, until some magical day when a magical message arrived, answering my question, sealing my fate.

The question: Will Denmark grant me a residence permit so I can live and work in the country I’m moving to in two short months?

I checked my email constantly for months, anywhere, everywhere, from the moment I woke up. In parking lots, at stoplights. All of the in-between moments when the phone comes out almost involuntarily. I was waiting for a single email from a government office in a country I do not yet live in, written by people I will never meet, about whether my family and I are allowed to do the thing we have already given everything to.

And after all of that waiting, the answer came on an ordinary Monday morning, in my driveway, after school drop-off.

I buckled both girls into their car seats, drove them to daycare, kissed them goodbye and made it back home in the window of time I try to protect for a workout before my day starts. I was sitting in the car doing what I always do in that transitional moment between one thing and the next: scrolling through email, not really expecting anything, just looking.

And then the subject line appeared: Denmark Decision Letter.

I stared at it for a second the way you stare at something that does not feel real yet. Then I opened it. Then I screamed. Then I ran inside to find Ras.

I will not pretend I received this news with any kind of composure. There was no slow exhale, no hand pressed to heart, no moment of still and private gratitude. There was a scream and then a sprint inside. (Which, for the record, I think that is exactly the correct response to five months of waiting and a lifetime of building toward something.)

The letter said what we had hoped it would say. My residence permit, issued under family reunification, grants me the legal right to live and work in Denmark for as long as it is valid, issued with the possibility of permanent residence. I am allowed to be there.

My children, who were born Danish, who carry that citizenship the way they carry Ras’s height and my blue eyes, are allowed to live in the country that is half of who they are. I knew this was likely, of course. I had been told, by lawyers and by logic, that this application was strong. I am married to a Dane with two half-Dane daughters, so of course I would be approved. And still, I needed the visa to give me a solid grounding, a legal right to live and continue my life in a new place. The exhale from this decision is maybe the calmest I’ve felt in months.

That night, after JoJo and Maya were asleep, Ras and I opened a bottle of Krug. It is our wedding champagne, the one we save for the moments that deserve it, and this was one of them. We sat on the screened porch in the warm late April dark and drank it slowly, going through Charli’s travel paperwork and scrolling through Copenhagen apartment listings on a laptop between us, planning the next thing the way you do when one door finally closes and you realize the next one has been open for a while, waiting for you to walk through it.

The next day, Ras left for a short trip to Copenhagen. He took Charli with him: she will stay with his parents in Denmark for the next two months, waiting for us on the other side, because flying a dog in cargo in summer heat is not something we wanted to risk. Plus, this way, Charli gets his undivided attention, unlike if she was coming along with us, the girls and our seven pieces of luggage. We had a morning of tearful good-byes and hugs for our furry older sister.

This means our family is already, in some small and four-legged way, split across continents. He will come back this weekend, but Charli will not. I stood in the driveway again, the same driveway where I had screamed with joy 24 hours earlier, and watched them drive away, and then I went inside, exhaled, cleaned up the girls’ breakfast and sat down to work.

That is the thing nobody tells you about the moments you have been waiting for. Life does not pause to honor them. Not long anyway. The email arrives and you scream and run inside, and then you still have a workout to get to and a work day and two small people who need dinner and bath time and four books and Elsa and Anna tucked in beside them.

The champagne is real and the relief is real and the joy is real, and then the morning comes and your husband drives away with your dog and you make daycare lunches and the day continues exactly as it would have if none of it had happened.

I have been thinking about this all day: how the biggest moments of your life are also just regular days. The visa application that felt like stepping off a cliff, submitted on a December afternoon near the Chrysler Building while the city hummed around me. The permit that arrived in a driveway between drop-off and a workout. The champagne on the porch that ended with apartment browsing and dog paperwork.

There is no ceremony for the life you are building while you are building it. You just keep going and trust that the accumulation of all these ordinary extraordinary days will eventually add up to something that looks, from a distance, like a life you chose on purpose.

We are going to Denmark. We are all, legally and officially now, allowed to be there. Charli is already there. Ras will sign a lease for the place we’ll call home for the next few years.

And I am here, in the driveway, in the in-between, which is where I have been living for a year now and where I will keep living until this summer, when the container ships, the flight takes off, the house sells and the girls fall asleep for the first time in a country that is half of everything they are.

Until then, the waiting continues. But it is a different kind now: the question that has been living in the background of every ordinary day finally has its answer, and what moved in to take its place feels less like a driveway, and perhaps, more like a runway.

It was sometime after 8 p.m. when we finally sat down, Ras and I, on the screened-in porch with a glass of wine each and a silence between us that didn’t need to be filled. We were dirty in the way that only a long physical day can make you: not just tired but worn through, the kind of exhaustion that settles into your shoulders and behind your eyes. We had been up since 6 a.m.

We had dragged furniture and boxes and the accumulated evidence of our life in this house out onto the driveway in the dark, watched strangers turn our things over in their hands, negotiated the price of objects that once felt necessary and now needed to belong to someone else.

We sold a bread maker Ras loved and wished we could have brought with us. We sold lamps we spent a long time deciding to buy many years ago. I watched a huge box of my daughters’ clothes go to another family who welcomed a girl after having three boys. Away it went, down the driveway, off to another life. Another family.

I would maybe feel emotional letting go of so many beloved items that won’t fit in the 20-foot cargo container we’ve rented, but honestly, I’m just too tired to care that deeply. I spent two to three hours a day for weeks going through our things, making decisions—keep or go—pricing and organizing into boxes. Then there was the marketing across Facebook groups, Craigslist and websites I had never heard of before, like GarageSaleFinder. Printing flyers and putting up signs. Hiring a sitter for Maya, asking my mom to take Josefine out of the house so she wouldn’t see some of her toys going to other little kids. Asking friends to come help us set up and taking their Starbucks orders as a thank you.

We pulled it off, we made some decent cash, and it was worth it. But wow.

