Finding my voice in a world of opinions
the beginning of Abroad Perspective Travel
Take a group of people from different backgrounds, different socioeconomic realities, different cultures. Put them in the same room, for the same amount of time, talking to the same people, eating the same food, hearing the same music. Every single one of them will walk away with a different experience.
None of them are right. None of them are wrong.
Each has drawn their understanding from everything they know - and everything they don’t. What if, instead of judging the distance between those perspectives, we got curious about it? What if we asked why someone’s experience of the same moment was so different from our own, and actually listened to the answer?
That question is at the heart of everything I want to do here.
Why It Took Me So Long
I have aspired to write about travel publicly for years. Every attempt ended before it began.
It wasn’t fear of criticism that stopped me. It was something harder to articulate - a deep awareness that what I think and feel today may not be what I believe tomorrow. I’ve learned over time that my opinions evolve, my perspectives shift, and the more I see of the world, the less certain I become about the things I once held as fixed. In a world drowning in opinions presented as facts, I needed to figure out how to share my experiences honestly, not as truth, not as authority, but as a snapshot. A glimpse into how I see things at this particular moment, from this particular vantage point.
That’s all any of us can offer, really.
I am not an expert. I am flawed in more ways than I’d care to list. I have a raw sense of humor and an adventurous spirit that some people find refreshing and others find to be a lot and I’ve made peace with both. I’ve been lucky enough to travel extensively, to sit at tables I never expected to sit at, to hear stories I never would have encountered had I stayed within the comfortable radius of what I already knew.
That luck comes with a responsibility to pay attention. And to share what I notice.
What Perspective Actually Means
Perspective is something we talk about far too little, especially in travel.
We treat it as a destination, something you either have or you don’t. But it’s not. It’s a practice. It’s the ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable work of holding your own experience lightly enough to let someone else’s land.
I’ve come to believe that the more the world genuinely understands one another - not tolerates, not coexists with, but truly understands, the greater the chance that compassion crowds out ignorance. That’s not a naive idea. It’s actually the only one that makes sense to me after two decades of moving through places that look nothing like where I grew up.
Real luxury, in my experience, isn’t a thread count. It’s having your assumptions quietly dismantled by a place you didn’t expect to move you.
What This Space Will Be
Abroad Perspective Travel is where I write through all of it.
Some of what I share will be lighthearted - a sailing day on the Amalfi Coast, a boutique hotel worth every dollar, a meal I’m still thinking about six months later. Some of it will be more honest about what it means to put yourself out there in the world, to show up somewhere unfamiliar and let it change you.
I’ll bring my camera, my curiosity, and an open itinerary. I’ll share what I find. And I’d genuinely love for this to become a conversation, not just my perspective, but a place where yours has room too.
Because that, ultimately, is the whole point.
Heather Devitt writes about travel, culture, and the quiet shifts in perspective that happen when you pay close attention. She is based in Chicago and is rarely there.
