She had everything.
And she couldn’t feel a thing.
So she walked.
Almost every woman I’ve talked to has felt like I did at some point. You’ve won at everything – family, career, life – but something inside you feels wrong… and you don’t know what.
I faced my massive reckoning by walking 800 kilometres along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. That little hike changed the way I see the world – and myself.
The Sam I Am explores one woman’s search for meaning, miracles, and potato chips on the Camino de Santiago.
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Early praise for The Sam I Am
“I felt like I was walking on the journey with you. You made me burst out laughing and tear up at the same time.”
— Victoria M.
“I instantly connected to your way of thinking and will be adopting The Producers as my own way of looking at what is not within my control.”
— Inese P.
“For anyone who dreams of changing their life, this is an authentic, vulnerable, and honest example of the power of a walking pilgrimage and stepping away from your day-to-day life for perspective.”
— Elisa J.
One Woman’s Search for Meaning, Miracles and Potato Chips on the Camino de Santiago
“Maybe it’s not the daiquiri that’s broken.”
Sam Plavins sat in a Toronto convention centre, surrounded by thousands of the most successful financial advisors in the world, pretending to be one of them. She had the title. The clients. The gold business cards. She had built exactly the life her father had envisioned for her. And she couldn’t feel a thing.
The math in her life just didn’t make sense. The two kids plus the hot husband, even the semi-stoned sheepdog. Why wasn’t the formula adding up?
On the brink of cracking, Sam did what any self-respecting overachiever might: she bought a plane ticket and walked across Spain. Not because she had a plan. Because she had no other ideas left. Eight-hundred kilometres seemed a reasonable distance to sort out her shit.
Under a face-melting sun, she spent thirty-three days unravelling, while the Camino continued to get the last word. Pilgrim brothels. A bathroom floor reckoning. A truth she’d spent decades outrunning. And somewhere in the Meseta, between the nothing and the nothing, Sam found the one thing she’d been too busy to look for.
The Sam I Am is for every woman who has quietly given everything to everyone else and is starting to wonder what’s left of herself.
Where to get the book:
A book about giving yourself permission.
In a way, The Sam I Am is a permission slip. To shelve the guilt. To question everything. To be unapologetically, messily, honestly yourself. Even if just for 800 kilometres. We shouldn’t need the goddamn slip, but the invisible load that women carry is a real thing. I know this. Because I’m a real woman just like you, living in the real world.
My deepest desire is that someone picks this up and just breathes a sigh of relief from feeling seen. She decides to take the step. She doesn’t make excuses, she doesn’t bargain or grovel. She just… moves forward.
Meet Sam Plavins
Capricorn. Phone destroyer. The least-together woman on the planet, which is funny, because she’s spent a lifetime convincing everyone otherwise. Good daughter, good mom, good wife, good career woman. She was all of it, to all of them, all at once.
Then she put her life in a 28L backpack and walked across Spain to figure out who she was underneath all that.
Did Sam find out? You’ll have to read her book.
These days though, she’s done apologizing. For being late. For being early. For showing up with ten things falling out of her pockets. And when not writing her new romance-adventure series, she might actually be on stage. Dancing in heels or high-tops… depends on her mood. Of course, she could be out on the trail somewhere, chasing that elusive summit. Mostly, she’s just trying to take herself less seriously and smash the most out of this one and only life.
The Sam I Am is where it starts.