When the sale was over and everyone left, we snapped right back into kid duty: funny voices and bath time, cooking dinner and negotiating how many books we would read. But at that point, drinking the wine, the kids were finally asleep.

And Ras said it first: that he was exhausted. Really exhausted. Accomplished but also humbled by how relentless it feels to be someone running hard toward something real and feeling every mile of it. I said I know. I said I am too.

And then we sat with that for a while, the two of us in the dark, and eventually one of us said what we’d both been thinking, which is that this is harder than we thought it would be.

Not wrong, not a mistake. Just harder. We know where we are going, we know why, and the terrain between here and there is rougher than the map suggested.

Both things are true. Both things have always been true about the choices that matter.

I’ve been meaning to write this edition for weeks, which means I’ve been sitting with it for weeks, waiting for the distance to write about it cleanly, waiting for the hard parts to resolve themselves enough to shape into something. None of that happened. So I’m writing it from inside the hard instead, which feels more honest anyway, more in the spirit of what The Dane Lane was always supposed to be.

This season has asked more of me than I anticipated, and I kept circling that sentence without wanting to commit to it, because committing to it felt like complaining about a life I chose and would choose again—and about the great privilege I have to move my children abroad. But there’s a version of this newsletter that papers over the hard parts in favor of the interesting parts, and I didn’t start writing this to do that.

So here is what it has actually looked like lately:

The house has to be show-ready at all times because, ya know, we want to sell our house, and you don’t want to say no to potential buyers in a challenging market. If you have ever tried to keep a house show-ready with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, I don’t need to explain what that costs. If you haven’t, here is what it looks like: Maya’s breakfast is on the floor by 7 a.m., Josefine has pulled out all of her dress-up clothes and shoes and dolls, and a showing request arrives with two hours notice. One of us shuttles them to school, the other frantically cleans every surface (thank you, empty boxes in the garage we can just throw stuff in and deal with later).

Ras takes a call from the car and I walk the dog. The showing ends, we come back, we hear nothing, and we reset and do it again. And again and again, all while continuing to care for two children and work. There is no controlling the timeline, there is only the reset, and the one after that, and the understanding that the most important variable is entirely outside my hands, which is not a comfortable place to live for someone who is good at making things move.

The not knowing is its own specific weight, different from grief or anxiety, something closer to suspension.

I am living a life that is neither fully here nor fully there, packing boxes I still need to unpack, planning for Copenhagen, unable to grieve leaving Asheville with any real ceremony because I am too deep in the logistics of leaving Asheville to feel it yet. I keep waiting for the moment when it starts to feel real, and instead it just keeps feeling like a to-do list, which is perhaps the least romantic way a life can feel when you’re in the middle of changing it completely.

The visa is still not through. And as I’m told, this is normal. It’ll happen. I check my inbox every morning with a very small sliver of hope there will be a message waiting for me, and my heart sinks when, inevitably, there is not. There is nothing to report except that it is somewhere in a system and we are waiting, and I have made a kind of uneasy peace with that sentence even as it lives in my chest like something unresolved. The waiting would be easier if it had a shape to it, a window or a timeline or even a maybe, but it doesn’t, and so I carry it the way you carry something you can’t put down.

Then there are the things nobody thinks to warn you about. Not the headline logistics everyone asks about—the movers, the schools, the apartment search—but the landmines you find only by stepping on them, usually around 10 p.m. when the house is finally still and your brain surfaces every thread you haven’t yet pulled.

My phone number, which I have had for twenty years, which is woven into the infrastructure of my entire adult life: every account, every two-factor authentication, every contact in every phone of every person who has ever known me, and what exactly I am supposed to do with it.

The bank accounts that need to be consolidated. The international accountant I need to find, because the United States taxes its citizens regardless of where on earth they live.

What my business looks like on the other side of the Atlantic, whether I’ve thought through all of it, whether thinking through all of it is even possible from here.

The health insurance that expires the moment we land, which means booking all of my check-ups and maxing out our coverage, and then thinking about the Danish system I’ve been told is wonderful but don’t yet know how to enter.

The subscriptions and memberships and automatic renewals attached to an address that will no longer exist, the invisible financial infrastructure of an American life that I didn’t know was so extensive until I started trying to dismantle it.

The cars, which we are selling, and when exactly we stop needing them here, and how in the world to make a drive to Atlanta with two car seats we’ll no longer need but we need for the ride, without paying $20 per car seat per day in a rental.

The credit history I’ve spent twenty years building in a country I’m leaving, and what it means to start from zero financially in a place that doesn’t know me yet.

JoJo’s medical records and Maya’s vaccination history and how to transfer a pediatric relationship across an ocean and whether the new doctor will know them the way ours does, the way someone who has watched them since birth knows them.

Feeling elated that daycare costs will be a fraction of what we pay now, but knowing we are only guaranteed a spot within three months of applying, and you can’t apply until you’re there in person with said children, and trying to figure out a sitter or a private option and how that all works.

And those are just the current items circulating my brain as I write this.

What is hardest to articulate is that there is no downtime. Not in the way people mean when they say they’ve been busy and a little stretched: I mean there is genuinely no third category of time. The hours I am not working or managing logistics are the hours I am mothering, and the hours I am not mothering are the hours I am working or managing logistics, and somewhere inside that equation I am also supposed to be a person, which some days I figure out but most days I do not.

And through all of it, daily life continues without pause or accommodation. I am still working, still sending emails and hitting deadlines and showing up for clients, still buying groceries and packing lunches and making dinners and getting JoJo to ballet on time with her hair in a bun, still doing all of the ordinary things that make up a life while simultaneously trying to dismantle and rebuild that life from the ground up. Nobody puts a hold on the mundane because you’re moving to another country. The laundry doesn’t care. The school pickup doesn’t care.

And there’s something about that: the relentlessness of normal life continuing right alongside the relentlessness of this…. that is its own particular kind of exhausting, the kind that’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t living it.

