Dear daughters,
In a rare moment of peace as your mom was recovering in the PACU and you were down the hall in the NICU, I found myself thinking about everyone over the years who made judgments about my lifestyle and said to my face: “Sure, you’ve been to every country and done every reckless, beautiful thing along the way already, but it doesn’t look like you ever want to settle down and raise a family, right?”
My response? “Right.”
Because I believed them. There was nobody to prove wrong, because I genuinely agreed with them. And it felt like all of this could be a sign proving that to be true, or perhaps, a test for how much I wanted to raise another family outside of the Monsoon Diaries family. . . .
But won’t you find out soon that that’s everything these days? Whether something is a sign or a test?
My answer was realizing I would never consider any of it as signs of “what am I going to give up”; instead, my attitude was always open to the curiosity of “how can we still make it work?”
Because the voices have been saying some version of this for 15 years: When I started The Monsoon Diaries back in med school, advisors told me: “You can’t travel full time and become a doctor. Something’s got to give.” I traveled to 70 countries as a med student anyway, graduated on time, and became a doctor.
When I kept traveling as a full time physician, falling in love with everywhere and everyone I’d meet, those voices then said: “You’ll never find a committed partner. You’re too restless.” I married my best friend. Then when we talked about building a life together, the voices tried once more: “You can’t raise a family while gallivanting around the world.”
If they only could meet you now, Kaira and Dakota.
(Kaira, you’re named after Cairo, where the very first Monsoon Diaries origin story happened, back before any of this had a name. Dakota, your name was chosen by mom, and it’s also one of the only U.S. states I still haven’t set foot in, despite finishing about every country in the world already)
I believed those voices for a while. I lost my father (your grandfather) to a sudden heart attack at 19 and my mother (your grandmother) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease that same summer, and I’ve been losing her in pieces ever since. I was instead raised by numerous loving guardians who were unrelated by blood. I thought I didn’t deserve the traditional kind of family, so I built an unconventional one instead.
Then I realized: I was building family differently; one true to me than what society tells us what is true.
Before you, I’ve visited every country in the world by 39, eaten my way through street carts and Michelin stars, filled yachts in open water, started dance-offs with strangers from remote dive bars to Tomorrowland, hiked in the Dolomites 8 days after losing a major organ to a potentially malignant cancer (and surviving cancer, no less), and camped in corners of the planet most people never see. And for nearly all of it, I took countless strangers and friends along, ultimately leading thousands of people to the most challenging places on Earth. And I realized that all this time I’d been practicing guardianship all along, just not how the voices expected.
Those voices were answering a different question: “How will he fit his dreams into a traditional structure?” I was asking something different: “How do I build a structure that fits my dreams?” If you’ve ever heard “something’s gotta give” and wondered if it’s true: it’s not. The people who say it aren’t lying to you. They’re just standing somewhere you’re not. They see either/or. I’ve always seen and/also.
So when you’re at your own crossroads, ask yourself: “Am I living authentically?” and then, “Am I listening to those who’ve done what I want to do? Or are they afraid of what I want to do?
If our story, whether in the past 16 years or the past 16 weeks, is proof of anything, it’s that you don’t have to choose between the life you dream of and the life you’re supposed to live.
Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.
Sometimes you get two slices.
And sometimes, you get twice as much as you hoped for.
- At time of posting in New York, NY, it was 27 °C - Humidity: 46% | Wind Speed: 8km/hr | Cloud Cover: clear
