The Fog and the Flow
A Memoir of Finding Trust in the Face of Uncertainty
coming september 22
A reflective travel memoir about embracing uncertainty and learning to move with life rather than against it.
How do you move forward when the life you've built no longer feels right, but the path ahead is still unclear?
For years, Renee believed that if she made the right choices and stayed one step ahead, life would go according to plan. But when the future she'd been working toward no longer felt like the one she wanted, she found herself caught between a life she'd outgrown and one she couldn't yet see.
Leaving everything behind, she sets off on two years of solo travel across fifty countries. What begins as an adventure becomes a lesson in trusting herself, loosening her grip on certainty, and allowing the path ahead to unfold.
Through unfamiliar cultures, breathtaking landscapes, and moments of awe and discomfort, Renee begins to change the way she moves through life. But returning home reveals that what she learned on the road was only the beginning. Learning how to live it is another.
The Journey That Became This Book
I started my career in tech as a web developer, operating from a very comfortable place. Stability, security, and the long-term plan.
The goal was clear from early on. Build a stable life, reach defined milestones, and “make it" in a way that felt responsible and predictable. I had been working toward that version of success ever since.
And for a while it worked.
Until it didn’t.
At a certain point, I found myself standing at what looked like the top of that mountain, having achieved the career trajectory I had been striving toward, while also realizing something unsettling. The future I had been optimizing for was no longer holding together.
Parts of the plan stopped working. Parts were no longer in my control. And eventually, even my career stopped making sense in the way it once had.
For a couple of years, I lived in that friction. Frustrated, uncertain, and trying to figure out what came next while nothing clear was emerging.
And then something unexpected happened.
I made the decision to leave everything behind and travel the world for two years, across 50 countries and five continents.
That decision didn’t feel like a plan. It felt like a rupture.
What followed was not just travel, but a deep dismantling of identity.
The parts of me that had been tightly held. Being hard-working and productive, achievement-driven, future-focused, dependable, structured. They all began to fall away. So did many of the roles I had anchored myself in: daughter, sister, employee, friend, American, and the everyday markers I had used to understand who I was.
In their absence, something else started to emerge.
A slower way of being. More presence. Less fixation on the future. A stronger trust in intuition alongside logic. A deeper sense of gratitude. A willingness to move with life instead of constantly trying to control it.
And beneath all of that, a different understanding of resilience. Not as the ability to plan for every outcome, but the ability to meet life as it unfolds, and adapt without losing yourself in the process.
Over time, what I discovered was a quieter kind of strength. Surrender without passivity, direction without rigidity, and trust without certainty.
This journey became the foundation of my work.
My memoir, The Fog and the Flow, comes out September 22.
From control to surrender, from planning to presence, from rigid concepts of identity to embracing the evolving self.