JoJo and Maya don’t know about any of this. They just know they want me, and I want to be fully there for them, and so I am constantly doing the invisible math of how to be both present and functional, and I land somewhere in the imperfect middle and try to decide that’s enough. Some days it is. Some days I stand in their doorway before I go to sleep and watch their small chests rise and fall, and I think: this is what it’s for. All of it. Every reset and every late night and every moving sale morning.

This morning, I kept coming back to the porch. To the specific quality of that silence, both of us in it together, not performing okay, not managing each other’s feelings, just being honest in the dark the way you can only be with someone who is in it with you completely. There is something I want to hold onto about that moment: not because it was beautiful or romantic, but because it was true, and the truest moments of a life together are often the seemingly unremarkable ones, the ones with no agenda, the ones where you’re just two people who chose each other sitting with the full weight of what that choice sometimes asks.

We are going to have a night like that in Copenhagen. I know this with the certainty that lives somewhere below logic, in the same place that told me almost eight years ago that Ras was the person I wanted to build a life with, that told me this move was right even when it started to feel impossible.

It will be September, I think, when the city is doing that thing it does in early fall: the light going long and golden, the evenings carrying their first suggestion of cool. We’ll have found our apartment and unpacked all of the boxes. The girls, hopefully, will be in daycare and preschool. I’ll have found a co-working space and we’ll have a routine. And we will know the neighborhood by then, the wine bar or the café or the place with the good outdoor seating made for people watching. We’ll sit across from each other the way we did on the porch, except the exhaustion will be different: the earned kind, the kind that comes after. And the silence between us will be the silence of people who made it, who did the hard thing and are sitting inside the life that was waiting on the other side of it.

I think about that night when the current one gets heavy. I let it be the thing I’m moving toward.

We just have to get there first.

There is a concept rooted in East Asian folklore that the universe ties an invisible red thread around the fingers of people who are destined to meet. The thread may tangle, it may stretch across oceans, time and distances, but it never breaks.

Taylor Swift made the idea newly popular in 2020 with her song “Invisible String,” but even before then, I have always liked this concept that the universe is pulling certain people toward one another. I’ve never felt it so clearly than with my best friend, Jess, over the last almost decade. In hindsight and in reflection, I can see the red thread—the invisible string—clearly.

I see it first in the summer of 2014: she was in NYC for a coding camp, and I was there too, four years into building my dream life in my dream city. She was in FiDi, I was a string of subway stops away in the East Village. We might have passed each other on the train or at a 20-something happy hour, fresh faced and both working toward the goal of becoming something, becoming someone.

A few years later in 2017, we both said yes to Remote Year. I was still living in New York then, she was in Salt Lake City, but we stumbled across the same year-long program that took a group of strangers to a different country every month. While it’s sadly no longer operational, it was a magical type of experience that attracted a very specific kind of person: someone restless in their everyday life, someone with a good enough job to work remotely, and someone with a reckless enough case of wanderlust to blow up their life for it. This wanderlust was its own thread, something encoded in us like a shared strand of DNA, the same itch in the same place, pulling us both toward the same crazy leap of faith.

Then the string brought us to the Yugen Slack channel together, in an actual thread: a line of messages where Jess shared her playlist about travel, and I listened to each one, eager to put words to all of the mixed emotions I was feeling about leaving my home and friends in the city. Soon we were trading songs and lyrics, creating a string of music notes between us. It was that playlist I listened to as my plane landed in Croatia, looking out the window and hoping it would all turn out okay.

A week later, I was wine drunk on a speedboat at sunset on the Adriatic sea, sitting next to Jess, pinching myself about how wonderful this digital nomad life was. I reached over and tapped her and pointed to the sky and said, “This is a moment.” We laugh about it now, a way to tease each other or to make the other roll our eyes. But at the time she understood immediately and smiled, taking in the same view. That is the thing about finding the other end of your thread: you don’t have to translate yourself.

And from that boat ride, the thread stopped being a single strand: it became a collection of moments built within a decade-long friendship.

Every country we explored together (21 and counting), every 2 a.m. conversation, every long car ride or travel day, every heartbreak witnessed and adventure shared, was another thread twisting around the first, the whole thing getting thicker and stronger and harder to see the beginning of. When the year ended I was not willing to let it go slack. I moved to Boston partly because she was there, which is the kind of decision that looks irrational from the outside and feels like the only logical thing from the inside, which is usually how the thread works: you don’t choose it, but rather you follow it wherever it leads.

And then the pandemic came, my dad passed away, and the grief of both pushed us toward my hometown of Asheville, the ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains creating a matching string of lines we’d eventually get tattooed on our sides. Somehow we ended up three left turns and three right turns from each other: two houses so close that proximity stopped being a decision and became routine.

The Instagram reel of our friendship is a beautiful one: the travel, the sunsets, the moments worth hashtagging and sharing. But the reality of what built it wouldn’t make the feed. The glamorous beginnings were just that: the first chapter of a friendship that grew roots deep enough to move twice, that bore into whatever ground we gave it and made it home.

As of writing this, we’ve texted some version of “on my way” more than 300 times. For almost ten years I have never lived more than ten minutes from her. Ten years, and the thread has never once been pulled tightly. I stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat: not because it wasn’t there, but because it had become so constant it was simply as reliable as just being alive.

But today, I feel the thread. It’s wrapped around my heart a few times, breaking it a little. Because, today she gets on a one-way flight to Cape Town.

And in a few months, I’ll take a one-way flight to Copenhagen. One-way flights started our friendship, but they aren’t in the same direction this time. They’re diverting: ATL to CPT for her, ATL to CPH for me. We won’t share an airport code anymore, but ones that are one letter and an 11-hour flight apart.

