So long, The Pin the Map Project 👋

Welcome to Wanderess, a free and sporadic travel & lifestyle newsletter brought to you by the founder of Unearth Women. In this newsletter, I wax poetic about the projects we choose to move on from and, in my case, saying farewell to a travel blog that reshaped my life. If you’ve found your way here but are not yet subscribed, here, let me help you with that:

How do you know when it’s time to move on from a project? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Recently, I deleted The Pin the Map Project—my very first travel blog and, in many ways, the catalyst for so much in both my personal and professional life. The deletion of The Pin the Map Project (henceforth known as PTM) has been a long time coming. For years now (quite literally, years), it has sat in the recesses of the internet, gathering dust, acting like a forgotten time capsule of a chapter I’d long since closed.

I haven’t touched my blog, haven’t written for it, and haven’t so much as logged into WordPress to update its plug-ins. This got me thinking about why we hold onto the things we’re no longer invested in or have the time to commit to. I’ve kept paying for my blog’s website hosting all these years, essentially paying a monthly subscription for nostalgia. If I dig deep, I think I held on to PTM all this time because I hesitated to let go of something I once poured so much time, energy, and money into. I hesitated to let go of something I once loved fiercely, even if it no longer served me in the present.

This changed recently when a conversation with a loved one prompted me to type in my blog’s URL and discover the website was no longer functional. At some point in the past few years, I had gone from paying for an abandoned blog to paying for the ghost of a website that no longer worked, and so, with one swift click of a button—not giving myself time to overthink it—I finally deleted PTM…permanently.

The moment I realized my blog was irretrievably gone, I felt compelled to honor its legacy in some small way. After all, my travel blog was once the spark that ignited my dogged determination to chase a career in travel writing, and—once that spark became a full-blown inferno—reshaped the landscape of my life, tearing down relationships, an engagement, a wedding, and a career so that from its ashes arose a newer and truer version of myself.

Once upon a time, I started PTM in my early twenties with the ambition to—as the name suggests—add pins to my map. When I began my travel blog, it was fueled by both wistful ambition and my admiration for the early travel bloggers who seemed to craft unique lives for themselves. For an entry-level post-grad living in NYC and earning pennies at a soul-sucking office job, discovering travel bloggers was nothing short of magical.

I had come across a crop of twenty-somethings who had seemingly managed to create a life that was the antithesis of everything I’d been told I needed to do: they weren’t working in an office, they weren’t settling down, they didn’t have kids, they weren’t getting married, they weren’t drowning in bills. No, they were traveling and writing about it. The mind reeled.

As I sat in that fluorescent-lit cubicle in downtown Manhattan, surrounded by varying shades of grey, lamenting the Excel spreadsheets on my screen, I decided that if they could travel the world and write about it, so could I.

Back then, I tended to my travel blog like it was a newborn. I’d stay up late fussing over it, looking for ways to help it grow. I’d look for ways to soup up its pages, try to research new Wordpress plug-ins and ways to design it on the cheap, teaching myself how to code. I invested what little money I had on a new logo—the words “The Pin the Map Project” next to a stack of watercolor suitcases and a little paper airplane flying around the letters and bags. I gave myself three months to see if I’d truly commit to this project before investing in hiring a website designer, spending weeks drafting up rudimentary sketches of what I wanted my dream website to look like.

PTM became my ultimate passion project: a combination of musings and travel articles I’d write in my spare time. It took time, but eventually, my blog did grow. I landed my first press trip—a short visit to explore Miami’s cultural scene—and learned that I could actually travel on the wings of my writing. Eventually, those press trip invites got splashier, from a small trip in Florida to a bigger trip in Indonesia. I began to partner with travel brands on sponsored blog posts or small giveaways. I met with other travel bloggers and looked for chances to expand my network and learn from their successes, which led to invitations to collaborate on projects or speak at conferences.

My writing began to grow too, from self-published blog posts to bylines in publications I admired to, eventually, published books with HarperCollins and Penguin Random House. But while my travel blog blossomed into ample career opportunities, it never quite grew monetarily, and so, as my career began to evolve past my blog—from dreaming about travel writing to working as an on-staff travel editor—PTM slowly fell by the wayside and then was left behind entirely.

When I compare my life to where it was when I first pressed publish on PTM to where it is today, it’s a world of difference. My travel blog once gave me something priceless: a field of dreams in which I could run wild with the idea of travel writing, reach for the woman I hoped I’d grow into, and dare to dream about a career that, at the time, felt far beyond my reach.

At a time in my life when I was rocketing in the direction of the wrong career and the wrong relationship, my little old blog gave me a safe space to play, write, create, and dream with wild abandon—and for that and to all who read it, I remain eternally grateful.

My travel memoir: Call You When I Land | My travel book: Wanderess