Guess How Travel Helped Me Heal (And Inspired Accessible Travel Planners)

Ten years ago, in 2015, I left Hawaii for what should’ve been a dream opportunity in Italy — working for the U.S. Army Health Clinic in Vicenza. On paper, it looked like a fresh start. In reality, I was carrying more than anyone could see.

I had just survived one of the hardest years of my life: a dangerous MRSA infection in the reconstructed part of my face that required eight weeks of Vancomycin through a PICC line. I took only two sick days — no work meant no pay, no insurance — and the kind of exhaustion that settles into your bones when you’re constantly maxed out.

I took a different travel OT job that moved me from the Big Island to the high rises and action of Waikiki. I learned just days before that move that I was 100% rid of the MRSA and would be ok. I began to party in the island version of the city that never sleeps. I threw myself headfirst into nightlife. Parties, celebrations, the thrill of feeling alive again… maybe too alive. I ignored the quiet truth: I was burning the candle at both ends and living so hard that I was burning myself out.

The Night That Changed Everything

Thanksgiving Eve changed everything. One moment I was at my favorite dive bar celebrating with friends. The next, I woke up at home with no memory of how I got there — or of the stranger who was with me. The actual violation that occurred early on that Thanksgiving morn was the start of my real spiral.

What followed was a blur of fear, shame, self-loathing, and reliving. Trauma had silently carved a fault line through my soul.

But just when I was at my lowest and feeling lost and hopeless, a unicorn of a job offer in Italy came knocking on my door. This rare opportunity felt like a lifeline — a chance to start over, to outrun the darkness. But fresh starts don’t erase what came before, and there is no outrunning your past.

Finding Myself Again Through Travel

When I arrived in Vicenza, I carried everything with me: trauma, burnout, unprocessed grief. I started work immediately, inherited a backlog of patients, and tried to hold it together with a heart running on fumes.

And then I did one thing that slowly brought me back to myself: I explored.

That first summer, friends invited me to Sardinia for the Fourth of July. We stayed at an agriturismo — an Italian family-run farm — and ate a four-hour dinner of freshly caught fish, handmade pasta, homemade wine, bread straight from the oven. Something lit up inside me that night. And it wasn’t just the homemade Grappa.

It wasn’t just a trip.
It was a remodeling of my soul.
A flicker of joy I hadn’t felt in a long time.

From that moment, travel became my therapy. My medicine. My way home to myself.

Over the next two and a half years, I visited 24 countries — often solo. There were spa weekends in Malta, northern lights in Tromso, Wine festivals in Slovenia, floating down the Croatian coast, stopping at pirate caves to have a pint, Diagon Alley in Edinburgh, and as many corners of Italy that the train could take me on my weekends.

I learned I loved off-season travel. I learned I hated crowds. I learned I could feel safe and free again, with the right amount of planning.

Healing Through Helping Others

Simultaneous to my travels through self-discovery, many of the soldiers I worked with in my OT clinic on base in Vicenza, Italy had PTSD and/or TBI. Crowds triggered them. Unknown environments overwhelmed them and made them hypervigilant. Their world had shrunk to work, home, base, repeat.

So, long before I ever became a travel agent, I started integrating travel planning into treatment: predictable routines, sensory strategies, structured exposure, step-by-step confidence building.

It worked. Families who hadn’t left their base community in months were taking successful trips to Rome and family fun weekends to Florence without getting overly triggered, panic, or fear.

That’s when I realized: my healing and my calling weren’t separate.

✨ The Birth of Accessible Travel Planners

Accessible Travel Planners was born from that truth: travel can heal. Accessibility isn’t just ramps and roll-in showers. It’s trauma support, sensory strategies, executive functioning, mental health, neurodiversity — all the invisible things most travel professionals never even think about.

That’s why I love what I do. Travel didn’t just change my life — it rebuilt it. And now I get to help others rebuild theirs too.