When I was 16, I packed up my belongings and moved to New York City, ready to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. Growing up two and a half hours up the Hudson, I had spent my life dreaming of that day. When I stepped out of the car on 7th Avenue, the Empire State Building shone above me and I knew I had finally found the place I belonged.

At 18, I moved again, this time across the ocean, to Florence, Italy. Planning to live in New York for my whole life (easy choice, right?), I had decided to do a year abroad instead of the more common semester option. Little did I know how that choice, coupled with my belief that New York was the only place for me, would be what inspired me to leave it.

At 21, I boarded another flight out of New York to a much farther destination: Australia. I had bought no return flight and I wasn’t sure when I’d be back, calling New York home again.

So, what in the world does any of this have to do with my writing? Throughout everything, no matter where in the world I've lived or what’s been going on, there’s remained one, simple constant: I have this indescribable need to write. More often than not, I find myself in awe of how the written word can connect us and create change in the most amazing ways.

Describing it best, in 'Wild' Cheryl Strayed writes, “Of all the things I’d done in my life, of all the versions of myself I’d lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.” When I moved to Italy I brought two overweight suitcases. Two years later, I lived out of a 55 liter backpack — a laptop, four books and three journals always in tow. I’ve changed, adapted, learned and moved, but I have always been a writer.