"Passport Stamps and Permission Slips: My First Trip After Divorce"

I used to think the world was small. Not because I lacked curiosity trust me I had plenty of it, even as a kid, wondering what was out past the edges of the map I'd been handed. It was small because I was taught, in a hundred quiet ways, that it needed to stay that way. Same town. Same pew. Same road home every night. Same picture of what a good life was supposed to look like, drawn up by someone else before I ever got a vote.

I grew up in a small town in Idaho, inside the Mormon church. I married young, young enough that I hadn't yet figured out who I was underneath who I'd been told to become. Wife. Mom. Somebody's daughter. Somebody's Sunday-best version of a good girl. Those roles, I understood completely. What I never got the chance to learn was who Danae actually was without them. There was a whole piece of me that didn't fit that cookie-cutter picture, and for years I didn't even have a name for her. I just felt her in there. Restless. Waiting.

Then I got divorced. And I want to be honest about what that actually meant, because it wasn't just a marriage ending. I was a mother with kids, walking away from the only life I'd ever built for myself and in that same breath, I walked away from the only church and faith I had ever known too. Two identities, gone at once.

Nobody tells you what happens next. The community that had wrapped around me my whole life, the potlucks and the phone calls and the people who showed up with casseroles when things got hard, most of it disappeared almost overnight. Leaving the structure, and sometimes the safety net goes with it. One week I was surrounded. The next, I was more alone than I had ever been.

I'm sharing this because I doubt I'm the only woman who's stood in that particular kind of quiet — the one where you realize the life you built, and the people who came with it, don't automatically stay when you decide to become somebody new. If you know that silence too, hear me on this: you are not as alone in it as it feels. There is a whole life on the other side of that fear. I promise you that.

Divorce cracked open a door in me that I hadn't even known was locked. And once I saw the light coming through it, there was no shutting it again.

The first trip I took afterward wasn't glamorous. No five-star itinerary. No girlfriends cheering me on in a group chat. Just a plane ticket, a stomach full of nerves, and one question I couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried: what else is out there that nobody ever showed me?

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For as long as I could remember, I'd lived inside a faith that told me who to be, what to value, what beauty was supposed to look like — all of it decided long before I was ever old enough to ask my own questions. Leaving wasn't only about geography. It was about finally, at an age when most people already know these things, deciding for myself what I actually believed. Not what kept the peace. Not what I'd inherited. What was true for me.

I stepped off that plane into a place that had no idea who I was. Nobody there knew my history. Nobody knew the version of me that had spent years quietly shrinking to fit somebody else's mold. Something in my chest came loose standing there among total strangers. I didn't have to perform anything. I wasn't anybody's wife or mother or example of what a good Mormon woman should look like.

I could just exist. Look. Taste. Wander. Listen. Start building my own definition of beauty from scratch, instead of the one I'd been handed at birth.

I cried more than once on that trip to the Philippines. Not from sadness. From relief, the dizzying, almost disorienting feeling of my own life finally belonging to me.

That trip left me with something I still carry into every haircut I give today: the most healing thing a person can do is get outside the room they grew up in. Sometimes that means an actual plane ticket. Sometimes it means finally questioning beliefs you were only ever handed, never chosen. Either way, you have to leave to see what you were never shown. I believe that down to my bones now. Healing doesn't happen while you're standing still in the same four walls that taught you to shrink. It happens the moment you get brave enough to walk out of them.

That's where Roots to Runways actually started.

Not in a business plan or a marketing meeting but standing in a foreign country, crying, with a stranger's kindness in front of me. Roots are everything I came from: the small town, the faith, the marriage, the motherhood, every layer of the woman I built before I knew I was even allowed to question it.

Runways are everywhere that came after — every trip, every stranger who ended up being a mirror, every version of beauty that didn't match what I grew up with, every woman along the way who showed me one more piece of who I could still become.

Here's what I want you to walk away with. You're allowed to leave the room you grew up in. You're allowed to outgrow an identity someone else built for you, even a loving one, even one built by people who meant well, even if leaving costs you a community you thought would always be there. You're allowed to ask the question I asked on that plane: what else is out there that I was never shown? and you're allowed to go find out for yourself.

I'm still finding mine. I don't think that work ever really ends. But every trip since that first one has handed me back another piece — pieces I didn't even know were missing until I found them somewhere far from home.

This is just the start of the story. More travel, more hair philosophy, more of this hard-won, beautiful chapter is coming. If any of this landed for you, or if you've ever felt like you were living in somebody else's picture-perfect frame. I just want you to know this: there's a whole world out there, and a whole version of you waiting in it. Go find her.

Love, Danae