"You've thought about it.
Probably more than once.
So did I - and then I went."
"Hi, I'm Grace. At 49, I packed up my life in the States and moved to Vietnam. Turns out the tug was right."
Before I left, there was what I now call the journey before the journey — selling things, sorting legal details, figuring out what your whole life fits into when it has to fit into two suitcases. It's a process that strips everything down to what actually matters. I highly recommend it.
I landed in Vietnam at 49 years old and I knew. I just knew.
Life now looks different. Really different.
For the first time in my adult life, I became an observer. After decades of leading, initiating, solving — I just watched. I watched how Vietnamese people move through their days, how other expats find their footing, how life operates when it's organized around completely different values and rhythms than the ones I grew up with.
I walk more. I eat fresh food — not because I planned to, but because Vietnam makes processed food almost beside the point. I unintentionally lost nearly twenty pounds in my first year just by living. I get on the back of a motorcycle at least twice a day. I visit four or five small shops to find what I need instead of clicking a button and waiting for a box to arrive.
It sounds simple. It has been anything but — and it has been everything.
I can't imagine going back to the life I lived before this one.
And I don't plan to.
Forty years in one place. Then Vietnam.
For four decades, I called Ocean Springs, Mississippi home — and I mean that with my whole heart. If you've never been, put it on your list. It's a small coastal town with live music spilling out of every corner, more artists per square mile than seems possible, and a local saying that pretty much sums it up: a drinking town with an art problem. I loved it. I built a life there. A career, a community, nonprofits, friendships — the kind of roots that take decades to grow.
And then I had a few hard years. The kind most of us quietly accumulate by our late forties — the kind that make you sit still long enough to hear yourself think. I was sitting in my beautiful office, at my great job, in my favorite city, and something shifted. Not dissatisfaction exactly. More like completion. Like I had given everything I had to that chapter and somewhere deep down I knew it was done.
There was a tug. There had been for a while. The feeling that there was a great big world out there and I was living on one small piece of it without ever really knowing what the rest felt like.
So I started looking.
I visited Costa Rica first — beautiful, warm, wonderful. But not different enough. I needed something that would genuinely crack my world open. I turned my attention to Asia. I researched safety, affordability, ways to make it work as a solo woman. Vietnam kept rising to the top.
I bought a one way ticket.