How a Writer From Texas Built a Life Around Travel, Storytelling, and Community
On any given day, travel blogger Helene Sula might be writing from a café in Europe, planning the next river cruise for travelers who now follow her work, or answering messages from one of the thousands of students learning how to build a life online through storytelling. To the outside world, it might look like the kind of life many people quietly dream about, traveling the world, writing books, building a community of people who feel the same pull toward exploration. But like most stories that appear effortless from the outside, the path that led here was anything but simple. To understand how Helene built this life, you have to go back to where it started.
Dallas, Texas.
Where the Story Begins
Helene Sula’s story doesn’t begin on a train winding through the Alps or in a glowing European Christmas market. It begins in Dallas, Texas. Her childhood followed the familiar rhythms of a classic Texas upbringing, Catholic school, Friday night football games, dance team, and sports. But one detail quietly shaped the direction of her life in ways she wouldn’t fully understand until years later. Her parents were college professors who led a study abroad program in London. Every year, Helene spent six weeks there. Those summers abroad became some of the most formative experiences of her life. While many children were experiencing the world through textbooks, Helene was already stepping into it.
As someone who now writes about travel myself, I couldn’t help but think about how early those experiences must have planted a seed, the quiet realization that the world was bigger than the one you grew up in. At the time, though, Helene imagined a life that looked much more conventional. Success meant stability. A clear career path. A plan that made sense to other people. She studied marketing at Southern Methodist University fully expecting that would be her future. The idea that one day she would be living abroad, writing books, running river cruises across Europe, and building a community of more than a million people online was never part of the plan. But as Helene says now, the plan was wrong, and she’s incredibly glad it was.
The Trip That Cracked Something Open
Before the books, the business, and the community of travelers who now follow her journey, Helene Sula was simply someone who loved to write and loved to travel. She married her high school sweetheart, Michael, and like many young couples, they started saving money with two goals in mind: buying a house and taking a trip to Europe. That trip would quietly change everything.
“I came home different,” she says. “In a way I couldn’t fully explain yet.”
The moment she said that, I immediately understood what she meant.
Anyone who has traveled deeply knows that feeling, the strange, subtle shift that happens when you return home and realize something inside you has changed. The world suddenly feels bigger, and the life you thought you were supposed to live begins to feel a little… smaller.
I’ve experienced that same feeling myself. Travel has a way of cracking something open inside you that never quite closes again.
Once you’ve seen what the world can be, it becomes very difficult to return to the version of life you thought you were meant to live before.
Learning to Start Over
Looking back, several moments quietly redirected Helene’s path. In college she started a dance camp and made $5,000 in a single month, an early glimpse into the possibility of working for herself. Later came the blog. Then Instagram. But the most transformative shift came when she moved abroad.
First Germany.
Then England.
Then France.
Each move forced her to rebuild her life from the ground up. Buying groceries required effort. Making friends required courage. Even filling out paperwork meant navigating a language she was still learning. As someone who has also moved abroad, I understood exactly what she meant when she described that experience. Living in another country strips away the comfortable assumptions you didn’t even realize you had.
“Each move stripped away another layer of who I thought I was supposed to be,” she says.
What remained underneath was someone she liked much more. In the process, she discovered something about herself she hadn’t known before. She was good at starting over. And when you’re building something from scratch on the internet, that turns out to be a very useful skill.
The Part of Success People Don’t See
From the outside, Helene Sula’s life now looks extraordinary. She has built a thriving online community, published books, and leads sold-out river cruises across Europe. But the path there was far from smooth. Building something online meant years of invisible work, creating, writing, experimenting, and showing up long before there was any evidence it would work.
She also tried many things that didn’t succeed. A t-shirt line. A candle business. Several other ventures along the way.
Listening to her talk about these moments felt strangely familiar.
Before finding my own path in travel, I had my share of failed ideas too, businesses that never took off, plans that looked promising at first and quietly fizzled out later. At the time, those experiences felt frustrating and sometimes even embarrassing.
But looking back now, they feel more like stepping stones. In many ways, I relate deeply to the invisible part of Helene’s journey, the part most people never see.
People often ask me what I do for a living, and strangely enough, it’s a question that still trips me up. The honest answer is that much of my time is spent writing, thinking about writing, or wishing I had more time to write. What most people don’t realize is that writing is actually what led me to everything I do now, the travel, the storytelling, the connections, the opportunities that have slowly started to shape my life. And yet, the surprising part is that the writing itself isn’t what pays the bills. At least not yet.
Like so many creators building something online, the work that means the most is often the part that happens quietly in the background, long before anyone else sees the result.
Most people assume success happens in one clean, upward line. In reality, it’s usually a collection of experiments, wrong turns, and lessons learned along the way. Helene’s story is a reminder that those “failed” chapters are often the exact ones that lead you to the life you were meant to build.
