Victoria Nguyen

So it's fall of 2022, and I have found myself on this unexpected mission driving halfway across the country with my brother's dog in the backseat.

Herschel was my brother's huge, beautiful, golden husky who unfortunately needed to be rehomed.

And out of everyone I reached out to for help, my friend Mila was the only person who was able to take him in.

The only catch was we were in California, she was in Oklahoma, and it was up to me to get us there.

At the time I decided to make this trip happen, I was going through a pretty confusing period in my life.

I was 25, living in my parents' garage, and I was working this dead-end office job that was eating away at all of my time.

And to top it all off, I had just gone through one of the most painful breakups of my life that left me questioning everything.

But it wasn't until then that I had this uncomfortable realization about myself, which was that for far too long, I had been letting my life just pass me by.

I never really knew what it felt like to be able to trust myself, like trust myself in making the right decisions and taking risks and doing anything new or anything remotely scary.

But suddenly, time just felt short.

And so when this opportunity came up to not only help my brother but do something completely unlike myself, I, for the first time in my life, felt like I knew what I needed to do.

And so a few days later, despite my friends and my family telling me not to go, I was slowly and surely making my way across those state borders.

And by the time Herschel and I made it to our first stop in Flagstaff,

I was riding this high off of life, and we were about an hour away from the Grand Canyon.

And so the next morning, I woke up at 5 a.m.

I put Herschel in the car, and I drove us through these dark, snowy roads into the canyon to catch a glimpse of the sunrise.

And it was so cold that it even hurt to breathe a little.

But when the sun came up and the canyon slowly began to fill with this beautiful mosaic of blues and oranges, it all was just worth it.

It was so surreal to me how much beauty there was in this world that I had been missing out on, how it was all right within my reach, just right outside of my comfort zone all along.

Two days later, Herschel and I made it to Oklahoma, and the mission was a success.