Lost & Found with Karmen Wiid

The Realities of a Nomadic Life and What It’s Taught Me About Love, Work & Home (A Brutally Honest FAQ Session)

My first FAQ episode! 
We’re talking everything: solo travel, love, work-life balance, loneliness, heartbreak, creativity, and what “home” even means when you’re constantly leaving it.
This one’s honest and a little chaotic. Kind of like my life.
If you’ve ever thought about packing your bags and building a life on your own terms, I think you’ll find a piece of yourself somewhere in here.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel
📸 Follow along on Instagram
📝 Read the blog
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali
Join The Lost & Found Book Club
 
 

Rage to Reverence: How My Thinking About Feminism & Femininity Has Changed

From angry teenage feminist, scowling at boys who opened doors for me, to my misandry era, to now. In this episode, I trace how my thinking about feminism, and about being a woman, has changed over the past 12 years.
We’ll talk about casual misogyny, bad sex ed, double standards, feminist theory, Anaïs Nin, and why I now believe feminism is about the freedom to decide what femininity or masculinity looks like for you.
This isn’t a prescriptive episode. I’m not here to tell you what to believe. I’m here to offer you my story as an invitation: to explore what feminism, femininity and masculinity mean to you, and how to live them out in a way that feels completely, unapologetically yours.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel
📸 Follow along on Instagram
📝 Read the blog
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali
Join The Lost & Found Book Club
 

So I Spent A Month Bartending in a Hostel in Vietnam… Here’s The Real Story

One little decision “for the plot” landed me behind the bar of a hostel in Hoi An, Vietnam.
In this episode, I’m sharing the real story. From five-hour night shifts and crazy pool parties to found-family friendships, I’ll take you inside the chaos, the laughter, and the hidden curriculum of bartending.
I’ll also answer some of the questions I get most often in my DMs:
How I landed the job in the first place + what it entails 
Day-in-the-life: full-time remote work by day, bar shifts by night (was it worth it?)
Patterns you notice in hostels 
“For the plot” vs “for the résumé” decisions
Why I’m staying another month in Hoi An (and retreating to a beach bungalow to recharge)
Come sit with me, let’s catch up.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel
📸 Follow along on Instagram
📝 Read the blog
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali
Get $$s off Worldpackers 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

Book Club: Cannibalism as Feminism? Digging Into A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

What happens when a woman refuses to be likable, palatable, or contained?
In this episode of Lost & Found, we sink our teeth into Chelsea G. Summers’s provocative novel A Certain Hunger, a literary thriller about Dorothy Daniels, a glamorous food critic with big appetites: for food, for sex, and for human flesh.
Far more than a cannibalistic shocker, this book is a biting commentary on female desire, hunger, power, and storytelling itself. We unpack its themes one by one - female villainy as feminism, appetite as rebellion, consumption as intimacy, culinary satire, and the voyeuristic complicity of readers. 
Along the way I will draw on feminist theory, cultural criticism, and my own reflections as a reader who laughed, cringed, journaled, and sometimes even craved espresso while turning the pages.
Polarizing, visceral, and unsettling, A Certain Hunger refuses to leave readers unchanged.
📚 Plus, the big reveal of the Lost & Found Book Club pick for September: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.
✨ Join the book club and keep the conversation going! 
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 
📸 Follow along on Instagram 
📝 Read my blog 
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

Why Solo Travel Is the Most Empowering Thing You’ll Ever Do for Yourself

Why do I solo travel? It’s the question I get in my DMs more than any other. The truth is, it isn’t always easy. Yes, it can be lonely, intimidating, and even a little chaotic at times. But it’s also the most liberating, perspective-shifting, and life-affirming thing I’ve ever done for myself.
In this episode, I’m making the case for why everyone should take a solo trip, whether it’s a weekend getaway or a year-long adventure. I share the 12 biggest lessons that travelling alone has taught me: from breaking free of the “blueprint,” to learning self-reliance, deepening emotional resilience, opening yourself up to unexpected connections, and becoming the kind of person who trusts themselves fully.
If you’ve ever dreamt of booking a trip but felt too scared, or if you’ve been wondering whether solo travel is really worth it, this episode is for you. I’ll also leave you with a few journal prompts to help you uncover whose blueprint you’ve been living by, when you feel most like yourself, and what dreams you’ve been putting off.
Because once you experience the freedom of solo travel, you’ll never settle for a life that feels small again.
PS… this episode is based on a chapter of my book, Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide to Solo Travel. Check it out here.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📸 Follow along on Instagram
📝 Read the blog
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