The thread is stretching further than it ever has, across an ocean and a hemisphere. There will be fewer “I’m coming over” texts and casual meet-ups and random vent sessions, because I won’t be able to just hop in my car and see her, or ask her if she wants to go for a walk. See if she wants to do takeout or go to a workout class. I can’t fully explain the grief of it, the kind that has made me tear up often over the last year of preparation. It’s a low ache that I suspect will ambush me unexpectedly for a while.

But when I sit with it long enough, underneath the ache is something that feels inevitable: two people who were always restless, always pulled toward elsewhere, now choosing elsewheres of their own. What I’m realizing, slowly (and begrudgingly), is that the thread between us has been doing something all along: it has been weaving.

All those years of proximity, all those filaments twisting together, all those moments named and witnessed and held, they didn’t just make a thicker thread. They made something else entirely: they made a tapestry.

A tapestry of moments that maybe weren’t sunset-on-a-boat-in-Croatia level, but meaningful all the same. Casual dinners and random dance parties. Trips to Costco, loading up the trunk, hoping it would all fit. Long discussions about finances and atomic bombs and protein intake. Birthday trips, gender reveals and bachelorette parties planned, schemed and booked. Checking on plants and pets. Giving opinions about jeans, hair color, five-year-plans, client proposals and sperm donors. Bringing our families together for the majority of Christmases since we met. It’s laughter fits over towels shaped like animals and a literal ferris wheel that won’t stop. It’s Chips A Hoy cookies we don’t talk about and the bread we stashed in our laps at dinner, just in case dessert wasn’t good.

And it’s been picking up the pieces after a miscarriage or a hurricane. It’s not thinking twice before spending a week at your childhood home because your dad died and reading through your childhood journals is the only thing that made you smile.

It’s burying a beloved dog in the front yard and helping to remove a tree from a house. It’s holding the umbrella for your husband while you’re reading your vows and it randomly started down-pouring in the middle of your wedding. It’s sprinting to tell the other you’re pregnant because you’re leaving on your honeymoon and you can’t stand the thought of not being able to text about it for weeks.

It’s bringing coffee because you’re in the thick of postpartum, can’t stop crying and don’t feel like yourself. It’s bouncing your screaming infant on a ball while you take deep breaths on the couch because you’re so tired and don’t know what to do. It is showing up at the door with flowers and cake when the fertility treatment didn’t work and staying until the grief of losing a parent or losing a baby softened into something survivable.

It is the inside jokes that have accumulated so many layers of context that explaining them to someone else would take far too long. It is knowing someone’s comfort order, their rhythm, the particular silence that means they’re fine and the slightly different one that means they’re not. It’s the thousand invisible acts of showing up that don’t make good stories but make a life. That make you who you are. It’s the courage to give the honest truth when it hurts, to call out the other one when they need it, trusting the friendship is strong enough to withstand it. It’s saying the uncomfortable thing because it’s more uncomfortable to have an elephant in a room that has always allowed you to be yourself.

It is the borrowed dresses and the shared playlists, the daycare pick-up ride-alongs, and the nights that started as one drink and ended with both of you laughing at nothing, at everything, at the absurdity of how lucky you got to have a best friend—a sister—like this.

It was the tapestry that took us from best friends to family. Not a single moment but an accumulation, thread laid over thread, until the weave was so tight and so dense that the word “friend” stopped being sufficient. Family is not always blood, sometimes it is years of someone loving every era of you, giving you space to grow and to change, accepting shortcomings not as character flaws but just as being human.

I’m not sure I noticed the tapestry as it was being sewn, but it just kept stitching together anyway, in the background of our lives, until one day we looked up and realized that what we thought was a thread had become something we lived inside. A home. Something permanent enough that it made sense she would be the godmother of my daughters. That our friendship is important enough to me that my children know how important it is to value the friends in your life and why you should treat them as your family.

The thread of folklore is usually romantic, but I think the mythology got one thing wrong: the thread was never the point. The thread is just how it starts: the first fragile string the universe throws across the distance between two people who don’t yet know they need each other. What you do with it after that, whether you follow it, whether you hold it, whether you show up enough times and stay long enough and fight through enough hard conversations to turn it into something that can actually bear weight: that part is yours. That part is a choice, made over and over again across a decade of ordinary days that didn’t feel like they were building anything but were.

So today I’m not saying ‘good-bye’ to the thread. I’m allowing the tapestry to cover us both on these new chapters. I’m watching the woman who helped me weave the whole thing board a plane, and I am so proud of her I can barely stand it, and I am so grateful that of all the people the universe could have tied me to, it chose her.

Bon voyage. Love you. I’ll see you in November. (P.S.: Hey Jess, this is a moment.)

“Okay, but when are we going to go back to the comfort zone?”

This was the question I asked at 10 p.m. last night, my body exhausted and my brain refusing to give up. My husband Ras and I were lying in bed with a shared Note open between us, going through The List: the endless, impossible, somehow-still-growing list of everything that needs to happen before we pack our two daughters, our dog and ourselves into a new life in Copenhagen this summer.

This is how we function—healthy or not, I cannot sleep with things rattling around in my head unchecked, so we built a ritual out of it: every night, we update each other on progress, divide tasks by who is better at what, and then trust each other to execute without micromanaging.

It works… mostly. Except on the nights when one of us sums up the whole operation with a sigh and says what I said last night: “All of this is so uncomfortable. There are so many unknowns and I don’t know how to function in a constant state of unknown.”

Ras, ever the practical one, said what he always says: “Growth is found in the unknown. Not in the comfort zone. You know that.”

Which brings me to the question I actually asked him, very sincerely: “Okay, but when are we going to go back into the comfort zone?”

He smiled and laughed, not even really looking up at me: “We decided we weren’t going to be in the comfort zone anymore when we became parents. Maybe in 20 years we’ll go back there. But probably not.”

I laughed in that moment, but this morning, with the list still there and the laughter gone, I am just sitting with the weight of what he said.

Because I think he might be right.

