CNN  —  She’d spent most of her life “checking off boxes” in order “to be deemed a success,” but as New Yorker Melissa Vargas approached her 30th birthday, she started to question the direction she was going in. While she was “killing it” in her career in digital marketing and had “done everything everyone told me I’m supposed to,” Melissa felt that she wasn’t “really experiencing new things,” and had gotten way “too comfortable.” After taking an extended trip to Europe for a wedding in 2016,