How to Get Your Spark Back When You Don’t Even Recognize Your Own Life Anymore

This is the second instalment in our two-part Getting Out of a Rut series. It’s for those moments when you look around at your life and think, How did I end up here? When the spark is gone, the days feel copy–paste, and you’re mourning something you can’t quite name.
In this episode, I’m sharing the tools, experiments, and uncomfortable (but freeing) truths that have pulled me out of my own deepest ruts. This isn’t about surface-level fixes, this is about getting to the root. Stripping your life down to the base, figuring out the values you actually want to live by, and building something real from there.
If you’re ready to stop waiting for life to happen and start feeling like yourself again (or maybe for the very first time), this is where we begin.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 
📸 Follow along on Instagram 
📝 Read the blog 
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

How to Get Out of a Rut: 9 Practical Shifts to Feel Like Yourself Again

This is the episode I needed this week, so I made it for both of us.
If you’ve been feeling off… low on energy, creatively flat, stuck in a loop of procrastination and you just need something to shake you out of it, this one’s for you.
In part one of this two-part reset, I’m sharing 9 powerful, practical shifts to help pull yourself out of a rut and remind you who the hell you are.
We’re talking: how to shake off stagnant energy, work hacks that spark momentum instead of guilt, and tiny tweaks that break the loop and make you actually want to show up again.
Part two drops Monday, and yes, we’ll go deeper into the psyche, the philosophy, the identity stuff. But this episode is the reset. The beginning. The spark.
Let’s get you feeling like yourself again.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 
📸 Follow along on Instagram 
📝 Read the blog 
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

Book Club: Desire, Ruin, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves About Love (on Madeleine Lucas’s Thirst for Salt)

Our first Lost & Found Book Club episode is here and we’re starting tender.
In this deep-dive discussion of Thirst for Salt by Madeleine Lucas, we explore the slow ache of a relationship that never quite breaks, but hollows. We talk love and longing, emotional whiplash, age-gap relationships, unequal power dynamics, aestheticized sadness, and the fantasy of becoming someone through someone else.
Why do we stay in relationships that hurt so much? Is it love or just projection? And what does it cost to be the one who feels more?
If you’ve ever looked back on a past relationship and realized you were building a life out of longing, this episode is for you, whether you've read the book or not. 
Plus: our August book club reveal (it’s sharp, feral, and unforgettable).
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✨ Let’s Stay Connected:
 
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 
📸 Follow along on Instagram 
📝 Read the blog 
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

What 19th-Century Romanticism Can Teach Us About Navigating Our 20s and Feeling Alive Again

What if beauty wasn’t something soft and sweet… but something vast, dangerous, and soul-shaking?
In this episode, we dive deep into the Romantic movement - not dating apps or romcoms, but the 19th-century revolution of artists and poets who believed that awe, longing, terror, and wonder were not distractions from life but the very point of it.
This isn’t your high school English syllabus. The Romantics were obsessed with danger, desire, melancholy, and the sublime… that dizzying, breathtaking feeling that reminds you you’re still alive.
It was an art movement that inspired revolutions - the French, the American, the Haitian. Because to feel deeply in a disenchanted world is political.
And today, in an age of algorithms, apathy, and endless scrolling, it might be exactly what we need.
This episode is your reminder that feeling is a form of resistance. And aliveness is an art.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 
📸 Follow along on Instagram 
📝 Read the blog 
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club

Story Time: Reading You "The Fifth Lover" (Think Sultry Nights, Doomed Prophecies & Ghosts in Silk)

A bottle of whisky, a palm reader, a prophecy. And a night that unfolded like silk around the hips. Slow, hot, dangerous.
In this episode, I'm reading you my latest short story, "The Fifth Lover."
From rooftops in Northern India to the dark dancefloors where we lose ourselves, this is a story about what we remember and what we rewrite. About possibilities and dead ends. About the high of being young, untethered, and briefly, beautifully, unbroken. 
Until it all unravels. 
Is it a story or a memory? Real or constructed?
You’d have to listen to figure that one out for yourself.
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Let’s Stay Connected:
📕 Buy my book — Untethered: A Beginner’s Guide To Solo Travel 
📸 Follow along on Instagram 
📝 Read the blog 
🌴 Join my group trip to Bali 
Join The Lost & Found Book Club