WHEN GRATITUDE BECOMES A MIRROR
A season where honesty becomes the beginning of reinvention.
Welcome to Issue #037 of Sojourn. Each week, I share two original essays to help you slow down, reconnect, and rebuild with intention — in a private community that uses travel as a path to reinvention.
Here in the U.S., today is Thanksgiving…
a day built around gratitude.
But I’ve learned something about gratitude that I didn’t expect:
It’s often the earlier version of us we end up thanking the most.
The one who kept going long before we had language for what we were feeling.
Last year, that was me.
From the outside, life looked steady.
But inside, I was carrying a different kind of burnout…
not from doing too much,
but from pretending everything was fine.
I wasn’t lost.
I was disconnected.
And I didn’t know how to say that out loud.
What shifted everything wasn’t a big decision or a grand reinvention moment.
It was something simple:
I started telling myself the truth.
Not publicly.
Not online.
Not in ‘polished’ sentences.
Just privately, on blank pages.
Writing became the very first place where I could ‘hear’ myself again.
Travel became the first place where I could ‘see’ myself again.
Together, they gave me the distance and honesty I had been avoiding.
And slowly, something real started to rebuild:
→ A voice I had abandoned
→ A clarity I thought I’d lost
→ A version of myself I was finally ready to meet again
And this is the part of reinvention… or building a personal brand.
We don’t talk about enough:
It doesn’t start when your life changes.
It starts when you stop performing your way through it.
So on a day about gratitude, here’s mine:
I’m grateful for the moment I stopped trying to look ‘put together’
and allowed myself to be honest instead.
That honesty is what led me to write publicly.
It’s what brought me to Substack.
People who understand the emotional side of reinvention,
and the role travel and identity play in it.
So if you’re in a season like the one I walked through,
shifting, questioning, or re-evaluating who you are…
Here’s what I hope you remember today:
You don’t need to be polished to be taken seriously.
You just need to be honest.
~Ana