Airports are strange places. They hold a kind of suspended time, a limbo between what you’re walking away from and what you’re heading toward. I’ve passed through countless gates in my life, but there’s one I still think about. The one where I walked away from Hollywood.

It wasn’t just leaving a city. It was leaving ten years of sweat, auditions, rejections, near-wins, and tiny miracles that somehow stitched together a life I thought would never unravel. Then COVID came. And like it did for millions of others, it unraveled everything.

I remember standing there at the gate, angry in a way I had never been angry before. Angry at a virus I couldn’t see, angry at the industry I gave myself to, angry at the helplessness of watching everything I had worked for slip through my fingers. I wasn’t heartbroken, I wasn’t grieving... I was furious. Furious enough that stepping onto that plane felt like slamming a door.

In the years since, that anger has softened. It’s no longer rage that fills me when I think back. It’s something quieter, sharper, a little more painful... regret. Not the regret of leaving, because deep down I know I had no choice. The regret is in how I sometimes see myself through other people’s eyes. A has-been. Or worse, a never-was.

It sneaks up on me at the strangest times. I’ll be watching a show and suddenly recognize a name in the credits ... someone I shared an audition room with years ago. Or I’ll see a peer on TV, their career finally catching fire. I get happy for them, genuinely. But there’s always that small atom of thought... what if that was me?

And yet... I didn’t fall into nothing. Saudi Arabia welcomed me in a different way. I didn’t return as the star I once dreamed of, but as something steadier. I became a high school principal. A position that sounds far from the spotlight, but in its own way, it is one. Every day, I stand in front of an audience. Every day, I shape a story that’s bigger than myself. And the kids ... they don’t see a has-been. They see someone who shows up for them. That’s more rewarding than any credit scroll.

Still, I’d be lying if I said the regret never taps me on the shoulder. Sometimes it whispers, maybe you quit too soon. Sometimes it sneers, maybe you couldn’t have handled it anyway. And sometimes it just sits there quietly, reminding me of that gate.

But here’s what I would say to the version of me standing there all those years ago, boarding that flight in anger: don’t be mad at letting go of this.

Because letting go didn’t erase the years I gave. It didn’t erase the grind, the auditions, the late nights on sets, the tiny breakthroughs. All of that is still mine. What it gave me was something different ... the chance to rediscover patience. The chance to believe in a comeback, not the one I demanded, but the one life chose to hand me.

And that’s the quiet truth of airport gates. We think they’re about endings, but they’re really about waiting rooms. Waiting for another flight, another chance, another way of being seen.

So if you’re standing at your own gate right now, angry or afraid to let go, know this: sometimes leaving doesn’t mean losing. Sometimes it means giving yourself space for the kind of return you never knew you needed.

Because the tide does come back. Maybe not as the wave you wanted... but often as the wave you needed all along.