I don’t quite know what to say.

When the Jet Set Zero team – a team I am now fortuitously part of – first expressed even the slightest interest in me just a couple months ago, I cried. (Fine! I admit it, I’m emo.) As a sensitive, filmmaker, photographer, writer, artist type, I have been known to shed a few tears, but this was different. The usual awkward facial contortions were absent, the smile was not crooked, my brow un-furrowed – the tears just fell. This was fate. This was years of travel, beginning when I moved to Mexico at age 6, and endless revolutions in the evolution of my authentic self all coming to a head. I could just feel it.

Nowhere in the email I received did anything confirm my emotional production as at all valid. It was a feeling. A feeling that proved that my past couple years of trauma, displacement, homelessness, and the delicate balancing act I mustered to keep myself afloat was all paying off.

I’ll sum it up for you:

• In 2007 I volunteered in Kenya…
• Campaigned with a Maasai Member of Parliament candidate…
• Returned home renewed…
• Turned on the news…
• Kenya’s election has turned violent…
• My friends in Kenya, including the MP, are beaten, displaced, and one child I met dies…
• Me: “I need to do something”…
• I create A Chance for Peace – a documentary film to show that Kenyans are capable of peace…
• I lose myself within this process…
• I film back in Kenya for 1 month with one other team member and no plan other than to make some magic happen and to represent the Kenyan voice. Simple enough, right? (Right.)
• I return feeling blessed to finally feel I have a home and not just a place to live…
• My place to live catches fire and burns down 1 week later. After my birthday party. Woot.
• I’m homeless and displaced, myself, for 11 months…
• I find a home…
• Struggle to graduate after they suspend my major and cut off my financial aid…
• I set out to travel California…
• I search for jobs…
• Send Jet Set Zero probably the most unprofessional email of my life…
• And four days later I cry out of bliss for the second time in my whole life.

So now what? I no longer have school to tie me down. No reason to prove my intelligence on issues I have lived off the written page anyway. I have accepted that my home is where my heart is – and my heart just so happens to be too big for social conformism. So now what? Now it’s time to take flight, but this time to find myself and create my own chance for peace, Jet Set Zero-style.

Such is the life for me.

Check out a visual autobiography on my blog, Lessons from a Vagabond