There is a particular myth we tell ourselves about discomfort: that it is temporary, that it is a corridor and not a room, that you move through it and come out somewhere easier on the other side. I have written this, I have said it in interviews and I have meant it.

Growth is the reward for tolerating the discomfort. That is the deal. That is the whole premise. Why else do it, ya know?

But what nobody really explains is what happens when discomfort stops being a season and starts being a permanent weather pattern. What happens when you have strung so many leaps together—career pivots, cross-country moves, new businesses, babies, then another baby, leaving a business, then a decision to relocate to a country where you do not yet speak the language—that the corridor becomes your home?

Parenthood did this first. Before Denmark, before any of this, becoming a mother rearranged my life, my priorities, my identity. Every decision now runs through two other people first: what goes in the shipping container and what gets donated so JoJo and Maya feel settled during the transition rather than unsettled by the absence of familiar things.

Which Airbnb in Copenhagen has enough space for two small kids and is close enough to a playground so we can keep them busy while we’re slowly adjusting (and waiting for a daycare spot). What to write in a book (and ask Claude to illustrate), and then print at OfficeMax so that our four-year-old has an illustrated frame of reference for what is happening, something she can hold and point to and return to when she has a question. (She always, always has questions.)

That last one is the thing that keeps me up, honestly. Not the logistics: I am good at logistics and they are not comfortable. They are also unknown: you make a decision, you book it, it’s done and you move on.

It is the interior work of it, the constant emotional project management of trying to give your children a stable inner world while actively dismantling the outer one. Of asking JoJo to be brave about something her mother is also, admittedly, terrified of.

When JoJo does not want to do something, she says: “Make the icky feeling go away.” She says it about having to eat dinner she doesn’t like (but actually does). She says it when we tell her ‘no’ to something she really wants to do or have. She says it when she doesn’t have a better word to describe how she’s feeling except icky.

And I always tell her the same thing: I cannot make the icky feeling go away, but I can be here with you while you feel it, and I promise it will not last forever.

I wonder sometimes what it looks like to her, watching me. Whether she can see the icky feeling on me. Whether the work I am doing to lean in, to stay present, to keep moving, reads as courage to her or just as her mother being tired, impatient or distant, somewhere else in my head instead of actively playing Elsa and Anna.

Because here is what I know and deny: the discomfort is not a technical issue in this plan. It is the plan.

We did not stumble into an international relocation because life got confusing. We chose it: not out of restlessness, exactly, but out of a growing, clarifying sense that staying would be its own kind of cost. That the comfort zone was comfortable the way a waiting room is comfortable: functional, tolerable, but not the life we want for ourselves or our children.

And still. The list is long, the unknowns are real. The vuggestue applications, my visa decision pending, the Danish business structure research and the question of what Charli does on the flight: all of it is sitting in a document and in my body at the same time, and I am tired from holding excitement and grief and logistics and love all at once. But I don’t have another choice. This is the choice. We made it.

Ras is right that we gave up the comfort zone when we became parents. I think that is one of the true things about having children that no one tells you before you do it— not because they are sugarcoating it, but because it does not translate.

You can say the words “your life will change completely” and people nod, and then the baby arrives and you understand that “change completely” was a cartographic metaphor for what is actually a transformation of the self at the cellular level.

The comfort zone does not disappear, I’m sure it’s out there somewhere. You just stop being the person who lives in it. You become the person who builds it for someone else.

I do not know what Denmark will give us. I do not know what the first winter will feel like, or what my work will look like from the other side of a seven-hour time difference, or whether the girls will get a spot in daycare within three months or one month. I do not know when my visa will finally be approved or what apartment we will be living in come August. I do not know when our home in Asheville will sell or a million other unknowns that make moving forward impossible.

And yet, it’s the only thing we can do. Stick to the plan, figure it out as we go, trust the process. Trust one another.

It is not comfortable. It is not supposed to be. It can’t be.

Growth is supposed to be the reward for tolerating the discomfort. And so, we lean in. Because even if I don't like how it feels, I know the discomfort will lead to something better on the other side.

Maybe not a comfort zone, I guess, but a life we chose on purpose.

The Dane Lane is a newsletter about relocating a life. New issues most weeks.

There are certain moments in the process of moving your family across the Atlantic that feel cinematic, weighty, significant in a way you will want to write about later:

Submitting your visa paperwork in Manhattan, signing the contract with the moving company and booking the one-way flights.

And then there are the other moments, the ones that are equally instructive but considerably less glamorous, like standing in your driveway on a Saturday morning in Asheville staring at a large metal bin while your husband hands you a broken floor lamp and asks if you want to keep it.

We rented a dumpster this weekend. And I have to say, it taught me more about this move than almost anything else has:

If you have the space, you will fill it

We have a three car garage and yet, in the five years we’ve lived here, we’ve never parked our car inside once. It never really served as a garage, but apparently, the home to every version of us we thought we’d be. There was the gardening era where we were convinced we’d grow our own vegetables (somehow this made since with a toddler?). There was the time my husband really got into handy-man work and bought every tool he thought he would need, and then they just sat there. (And we continued to hire a handyman when we needed one.)

There were the decorations I bought for every holiday, then forgot about them, then bought them again, so then we had dupes. Then all of the baby gear I held onto “just in case.” And the endless mailers from PR reps that I appreciated but ultimately, didn’t use or need.

I thought we were relatively intentional about what we owned and I thought we were generally tidy people. But the truth is, it’s really easy to buy stuff in America: online shopping is constantly at your fingertips. And if you have the space to store nearly anything, you can and you will. I’m very much looking forward to less house, less space, no access to Amazon (it’s not allowed in Denmark), and having to return to my mid-2010s self who lived in a city and had to carry everything she wanted to buy.

Purging is surprisingly easy when moving across the Atlantic

Here is the thing nobody tells you about downsizing: the hard part is not deciding what to throw away. The hard part is the absence of a forcing function, because when there is always a little more closet space, a storage unit down the road, a garage with no cars in it (see lesson #1), letting go of something requires internal negotiation that most of us simply are not motivated to have.

