Daily Nurse: Finding Home

Aya’s nurse fellow, Zac Shepherd, penned this piece about how travel nursing helped him find home.

“Home is where the heart is,” they say. But for me, home was always more of a question than an answer. 

Growing up, we moved a lot. My parents were working hard to build their credit so they could eventually buy a house, but until then, we rented and moved often. Not in the “across the country, military family” kind of way, but enough that by the time I was 10, I thought moving once a year was just how everyone lived. Even when we finally settled into the house my parents still live in, I have to admit—North Texas never truly felt like home. 

I went to college there. Started my nursing career there. Paid taxes, voted, even had a favorite restaurant. I did all the things that should’ve made it feel like home. But that deep sense of connection that some folks have with their hometown never came for me.  

Something was missing, and I couldn’t ignore it. So after five years as a staff nurse, I stopped waiting for Texas to feel like home. I knew I wanted to buy a house one day, but I also knew I needed confidence that where I bought was where I wanted to stay. That left me with one big question: “How do I try out different places, different communities, different ways of living?” 

Enter travel nursing with Aya Healthcare. 

At first, travel nursing sounded like a clever solution for indecision (“Don’t know where to live? Just keep moving!”) But it turns out I was pretty good at adapting and found my rhythm in the 8-to-13-week assignments, town after town, with all the road trips and new environments. On the surface, it might have looked like restlessness or a fear of commitment. But for me, it was something different. It was an experiment. 

Over the next 5 years, I took assignments everywhere: Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, Newark, San Francisco, San Diego. In between contracts, I roamed—Nashville, Washington D.C., Flagstaff, Portland. I experienced more random local coffee shops, hikes and neighborhood walks than I could count.

I learned which Seattle neighborhood has the worst parking (Spoiler Alert: it’s Cap Hill), that Denver locals call it “Wash Park,” not “Washington Park,” that in San Diego, it’s “the 5”, not “I-5”—and that New Jersey’s nature actually lives up to the “Garden State” moniker. 

And then there were the conversations with patients and families in the quiet, in-between moments of care. They talked about their towns—why they stayed, why they thought about leaving. Some spoke with pride, others with longing. I thought I was just listening, but their stories were giving me a lens. Without realizing it, those conversations were shaping how I thought about belonging and about myself. 

Somewhere along the way, I stopped searching and started comparing. I’d reached a point where I had connections in so many places that leaving each one got harder. Every city taught me something: how I handle solitude, how I build community, what I reach for when everything around me is unfamiliar. It wasn’t that I was chasing a perfect place. I felt connected to all these places because I was finding pieces of myself in each one. 

In the arc of my journey, Denver was my first stop. At the time, I thought it would be just that—a starting point. But after every new assignment, I kept finding myself drawn back. I’d leave, explore, learn and return. Each time I came back, Denver felt different. Or maybe I did. What began as a single assignment turned into a pattern. 

It wasn’t just about the city, but about what I found every time I returned. Community. Coworkers who became friends. Relationships that became harder to leave behind. Places layered with memory. In Denver, I didn’t just see myself more clearly…other people saw me for who I was too. 

That’s why, after nearly seven years of traveling, I decided to stay. Last year, I bought a home in Denver. 

These days, I work per diem in Denver with Aya. I get to stay connected to the work I love, with enough space to keep exploring—this time from a solid home base. 

In the end, my travel nursing journey gave me answers, just not in the way I expected. It didn’t point me to a perfect city or give me an obvious sign. Travel nursing taught me how to pay attention to who I was, not just where I was. 

I found home because I stopped needing to find it.

Read the article on Daily Nurse.