Brave-ish: One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless After Fifty

Book excerpt: Newlywed Niver was on the adventure of a lifetime. She had quit her job, rented out her condo, and was traveling around Asia. To the outside world, Niver was a woman living out her dreams of exploring ancient ruins in Cambodia and seeing orangutans in Borneo. In private, she was keeping a dark secret. But, when she found herself lying on a sidewalk in Thailand, looking up at the sky in severe pain, she knew things had to change. At age forty-seven, Niver found the courage to set course on a new life. Feeling like a failure, pushing fifty, and moving home to her parents’ house to start again from scratch, Niver started taking one tiny “brave-ish” step at a time to take her life far away from the old one and into the adventurous world of travel writing. These small hurdles led to the challenge of trying fifty new things before turning fifty. From diving into shipwrecks, swimming with sharks, bobsledding at 3 Gs, to indulging in wild escapades, Niver found herself traversing the world on a journey of reinvention, personal growth, and discovering what it actually means to be “brave.” While Brave-ish chronicles Niver’s inspiring expeditions to distant corners of the world including Myanmar, Cuba, Morocco, Kenya and Mongolia this is more than a travelogue. Niver’s story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of perseverance. Brave-ish inspires readers to dream big, take risks, and embrace the unknown to create a life filled with wonder and excitement, even when courage seems elusive.