But when your entire life has to fit inside a single 20-foot container crossing the Atlantic, the math becomes very simple very fast. Our ‘sorting hat’ process was pretty straightforward:

• Do I love this enough to give up three square feet of oceanic real estate?

• Do I want to pay to store this if it won’t fit in our Copenhagen apartment?

• Can I reasonably bike in this?

• Will my child use this for at least another year?

• Is this so special to me that it can’t be replaced?

The answer, with remarkable frequency, is an immediate and clarifying no. The container has turned out to be the most effective editing tool I have ever used, and I say this as someone who has spent the better part of her career being paid to cut things down to what actually matters. (Mostly words, but you know what I mean.)

It is not as expensive as you think

I want to put this in here because I avoided renting a dumpster for months on the basis of absolutely no information, just an uninformed assumption that it would be thousands of dollars and a big hassle (permits, timing, etc.).

None of that was true! We got quotes, the prices were reasonable (around $400, all in), they dropped it off, we filled it, they came and took it away, and by Monday afternoon the garage looked like it belonged to different people entirely. If you are reading this while mentally staring down your own accumulation, consider this your sign: It is probably cheaper than you think and it is almost certainly worth it.

Throwing things away is cathartic

What I didn’t really understand about downsizing is how emotionally freeing it is: the relief of tossing something lands in the body before it registers in the mind. The things we set aside for the yard sale produced a different feeling—something closer to satisfaction—the sense of passing something along rather than sentencing it to a landfill, which I found I cared about considerably more than expected.

What surprised me most was the clarity that followed, and not just in the garage. Every object you are holding onto without using is asking something of you: a small ongoing tax on your attention that you stop noticing until it is lifted, and paying down the whole debt at once turns out to be its own reward.

A dumpster, it turns out, is a love language

When the bin was full and the light had gone golden and the kids were asleep, Ras and I opened a bottle of champagne and sat by our Solo Stove (which is making the move to Denmark, btw). We did not plan it as a celebration exactly; it just felt right the way certain endings do.

We sat on our deck (the one we built last year, still trying to make NC work when it wasn’t) talking about Copenhagen and laughing about the vast amount of things we found in the garage. I did not expect renting a dumpster to produce one of my favorite evenings of this entire process, but here we are.

There is something about working alongside your person in the hard, unglamorous, deeply unsexy labor of a life transition that closes a distance the grand gestures don’t always manage. Anyone can book the nice dinner. Not everyone will spend their Saturday hauling boxes and then sit together afterward, champagne in hand, and actually mean it when they say they cannot wait to see what comes next.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to leave a place, and I think I had it slightly wrong. I assumed leaving would feel like loss: like subtraction, like the slow removal of everything that made a life feel like yours. In some ways it is, but in others, it’s the opposite.

What this weekend showed me is that it has already started to feel like something else. Every box we threw out, every decision we closed, every square foot of garage we reclaimed was not the dismantling of something—it was the clearing of a path.

We are not emptying a life, we are editing it down to what we actually want to carry, across an ocean, into whatever version of ourselves is waiting on the other side.

The morning after a full moon in December, I took the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan to apply for my Danish visa.

I noticed the moon the night before while walking to dinner to meet some friends. It rose high above the Brooklyn Bridge, and though I was freezing, I managed to snap a blurry photo and send it to Ras, since Josefine is currently obsessed with all-things stars-and-moons. I imagine she will be much like her mom one day, since I’m so sentimental about timing.

A full moon feels like culmination, like something swelling to its edge, a diamond high in the sky, dazzling on everything below. The day after is less dramatic: it is the day you actually move your life forward. I did not plan the appointment around lunar cycles (though it would have been pretty cool if I did), but as I packed my folder with documents and triple-checked that I had every required copy, it felt fitting that this decision would land on the other side of something bright and complete.

The application center was beside the Chrysler Building, which has always been my favorite building in New York. When I lived here for nearly a decade in my 20s, I used to look up at its silver crown and feel steadied by it. Old and different, unassuming but profound: it was different than all the other skyscrapers. On that morning, years after I left the city, I walked past it again with a thick folder pressed against my ribs, and I felt that familiar mix of nostalgia and forward motion that this city seems to specialize in producing.

The folder was almost embarrassingly heavy. Inside were birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, financial statements, proof of address, proof of employment, proof that my husband is Danish, proof that our daughters are who we say they are. It struck me that so much of love, when filtered through government systems, becomes documentation. Our marriage was reduced to a certificate with an embossed seal. Our children’s existence translated into official stamps and signatures. The life we have built together fit inside plastic sleeves and paper clips.

I knew the weight of what I was carrying: not only the documents themselves, but everything they made possible.

My husband and daughters could move to Denmark tomorrow, I’m the only one truly immigrating. I felt the responsibility of it all in my bones, and my nerves were definitely high as I made my way to well, our future.

I never knew the visa center was near the Chrysler Building. I also never knew, when I first moved to New York, that I would one day sit in a waiting room applying to become a resident of another country. Back then, I was chasing something: independence, a big career, friendships, romance, a life. I moved here less than six months after I turned 21 with $3,000 and the will to succeed. That will took me further than I could have ever dreamed it could. It also took me away from New York when my wanderlust was so big, I couldn’t stay still any longer.

This time, I was not chasing anything. I was choosing.

Choosing to move myself, my business and my daughters’ daily reality across the Atlantic. Choosing to become the foreign one in my marriage. Choosing to enter a system that would evaluate my worthiness to live in my husband’s homeland.

Inside the application center, everything was fluorescent and procedural. The waiting room held a handful of other people clutching similar folders, each of us pretending to scroll through our phones while our eyes flicked up at the screen calling numbers. I wondered what their stories were. Were they joining partners, accepting jobs, fleeing something, returning somewhere? There is an intimacy to that kind of room: everyone is on the verge of transformation.

