I was 35 years old when the life I thought I was going to have ended.
My marriage was over, and with it went the future I had assumed would be mine. There is a strange thing that happens when something that large ends. At first, all you can see is what is no longer there. The plans. The expectations. The picture you had carried in your head of what your life was supposed to look like.
But somewhere in that season, I began to see something else.
I had a blank page.
And for the first time, it occurred to me that I could put almost anything I wanted on it.
I remember this feeling of wide-open blue skies, sunshine coming through the window, and the realization that I could dream again. Not adjust an old dream. Not figure out how to salvage the life I had planned. I could ask an entirely different question:
What do I want my life to be?
That question changed everything.
I went back to school. I studied international business and political science. I began allowing myself to be curious about things simply because they interested me. I stopped assuming that the choices I had already made had to determine all the choices that came next.
Eventually, that road took me all the way to Turkey.
I could never have known at 35 that one day I would pack up my life and move to Istanbul. I could not have imagined the people I would meet, the work I would do, the places I would travel, the businesses I would create, the losses I would survive, the faith that would carry me, or all the different versions of myself I would meet along the way.
I certainly couldn’t have known that decades later I would be writing songs about it.
But perhaps that is what I am most grateful for when I look back at that threshold.
I didn’t know.
There was no map showing me what was waiting on the other side. I didn’t cross that threshold because I had some grand vision of the woman I would become. I simply began walking into a life that was suddenly mine to choose.
That is where One-Way Ticket to Me comes from.
When I began writing the song, I pictured the whole experience as a journey. There is an airport in the song because, in many ways, my life really did become a journey. There are departures and arrivals. There is baggage. There are other people’s plans being left behind. There is a window seat and an unknown destination ahead.
And somewhere in all of that traveling, the person waiting for me at Arrivals turned out to be me.
That may be the greatest gift that crossing gave me.
At 35, I could have looked at my life and seen only an ending. Today, I can look back and recognize a beginning.
That does not mean I am grateful for every painful thing that has ever happened to me. I don’t believe gratitude requires us to pretend that loss didn’t hurt or that every ending was somehow wonderful because something good eventually followed it.
But I am profoundly grateful for what that particular ending revealed to me.
My life was not over because one version of it was.
There were countries I hadn’t seen yet. Work I hadn’t done yet. People I hadn’t met yet. Songs I hadn’t written yet. There were parts of me I hadn’t even discovered yet.
And perhaps most importantly, I learned that becoming yourself isn’t something that happens once.
I am 60 now, and I am still becoming.
In fact, One-Way Ticket to Me is part of another unexpected chapter. Music was something that had always been woven through my life, but I certainly didn’t expect to reach this age and find myself writing song after song, turning experiences from decades ago into music and hearing pieces of my own life come back to me in a completely new form.
Maybe that is why this song means so much to me.
It isn’t really a song about divorce.
It is a song about departure.
It is about that moment when the life you expected is no longer the only life available to you. It is about looking through the window at all that open sky and realizing that you are allowed to go somewhere new.
And sometimes, after all the miles and all the unexpected stops along the way, you discover that the destination you were traveling toward all along was yourself.
One-Way Ticket to Me is the song that came from that realization.
So rather than tell you anything more about it, I’d love to let you hear it.
One-Way Ticket to Me
🎵 Listen to One-Way Ticket to Me
I bought a one-way ticket.
And I’m still discovering where it can take me.
Continue the Conversation
Have you ever reached what felt like an ending, only to look back later and realize it was also the beginning of something you never could have imagined?
What was waiting for you on the other side?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Some of my favorite conversations begin there, and I read every one.
Continue the Journey
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These stories wander through joy and grief, travel and home, faith, friendship, unexpected people, and all the strange and beautiful places life takes us.
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Until next time, may you find a little more joy in the ordinary.
— Deronda
The Joy Ambassador | Architect of Joy