Between the Pages and 8,000 Miles Away

Thailand to Tahoe

There it was, sitting on the hotel desk beside him.

A journal.

I was checking into my hotel in Lake Tahoe when I noticed it next to the young man helping me. Since I seem to have developed a habit of noticing other people's journals, I asked him about it. And that's when I met Techin.

I had no idea the question would take us 8,000 miles away. “I'm 8,000 miles from home,” he told me. Home is Thailand. And his journal, I quickly learned, has become one of the places he goes when that distance feels especially large.

“I write when I feel down, and sad,” he said. “I'm here alone. The first week away was really hard for me. I really missed my mom.”

That stopped me.

Because suddenly the journal sitting on the hotel counter wasn't just a notebook. It was a place to put homesickness. Loneliness. Thoughts that perhaps don't have anywhere else to go when you're thousands of miles from the people who know you best.

“Sometimes I write out songs, poems,” he explained. Then he used a phrase I haven't been able to stop thinking about: “I write about the bottom of my mind.”

The bottom of my mind.

Isn't that, in some ways, exactly what journaling allows us to reach? Not just the thoughts sitting conveniently at the surface, but the ones underneath, the things we haven't said aloud, the feelings we haven't quite figured out, the parts of ourselves that sometimes only emerge when there is a pen in our hand and a blank page in front of us.

“When I journal,” he said, it's “when I feel like I need to reveal something.” His journey actually began before Tahoe. “Back two years ago, I applied for a work and travel program,” he told me. In 2024, that program brought him to Yosemite. There, something clicked. “I went to Yosemite and I loved to connect with the world. I was in nature alone for three months.”

After returning home, he wanted that experience again. This time, he set his sights on Lake Tahoe. “I chose to come to Tahoe, and I fell in love with it,” he said. He had applied the year before and wasn't accepted. He tried again.

This time, he got in.

“Maybe God wanted me to be here.”

Listening to him, I could understand why Tahoe felt like the right place. He talked about nature as something restorative—something that has helped him through a period of tremendous change. The mountains, the lake and the outdoors have become part of his experience of being far from home. And this year isn't simply an adventure. “I stay here for one year,” he explained. “It helps me improve myself. And the language.” He is thinking about what comes next, too.

“When I go back to Thailand, it will help me find a good job, as I'll have experience working with people from around the world.”

That doesn't mean the year has been easy. In addition to missing home, he has dealt with practical challenges, including housing costs that increased unexpectedly.

But something else has changed since those first lonely weeks. “I finally made some friends.” He said he has made a group of Dominican friends, and some American friends, and now a little bit of Thailand makes its way into their gatherings. “I cook Thai food for them, and they hang out with me.”

I think that may have been my favorite part of our conversation. Eight thousand miles from his mom and his home, he has found a way to create a small community around him. He shares his culture through food. He explores Tahoe. He hikes. He paddles.

And he writes.

Even the journal itself carries pieces of the people he has met. A dragon drawn on its cover came from a friend, one of several drawings that have personal meaning to him. That's why he was so disappointed when someone later marked on the cover without realizing that the drawings already there weren't random doodles. They were memories.

Perhaps that's another thing that struck me about finding that journal on the hotel desk. We talk a lot about journaling as a way to record our lives. But his journal seems to be doing something slightly different. It's helping him live this part of his life. It holds the days when he misses his mom. The loneliness of arriving somewhere without friends. Songs and poems. Thoughts from “the bottom of my mind.” Pieces of people he's met along the way.

And now, increasingly, it can hold something else. Friends. Thai dinners shared with people from another part of the world.

Mountains.

Paddling.

Tahoe.

And the experience of discovering that sometimes the place you didn't get into the first time becomes exactly the place you needed to be. Maybe, as he put it, he was meant to be here.