Unanchored, then returned

After years of telling other people’s stories, a pause brings me back to my own. Between Colorado and Spain, I reflect on distance, family, and the quiet return of curiosity.

INTROSPECTIVE

Life has a way of pulling us in different directions, especially when you make a living telling other people’s stories.

Over the past few months, I stepped away. A family situation made that decision for me. It slowed everything down.

Things are better now.

But the pause did something I didn’t expect.

It brought my curiosity back.

Not the kind tied to deadlines or deliverables. The quieter kind. The one that asks questions without needing answers right away. The one that made me fall in love with storytelling more than a decade ago.

For years, I’ve been focused outward. Telling stories. Chasing growth. Learning how to write, edit, translate, shoot.

Always moving.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped listening to the people closest to me.

I started noticing it in small moments.

Conversations with family that lingered longer than usual. Stories I had never heard. Details that made me pause.

I had spent so much time documenting other lives, but not enough time sitting with my own.

No deadlines. No audience. No reason, other than to be there.

In Spain, that feeling settled in.

Time looked different. Slower. Fuller.

Aunts and uncles had become grandparents. Cousins had children. The pets I grew up with were gone.

Life had moved forward, with or without me.

And while I had collected countless stories over the years, very few of them included the people who raised me.

I started asking questions again.

Not just as a journalist, but as someone trying to understand where he stands.

Why does life feel different here?
How do families stay so close?
How much have I missed?
Do my nephews know me, or am I just someone who lives somewhere else?

There’s a stillness that comes with asking those questions.

A kind of clarity.

You start to see what you’ve been moving toward, and what you’ve been moving away from.

I realized I hadn’t just been telling stories.

I had been drifting from my own.

Now, back in Colorado, I carry that with me.

Not as regret. As awareness.

Because the work continues. The stories continue. That part of me isn’t going anywhere.

But neither is this:

The need to stay close to what grounds you.
To listen without urgency.
To remember that not every story needs to be told to matter.

Some just need to be lived.