Out of Pages, Not Places: Life Goal Achieved!

Throwback to this time in 2023, when I finally achieved one of my most oddly specific life goals: I slaughtered a passport. Every. Single. Page. Front to back. Wall-to-wall ink tattoos until the poor thing looked less like government ID and more like a graffiti project.

This obsession started years ago in the Denver airport bar. I overheard a guy on the phone, casually flipping his ragged, scarred passport like it was a family photo album. He said, “Yeah, I filled my passport again—need to get a new one.” My jaw hit the bar. Forget astronauts, rock stars, or Olympic champions—this random airport guy was my new personal hero. That was it. I needed to earn that line for myself.

And I didn’t want to cheat. I didn’t want to say “I filled it.” I wanted to live it—border crossings at dawn, mystery meat on a stick in some neon-lit night market, boat repairs that smelled like diesel and despair, friends made and lost across oceans, sunburns that could qualify as war crimes, and enough existential crises at sea to qualify for my own TED Talk.

Took just under 2 years. Two years of stamps stacking up like Pokémon cards, until one day that passport gasped, wheezed, and gave up. Every page, spoken for.

Now when I flip through it, it’s not just a passport—it’s my leather-bound autobiography. A travel diary written by border guards, ink pads, and the occasional confused official who spelled my name wrong. Every stamp is a photo album: the time the dinghy engine died at midnight, the time I danced barefoot in the sand with strangers, the time I realized I wasn’t just visiting places—I was showing up to life.

And when I renewed in Singapore in 2023? I went full send: got the 50-page jumbo edition.

A passport so thick it could stop a bullet. The War and Peace of government documents. We’ll see how long it takes me to murder this one. Spoiler: I’ve already started.