The Cabo Chronicles, Vol. 1: We Announced Cabo and Jada Already Has Us in Customs

9:23 AM. My coffee is still hot. The chaos is not.

I sent one message. One. "Block the dates, look at flights, more details coming." That was it. That was the entire ask.

Twenty minutes later I am now the designated passport attorney for five grown women who have been to international airports before.

Jada — God bless her — cannot let anything breathe. The announcement was barely warm and she already had a TikTok queued up about customs detainment. And the thing is? She's not even wrong to ask. She just could not wait thirty minutes. And now Nia is second-guessing her own passport, Maya doesn't know if hers is expired, and Kendra — the Maid of Honor, the woman with the official title — has already volunteered me to handle it and gone back to sending heart emojis.

This is how it starts every single time. One person panics, it spreads, and suddenly the organizer is the one doing three hours of government website research before she's even finished her morning routine.

I have a full-time job. I have a whole life outside of this group chat. But from the moment I hit send on that announcement, I became the unpaid travel coordinator, the anxiety buffer, and the human equivalent of a FAQ page — all before 9:30 AM.

What I actually need is something I could just drop in the chat. One resource. Clean, official, no-drama — something that answers Jada's question, calms Nia down, and reminds Maya that passports are a thing she should probably check. Without me having to spend my lunch break on the State Department website building a custom explainer for people who have known about this trip for eleven minutes.

But that doesn't exist. So here I am.

Next week I'll fill you in on the next problem — because once the passport panic settles, I still have to figure out how to actually get five women organized across four different apps, two spreadsheets, and a group chat that already has too much going on. And if I know this group, that's going to be its own situation entirely.

Unbothered. Moisturized. Lying about both.

— Chloe