The Geography of No Longer Abandoning Myself

Today, I saw a post a friend had written last year while visiting us in Mérida. She was lying beside the pool, writing about how she always falls in love with wherever she travels and trying to calculate how she could stay and start a new life.

By then, Heather and I had lived in Mérida for six months. We had bought our house but were still living in Airbnbs, out of suitcases, speaking English and not having a clue where to find anything. Our home in Canada was waiting for us, with everything there still to deal with. We were somewhere between visitors and residents, trying to land.

Our friend arrived in the middle of that. She reads a room easily, and there was a lot of pressure in all of ours. She talked about how good she always feels on vacation. She does not want to leave her people, but she wants more.

Reading her post today took me back to the point before our move, when a different life had stopped being a daydream but had not become a plan. The moment when the feeling became serious enough to start doing the math.

I have a mind that can feel too much, think too much and spin sideways while trying to help and hold everything together. For most of my life, I was very aware of what other people wanted. I considered what they needed, how they might feel and whether something I did would affect them.

I could know exactly what I wanted until it conflicted with someone else’s wants. Then I shrank. The minute another person might be disappointed, I began questioning myself. Was it fair? Was I asking too much? Could I wait? Was it important enough to cause a problem?

Usually, I could tolerate things as they were. So I did. I thought I was being considerate. Often, I was. I also became very good at leaving myself out.

Then I would travel.

It should have made me more unsettled. I would arrive somewhere unfamiliar, with different customs, speech patterns, sounds and ways of doing almost everything. My mind was receiving more information, not less.

Instead, my thoughts slowed down. My shoulders dropped. I stopped replaying conversations and wondering whether I had said something wrong. My back, always locked and aching in Canada, released in the heat. The difference in my thoughts was strong enough that I came off my ADHD medication. My mind felt like mine.

This happened often. Not every time, but almost every time. Maybe it was the sun. Maybe I shut my brain off differently while I was away. Maybe everyone felt like this on vacation, and I had simply failed to understand the obvious purpose of leaving home for two weeks.

I would return feeling recharged. For a short time, some of it stayed with me. Then the pressure returned. I thought that was what vacation was supposed to do. You went away, felt better and settled back into your life.

Other people seemed to settle back in. I did not.

I missed knowing what I wanted before everybody else entered the room in my head. The more often I felt that difference, the harder it became to ignore. I had treated those trips as breaks from real life. I began to wonder what they were telling me about it.

Heather and I had talked about retiring south, but talking about something is easy. I needed to know whether I was responding to a holiday or recognizing something about myself. Could ordinary life feel this way?

On a two-week trip to Mérida in July, we sat in the pool looking up at the highest, bluest sky I had ever seen. We listened to tropical birds and, of course, the occasional firework.

We talked about wanting the tall skies, the sunshine, the heat. Streets alive with sound and community. We began talking about retirement and how we could make it happen.

This was not our life. We were sitting in somebody else’s pool in a country where we barely spoke the language, discussing how we might take apart everything we knew. We could always travel more often.

Then I thought about all the people already living in Mérida. That was a very large Petri dish of people proving it could be done.

We did not know whether it would work for us. I did not know whether the calm would last when the trip ended and regular life began. But through our conversations, the thought became something Heather and I were moving towards together.

We knew what we might be risking. Money. Relationships with friends and family. We sensed that the decision would not go well for some people, and it did not. We would have to learn a new culture and language, leave behind the ease of knowing how everything worked. We could do all of it and still find out that we were wrong.

Staying had a cost too. I could keep waking up with my back locked, spending so much energy trying to regulate myself. I could spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I had taken my own experience seriously.

I did not have the answer. I only knew I had to try.

I had always known how to make my own wants smaller until they fit around everyone else. This time, I let the thought remain.

When our friend visited last year, we were already living inside the consequences of that decision. I could not have explained the path this clearly. Her post brought its beginning back to me.

I do not know whether her experience is the same as mine, what she might decide, or what wanting more means for her. She does not want to leave her people. Whatever her path is, it belongs to her. But I recognized the space she was in, and it made me feel closer to her.

I had thought of our move as one big choice. Now I can see the smaller ones that made it possible: taking the difference in my body seriously, questioning why calm seemed available only while I was away, allowing what I wanted to remain visible when it conflicted with what other people wanted.

I miss people. I do not regret leaving. Both are true.

I left knowing it could hurt people and change relationships, without knowing whether I would succeed. I could no longer make myself smaller just to keep everything else the same.

I thought I was deciding where to live. I was choosing not to abandon myself again.