How to Tell the Truth About Travel Without Making It a Brand

Relocation is not content. The second you treat a move as a LinkedIn arc, you start performing the paperwork instead of doing it. I have drafted the post in my head: Louisiana light, Auckland rain, a lesson about courage. Then I remembered I still had to find a GP and prove the apartment internet worked at 7 p.m. The lesson could wait.

Quiet competence looks like this. You tell the people who need coordinates: team, family, the one friend who would notice if you went quiet. You do not owe a personal brand a hemisphere change. A status that says you are in a different timezone and reachable in writing is enough. A carousel of boarding passes is optional, and usually noise.

I am wary of the story that travel makes you a more interesting builder. Travel makes you a person with lag, laundry, and a SIM that dies at the wrong hour. The work is still the work. If the work is good, the location can be a sentence in a bio. If the work is thin, no skyline saves it.

New Orleans taught me a different craft note: place can live in the sentences without becoming a costume. I can write from the humidity and the brass without turning every week into a performance of origin. The same rule applies in Tāmaki Makaurau. Live there. Do not cast yourself as the protagonist of Leaving.

The pressure is real. Feeds reward the announcement. Recruiters skim for “global.” I still think the honest version is duller and more useful: here is where I am, here is how to reach me, here is what I am shipping. Save the lyric writing for the page that is actually writing, not for a professional update that should have been two lines.

If you need to tell the truth about travel, tell the constraint. Visa windows. Overlap hours. The week you will be offline in the air. That is information. A personal myth about becoming someone new in a departure lounge is mostly advertising. I would rather be slightly boring and reachable than interesting and late.

— JV · Dark Heart Labs.