Storytelling at the Center of It All
Despite everything that has grown from her platform, the books, the business, the cruises, the audience, Helene still sees herself in the simplest possible way. A writer. “I’ve always been a writer at heart,” she says. “Both of my parents are.”
Long before there was an audience, she was writing simply to understand the world around her. Travel gave her stories worth telling. The internet gave her a place to tell them. And over time, those stories found people who felt the same pull toward the world that she did. That part of her story resonated with me more than anything else.
Because in many ways, I’m building something similar, a life centered around travel, storytelling, and helping people experience the world in a deeper way.
When I first began planning travel for others, I had a realization that felt surprisingly freeing. I didn’t have to live inside the traditional idea of success. I didn’t have to work a conventional 9–5 to “make it.” There were other ways to build a life. Travel showed me that. Writing helped me understand it. And like Helene, I’m still figuring it out as I go.
Building a Community, Not Just a Following
Today Helene Sula’s platforms reach more than a million people around the world. She has also mentored and taught over 4,000 students through her courses, helping aspiring creators learn how to build their own platforms and share their stories online while learning how to monetize social media in a sustainable way. Her course is actually the second one I’ve taken on building a platform online. The first course helped me get to where I am today, but I struggled to fully connect with the creator behind it. The instructor had the kind of perfectly polished travel influencer aesthetic that social media often celebrates, the kind of beauty and imagery that naturally captures attention. And while there is nothing wrong with that at all, something about Helene’s presence felt different.
She is undeniably beautiful, but in a way that feels relatable, grounded, and real. More importantly, she’s a writer. That combination, honesty, storytelling, and relatability, is what ultimately drew me to become one of her students.
The Moment That Changed Everything
One experience in Helene’s life shaped her perspective on travel more than almost anything else. In July 2005, Helene, her family, and Michael narrowly missed the London Underground bombings by minutes. Their train had broken down just before reaching the station. Standing there, they watched the news begin flashing across a screen, fifty-five people killed in the deadliest attack London had seen since World War II. In that moment, something shifted.
After that day, the question was never “Is it safe?” or “Is this the right time?” It became something much simpler. If not now, when? She got back on the Tube. And she never really stopped moving. When she told me that story, it reframed something for me too, the quiet reminder that life rarely waits for the “perfect” moment.
The Courage to Start Before You’re Ready
Despite everything she has built, Helene still describes herself in the most disarmingly simple way.
“I think I’m just very average,” she says. “But you can be very average and still live an extraordinary life. You just have to take the risk.”
And if there is one message she hopes someone reading her story takes away, it is this:
Start before you’re ready. Start when it feels messy. Start when it feels premature. Because the version of you who begins the journey cannot possibly imagine where it might lead. But you have to start to find out.
For Helene, that decision to start, first with a blog written during recovery from a climbing accident, then with stories shared online, eventually grew into a life built around travel, writing, and connection. A life that, from the outside, might look extraordinary. But listening to her tell the story, it becomes clear that the path wasn’t about extraordinary talent or perfect timing.
It was about curiosity.
About persistence.
About continuing to move forward before the outcome was certain.
And for those of us still somewhere in the middle of building our own paths, still writing, still experimenting, still trying to figure out where all of this might lead, that might be the most encouraging part of the story.
What Makes Helene Different
After spending time learning about Helene’s story, what stood out to me most wasn’t just the travel or the success she’s built online. It was the honesty. In a space where so much of the internet is polished and carefully curated, Helene speaks openly about the parts of the journey that don’t always look impressive from the outside, the failed business ideas, the uncertainty, the years of work that happened quietly before anything appeared successful. That honesty is likely part of the reason so many people connect with her work. Because beneath the travel photos and the growing platform, what she’s really sharing is something much more relatable. The experience of figuring life out as you go. You can follow Helena’s story on IG by clicking here!
Why This Story Resonated With Me
In many ways, writing this story felt less like telling someone else’s journey and more like recognizing pieces of my own.
When I first came across Helene’s work, I didn’t just see a successful travel creator. I saw pieces of my own story reflected back. The failed business ideas. The realization that success doesn’t have to follow the traditional path. The obsession with walking long distances through beautiful places in faraway parts of the world. The deep pull toward storytelling. There’s something incredibly powerful about seeing someone build a life that looks different from what we were taught to expect and realizing that maybe you can do it too.
That’s part of why I’m now one of her students. Not because she has everything perfectly figured out. Because she’s proof that you can be an ordinary person who decides to build an extraordinary life anyway.
Faces Behind the Places is a storytelling series on OurTravitude exploring the people shaping the way we experience travel. If you enjoyed this story, you may also enjoy meeting Jorge — a tour guide and driver from the island of Roatán who reminded me just how much the people behind a place shape the way we remember it.
