In 2015, I quit the first job I had as a young adult and moved to Europe. The plan was to stay for one year with an au pair visa, then return home to figure out the “real” path for my future.

The choice shocked everyone who knew me. I had never been adventurous and was prone to worrying about almost anything. To trade in a comfortable salary for 450 Euros a month and be a live-in nanny to a family I had met just a handful of times via Skype? This sounded far too outlandish for a girl like me.

Truthfully, I can’t blame the skeptics. At the time, I was 23 years old and had never lived more than 45 minutes from my hometown. I had a job that coincidentally put me on track to follow my mother’s career path, and I was in a relationship that after 3 years had culminated in a marriage proposal I didn’t know was coming.

Whether I was fully aware of the painfully blaring cliché or not, I had come to the proverbial fork in the road. One direction was quite clear, as it looked exactly like everything I already knew. The other was shrouded in fog and doubt.

Looking back, I like to think something existed in my bones that forced me to explore that option anyway. Maybe it was luck or perhaps it was fear that pushed me down the equally cliché road less traveled, but whatever it was, it got me moving.

I left for my year abroad, but after a year passed, I didn’t come back. Instead I continued taking any and every chance to explore something new. Slowly, I began to figure out that I was, in fact, adventurous and brave and independent from the mold I thought defined me.

I’ve come to dub these years as my personal awakening. They were the years that taught me more about myself than the first 23 years of my life ever did. They were free and fun and yes, sometimes even wild. This led many people to believe that I was running from my “real” life. But truthfully, I wasn’t running from it at all. I was running toward the real life that was always meant to be mine.

Those years taught me that it’s okay to be moving, even when you don’t know where you’re going. I had come so close to a prescribed life, so in my mind I had to keep moving forward, which is a lot different than running away.

The most important realizations were those that would not have come to light had I never left home. Things like a corporate America job and salary really aren’t my end goal because that’s not what ultimately makes me happy.

Equally important were the things I learned from what didn’t go as planned. When my own heart was really broken for the first time, I finally understood aspects of the relationship I left behind and what I had done wrong— things that are essential for anyone to know and understand if and when you choose to link another life to your own.

I discovered I could be proud of who I am as an individual and that a large part of my identity does exist outside of the world where I grew up. Better still was finding true comfort in where I was, even when I had no idea what it meant or where I was headed.

And while to many it may have looked like I was running, to me, it felt more like flying.