My name is Tuggle. I’m a TV producer and writer with an incessant voice in my head that’s screaming at me to live a life of adventure, despite my best attempts to settle into a routine and just get some damn sleep. I write here about trying to satiate that voice, in addition to other things important to me.
Who does the voice belong to? Maybe it’s my anxiety. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s me – my most essential self, the version of me who says yes to everything, has no fear and wants to squeeze the most out of every single precious second on this terrible, beautiful earth, no matter how painful it can be here sometimes.
The Evolution of The Tuggle is Real
If you want the longer story, here it is – I started this blog in 2013 as a personal experiment. I wanted to see what would happen if I committed to doing one thing a week that scared me. I called the blog An Adventure A Week.
At that point, I was 27 and working non-stop as a reality TV producer, but I needed something to strive for outside of the career I’d thrown myself into for the past 6 years. While I love what I do (and it can very often be an adventure in itself!), it wasn’t satiating that inner voice to work 100 hours a week making TV. I didn’t want to believe that travel bloggers and full-time adventurers were the only people out there really living, doing crazy cool adventurous stuff. I wanted that life for myself, and this was my chance to make that happen.
Turns out, a lot can happen when you start making a habit out of adventure. You meet fascinating people. You learn amazing things about yourself and the world. You notice opportunities you didn’t see before. You get more excited about your days when you start having new things to look forward to. You start wondering if doing the same thing day in and day out is the best option, or even healthy for you.
When I turned 30, I sold most of my possessions, put my career in TV on hold, and set out to look for adventure on a full-time basis. Almost a year later, I returned to the states, to my job, and to my life, with a completely new view of the universe. I took a 5 year break from writing, which meant this blog sat collecting dust. The early years of my 30s were some of the best of my life – I developed incredible life long friendships, my career reached new heights (through insanely hard work!) and I even managed a few adventures in between, including a Kilimanjaro summit and a two month trip around the Mediterranean.
But after the ultimate year of monotony and stress in lockdown (I’m looking at you, 2020), I decided to tap back into that pushy inner voice, dust off the keyboard, and seek out more extraordinary experiences to write about, because dammit – that voice won’t go away. So in 2021, I picked back up where I left off and renamed the blog The Tuggle is Real.
Shortly there after, my life unraveled in epic fashion over a year. A failed engagement and crushing breakup. A medical scare that started with an ER visit and ended 6 months later with a surgery. The death of my dog. Getting covid. Being forced to find and move into a new place. And the absolutely worst thing imaginable – the sudden death of my sister.
I started writing again out of necessity – I needed a way to process the hardest time of my life and find an outlet for my grief. I’m still wading through it, and I’m not sure who I’ll be on the other side of it. But if there is one thing this adventure experiment has taught me, it’s that we, as humans, are capable of far more than we think we are. We just have to listen to the voice.