When my number was called, I stepped forward and slid my stack of documents across the counter. The woman on the other side was kind but efficient. She flipped through pages with the rhythm of someone who has seen every possible version of a life condensed into paperwork. I attempted to make small talk until it was clear she was focused on her job and she didn’t need me to do much other than, I guess, be quiet.

What I wanted to share was what was written in between the pages of those copies:

There was the drunken bike ride six months into dating, where he played tour guide to show me all of his favorite haunts.

The time we escaped the pandemic and were able to enjoy Copenhagen without an tourist, as a citizen, he was allowed to enter, and as his domestic partner, I could, too.

There was the historic bed and breakfast where he asked me to marry him, a moment I almost ruined because I had to pee so badly on the long car drive.

There was the time we arrived to host our Danish wedding celebration, but found out three hours before we boarded the flight that I was pregnant with Josefine.

There was the first time we brought our baby to the city she would eventually grow up in, even if we didn’t know the exact timing then.

There was the ‘room of doom’ as I called it, where I spent two weeks in a chilly April inside of a rental because I was in the first weeks of pregnancy with Maya and horribly sick.

And there was the last time we visited, last July, where we were able to introduce Maya to her Danish family—and also let them know we were officially moving.

So many moments, trips and milestones with Ras brought me here to this moment. They all came flooding over me, and I had to pinch myself so I wouldn’t tear up. (I told you I was sentimental.)

Then she turned the final page toward me and pointed to the line where I needed to sign.

It was a small, ordinary motion, pen to paper, but I felt the weight of it in my chest. I was signing something that would formally categorize me as an immigrant. I have written about travel, expats, nomads, ambition and reinvention for years, interviewed founders and executives about their pivots, their risks, their courage.

Met so many jetsetters across the world. People who picked something different, something new, not knowing how it would all pan out. Sitting there, I realized I was stepping into my own structural pivot, one that would not just shift my career but reclassify my identity in a government database.

I signed my name confidently, aware that this was not just ink on paper. It was consent. It was acknowledgment. It was the beginning of a waiting period defined by email refreshes and an undercurrent of vulnerability I am not used to feeling in my life.

After a quick visit to biometrics, I was out the door. Well, I guess I’m doing this, I thought as I left the building.

Because I rarely let a milestone pass without turning it into something ceremonial, I booked a ticket to visit the Empire State Building that afternoon. In all my years living in New York, I had somehow never gone to the top. It always felt like something I could do later, but later is a word that loses credibility once you start moving continents. If not now, who knows when I’ll be back in the city? And so, I paid the extra fee for the VIP line since, hey, New Yorkers don’t wait in line.

The elevator shot upward, ears popping as the city fell away. When I stepped onto the 102nd floor, the city spread out beneath me in a way that felt both familiar and distant. I could trace the neighborhoods where I had lived in apartments barely wide enough for a couch and a bed. I could picture the coffee shops where I pitched my first clients, trying to sound more capable than I felt. I could remember sitting on park benches after breakups that once felt life-ending and now read like necessary plot twists.

If I’m honest, for years after I left New York, I wondered if I had made a mistake.

The city had shaped me so completely that leaving it felt like stepping away from oxygen and I carried a low-grade question in the back of my mind about whether I would eventually circle back for good. Whether New York was the place that made sense of me and where I wanted to raise my family. It had defined the most defining chapter of my life, and it felt odd to not be here. It was so entrenched in my identity, I felt unlike myself without it. So much so, that when people ask me where I’m from, “New York’ is what comes to mind first, even though I haven’t had an address here since 2017.

Standing above it that day, I expected a rush of grief. Instead, what I felt was closure.

I am not the woman who moved here at 21 with two suitcases and a willingness to live on almost nothing. Many of the dreams that once defined me have come true. I built the career I once stayed up journaling about. I married the man I spent the better part of a decade writing about, wondering when I would meet him (spoiler: not until age 30, Lindsay!). I had the daughters I used to imagine when I watched mothers push strollers down those very sidewalks.

I realized as I looked out over the skyline that raised me, I missed Ras and the girls more than I missed the city. I wanted them next to me, pointing at bridges and asking questions about how tall buildings get built. The realization landed gently but clearly: I am not longing for what I left. I am leaning toward what is ahead.

Applying for my Danish visa in New York felt like a full circle moment, but not in the tidy way I thought it would be. It felt complicated, earned, messy and also, complete. The city that taught me how to bet on myself was now witnessing me bet on something bigger than individual ambition. I was choosing family geography over professional geography. I was choosing to let my children grow up pedaling on cobblestone streets in a language that is not my native tongue. (And is so hard to learn but we’re getting there.)

It’s cheesy, but New York will always be my first true love. It is the place that sharpened me, broke me open and taught me how to rebuild. It showed me that I could create something from nothing. It showed me that reinvention is not a personality trait but a practice.

Denmark will be different. It will ask different things of me. It will ask for humility, for patience, for discomfort, for language lessons and new systems and the uncomfortable truth of not fully understanding the room. It will also offer something I once only imagined: a life built not just on ambition, but on belonging across borders.

This time, I am not arriving alone with a MetroCard and a hungry hustle. I am moving with my husband, our daughters and our dog. With the people I love more than life itself. I am not chasing a city to prove myself. I am carrying a self I have already built into a country that will stretch me in new directions.

The full moon had already waned by the time I left the city that evening. The paperwork was submitted and the waiting had begun. But when my flight took off to Asheville, my home for a few more months, I did not feel like I was leaving something unfinished. I felt like I had honored the place that made me, signed the document that would change me and stepped, deliberately, into whatever comes next.

ICYMI: In a few months, my husband, our two daughters and I will board a plane with one-way tickets to Copenhagen.

I still feel a flicker in my chest every time I say that out loud. Most of the time, I’m too buried in logistical planning to really think deeply about it, but when I do, I get those same butterflies in my stomach I had when I went on Remote Year in 2017.

