Let's Not Play Small: A Memoir of Divorce, Healing, and Reinvention Through Solo Travel

For years, she did everything “right.” She raised a family, built a career, kept the peace, and smiled on cue. Her world was small, safe, and socially approved.Within one fateful decade, that carefully constructed world imploded with a breast cancer diagnosis and the unraveling of her marriage, leaving her the ex-wife of a man who was now dating men. (Not exactly the life plan.) The fallout laid bare her faults, fears, and insecurities; for a while, it felt like a battle for her very existence.In 2019, Dawn Ritter Fischer made the decision most people only daydream about. She left.Not for a vacation. Not to escape. But to find out what might happen if she stopped ignoring the pull for something more.What followed was a reckoning: the radical act of rebuilding her life from the inside out.She kept moving across seven continents, letting the road become both mirror and teacher. A cargo ship to Patagonia. Five hundred miles on foot across Spain. Months sailing the Caribbean, including a passionate, complicated relationship with a French sailor that blurred the lines between freedom, love, and illusion. Then came an unexpected stretch in a small village in India, where the world shuts down. Stranded by a global pandemic, she’s forced into stillness and into herself.Let’s Not Play Small braids practical wisdom into a story of desire, fear, and reinvention. With candor and hard-won insight, it confronts the expectations that keep women small and traces the inner work required to live differently, whatever that means to you, especially after a lifetime of being “good,” agreeable, and fine. Page by page, it invites you to get comfortable with the discomfort of change.For readers who love travel memoirs with emotional truth, in the vein of Eat, Pray, Love and Wild.And for those who feel the pull to go, the book includes a practical Solo Travel Toolkit with grounded guidance on:Planning and logistics (routes, timing, budgeting)Safety and risk reduction without fear-based rulesManaging anxiety, loneliness, and second-guessingHow to take the first step when you’re not “ready” yet Read more