Cádiz: Breathing New Air
August 2026
What Distance Brings Into View
There is something about stepping off an airplane in a new country. Breathing different air, hearing a different language. Everything feels unfamiliar. And yet somehow, that unfamiliarity brings out the parts of you that feel the most authentic.
At home, you aren’t just you. You’re you inside a system. Your surroundings are full of cues about everything currently demanding something from you: responsibilities, routines, decisions, unfinished problems, expectations.
There can be comfort in familiarity. The same streets, the same people, the same sounds. It’s easy. It’s predictable. We settle into our routines and our patterns—good or bad. But with familiarity can also come a narrowing of our world. Problems can feel disproportionately big when our physical world gets small. Our brains start treating our little corner of the world as though it’s the whole universe.
But it’s not.
When you land in a new country, suddenly all the familiar cues about who you are disappear. You’re sitting on a train where nobody knows any part of your story other than the one that exists in that very moment. There are no prior perceptions. There are no future expectations. You’re just you. On a train in a foreign country.
And your brain gets flooded with a completely different set of evidence about who you are. I got myself here. I built a life that is taking me places I once only imagined. I can walk into the unfamiliar and find my way. I can handle uncertainty. The world is bigger than this. My life is bigger than this.
Travel physically demonstrates something that can be incredibly difficult for our minds to conceptualize at home: just how much exists beyond our little corner of the world. When you put distance between yourself and everything familiar, something incredible happens. You meet a version of yourself that feels brand new and yet, somehow, was there all along.
As I thought about this on the train ride from Madrid to Cádiz, I wondered: Which parts of myself come back into view when I get far enough away from everything that’s been occupying my attention?
One of the answers came somewhere between the dance floor and my flight home. Just a couple of hours after leaving the final social, I ran into a dancer from LA at the airport. He told me that although we hadn’t danced together much, what he remembered about our dance was how happy I looked. He said that as a lead, what you want most is to know that your follow is having a good time, and that I was very generous with my smiles.
And he’s right. When I dance, I am all smiles. Ear to ear. Because I fucking love it.
And I think I needed that reminder. This past year has brought some incredibly difficult experiences within my dance life, and at times they have taken up so much space that they’ve overshadowed the pure and simple joy of dancing. But hearing someone describe me that way—happy, smiling, clearly having the time of my life—brought back into view what has always been at the heart of it for me: I simply love to dance.
There is so much beauty in dance. Connecting with another person through movement. Telling a story together for three minutes. Bringing music to life. Being completely present in the moment. That is what I love about dance.
That’s what a little distance can give us. Not an escape from the difficult parts of our lives, but enough perspective to remember that they are only one part of a much bigger picture. They don’t define who we are at our core.
The sense of peace I felt sitting on the train as I left Madrid, the lightness I felt walking through the cobblestone streets of Cádiz, the pure joy I felt on the dance floor all week… those parts of me didn’t appear from nowhere as I flew over the Atlantic. Breathing new air in Spain just removed enough noise for me to feel them again.
Because when the noise disappears, all I’m left with is how much I love dance. And if the challenges of the past year brought me to where I am today, well, then I can only be grateful for them. Because where I am today—this life that I am building—is pretty damn amazing.