Except this time, I’m not a nomad. I’m becoming an expat. I’m becoming a Dane!

For years, Denmark has been becoming something to me. First, just a place I visited once with a friend. Then, it was the country that raised my husband, my favorite human. It then became the place we got engaged, where we visited in the summer, the first international stamp on our daughters’ passports and where we dreamed about what life could be.

Now, I’m driving (eh, pedaling?) into a brand new chapter in my life, where I learn what it means to be an immigrant. To navigate a culture and language I’m familiar with and honor, but isn’t mine.

I figured chronicling my life has built my career this far, so why not document the journey through prose?

I’m happy to introduce a new series, The Dane Lane.

I’ll share what it actually looks like to move a family across the Atlantic in your late thirties, not just physically but psychologically and professionally. I want to write about the practical logistics, yes, but also everything: parenting, ambition, marriage, culture shock, you name it.

This will be about the practical realities, from navigating international childcare systems to understanding Danish tax structures to downsizing a five-bedroom house into a three-bedroom apartment. It will be about what it actually costs to move a family across the Atlantic and what it feels like to leave a community you built on purpose. It will be about raising daughters between identities and building a business that is no longer anchored to one country.

But it will also be about something more: what it means to voluntarily disrupt your own stability. What it feels like to choose discomfort when your life looks perfectly fine on paper. What happens when you step away from a version of success you understand in pursuit of a life you cannot fully picture yet.

We leave this summer. Until then, and long after we land, I will be writing from the in-between.

Edition 1: The waiting. OMG THE WAITING

We are, quite literally, waiting on a visa. My visa, to be exact.

There is something uniquely destabilizing about knowing your entire life hinges on paperwork moving through a system you cannot see. And you cannot follow up on. (Trust me, I looked into it but they very specifically say ‘do not follow up’—which reminds me of the horrors of dating in my 20s more than I can express.)

I applied in person in New York City in early December, mostly because the embassy was clear it could take up to eight months, so we needed to give ourselves time. I know it’s unrealistic to think it would happen instantly, but I’ve always been hopeful by nature. (Important note here: technically, we can still move even if my visa is not approved by our flight date, but having it approved beforehand gives me significantly more personal flexibility and professional freedom once we land.)

And so, every morning I check email before my feet hit the floor, scanning for an update from the Danish authorities. We submitted everything meticulously, cross-referenced timelines, triple checked documentation, confirmed citizenship pathways with a lawyer, and now there is nothing left to do but wait. Not having any certainty here is stressful but it’s also part of the process I’m trying to trust.

While we wait, we make moves & plans.

The international relocation is no longer theoretical: we hired the moving company and we booked the container that will spend two months making its way from the East Coast to Copenhagen.

I now know more about overseas shipping logistics than I ever intended to. A few fun facts if you’re curious:

• I spoke with eight companies to receive quotes and all of them were within $1,000 of each other. It seems like there is generally a standard price, with no one trying to pull a fast one on ya.

• The rates include (yes, include!!) packing cost. This was music to our ears since, as you can imagine, the thought of having to pack up our home with two kids running around was paralyzing. They come to pack and inventory for customs one day (complete with boxes and bubble wrap) and then load the container the next.

• It’ll take an estimated 6-8 weeks. I knew it would take time, of course, but I didn’t think of what that would mean for our family. Our stuff moves six weeks before we do. We don’t want to leave early (we have childcare here; not in Denmark yet). So we need three buckets of stuff as we downsize: things that make the move to CPH, things we’ll use for six weeks but then donate and then things to sell or donate right away.

• We chose a dedicated 20-foot container because the shared option felt like adding another layer of unpredictability to an already intense process. A consolidated shipment can save money, but it also means your belongings move on someone else’s timeline, and after enough conversations with freight coordinators I realized the premium for control was worth the peace of mind.

At the same time that we are learning the mechanics of maritime freight, my husband is preparing to use his local knowledge to help us get set up. And to move our beloved first-born, our dog, Charli.

While we would have loved for her to come when we do, there are heat restrictions on the tarmac: if it’s too hot when we intend to fly, one of us would have to stay behind with her until it was cool enough for her to board. Considering we’re flying out of Atlanta in the middle of summer, that felt like a guaranteed travel disruption. (Can you imagine suddenly having to travel solo with a four year old, two year old, five suitcases… and your partner couldn’t join or help? No thank you.)

So, the Danish grandparents will care for Charli girl for a stretch of time. I’m sure she will appreciate the undivided attention without the chaos of kids, but we’ll miss her.

While he’s getting her settled, he’ll begin the apartment search for us. (If you know a Copenhagen real estate agent who handles rentals by chance, hit a girl up.)

The Danish housing market moves quickly, particularly for family sized apartments in central districts, and rentals often require in person presence, a deposit that can equal several months’ rent and documentation of income that aligns with local expectations. We are preparing translated financial statements and employment documentation because credibility, even when you are returning as a citizen, still needs to be demonstrated.

From here in Asheville, I toggle between logistics and imagination. I research schools and childcare structures, learning the difference between vuggestue (daycare) and børnehave (pre-school/kindergarten), reading about waitlists and municipal placement systems and researching summer camps for Josefine. I study tax structures and business registration requirements because my company will need to exist in a cross border reality, and I would prefer to be proactive rather than reactive.

The strangest part of this season is how active it is while also being defined by waiting.

We have made commitments: deposits are paid, contracts are signed, flights are booked, timelines are penciled in.

It is a peculiar way to live, suspended between continents, editing a house while refreshing an inbox, studying maritime shipping routes while planning goodbye parties.

We are not in Denmark yet, but Denmark is already shaping our every thought. The move has begun, even if the official permission to land has not yet arrived.

For now, we wait, we prepare and we trust that eventually the email will come, the container will close, and this long administrative prelude will give way to an exciting departure to The Dane Lane.