A warm Hello to you, from Fairfax CA!

It’s time for an update. Much has come to pass, and much is in flux.

My 4 month Mexico trip has come to an end, and I’m officially back on US soil, enjoying some quality time with family and friends… and resting.

Read on to hear about…

• Finishing up my time in Puerto Escondido
• Oaxaca travel
• Homesickness, hating solo travel, and reckoning with health issues and a sometimes-sad heart
• New frontiers: facing the health challenge of Hypothalamic Amenorrhea

Goodbye Puerto Escondido

Ah, Puerto Escondido. My home for three and a half months, during a part of my journey where I started to try to peel back layers of stress in my life and turn towards my passions. The place where I quit my corporate tech job and devoted myself to Movement and Dance… and now, Puerto Escondido is a fond memory. A friend. Thank you, friend.

In my last days there, I felt like I was more able to spend time with the place itself. The Movement trimester ended. Friends left. La Punta felt calmer as it began to empty out and quiet down, “high season” coming to a close. Those of us who remained sweated nearly non-stop from morning to night as the season’s turning brought in higher temperatures. I was dancing, working on a solo Movement practice, having lazy afternoon coffee dates, saying goodbye to friends, and fretting over what to do next with myself.

My Movement school was done. My time in Puerto was done. That left me with myself, a sudden and terrifying void of commitments and plans, and a whole swirl of feelings and fears.

Now What? A Blank Canvas In Mexico

Past me was hoping that by the time I got to this moment, I would be inspired about a next step. Excited to travel more, maybe. After all, I don’t have a job anymore! No commitments at all! I’m free, right?

Wrong… I actually kind of freaked out and and froze up, terrified by my sudden lack of structure, plans, and commitments. Figures.

(Ugh, the dreaded deer-in-the-headlights, indecisive hell hole part of myself. Nooo, anything but that!!)

I thought about bus-traveling Mexico. Bus-traveling South into more of Central America. Hostel-hopping. WorkAway-ing. Visiting my ex. Staying in Puerto Escondido and doing another round of Dance and Movement.

Inside of all the options were endless questions for me. What’s most important? Keeping up my Movement practice? Studying TVM? Figuring out how I’m next going to make money? Doing healing work? Writing?

Truthfully I was wayyyy too mental about all of this… while actually ignoring the increasingly loud messages coming from my heart and body.

My body was telling me “I’m tired and I feel way too far away from home, which feels really scary.”

My heart was telling me “I miss my family. I’ve been gone for too long. I need my home and my people.”

I was okay when I was with others and swept up in activities… but my own truth would hit me when I was by myself.

Why didn’t I listen sooner? Why did I want to push my limits? For some fantasy about what a good, impressive young life is… rather than a grounded connection to my actual SELF and what actually matters to me.

It took me a couple more weeks of trying out the Solo Travel thing to heed the message from my inner wise self.

Solo Travel: Not My Greatest Passion

I had some hard moments in two weeks of traveling after leaving Puerto Escondido.

Don’t get me wrong, it came with its gems as well… But I was fighting a losing battle with my own energy, trying to make it work to “get the most out of my Mexico experience” before going home, with an empty tank.

I had five days of travel with Valentina, which mostly worked out well. We visited San Jose Del Pacifico, a beautiful little mushroom town in the mountains, and stayed at a meditation center. It was the perfect mountain retreat for two days. I loved being back in the mountains, though it made me feel my homesickness more acutely… the land felt familiar to my home mountains up north in California, yet in my body I knew I was still so far away.

Then we went to Oaxaca City, which I was endeared to almost immediately for its beauty and art and music.

I kept experiencing the same thing in different places… the high of being somewhere new, shortly followed by homesickness and a sort of apathy towards the travel experience.

Oh, Oaxaca City… I can see why people love it. I loved it! The place is bursting with a beautiful vibrant aliveness! And, unfortunately my inner self was really not excited about more travel. I missed my people. I missed home.

Then Valentina left, to stop over in Mexico City on her way back to the Czech Republic… it was very strange saying goodbye to my best friend from this little pocket of time, and our parting was marked by an odd mixed energy, both the love and celebration of our shared time and energy, as well as the rub of our diverging paths and purposes, swirled up in a rush of last-minute Oaxaca experiences.

It moved faster than I had energy to deal with, some of these transitions. It was easier to move from place to place with a buddy. And a lot harder on my own, with my whole little Puerto Escondido life in my heavy suitcase waiting to go home with me. I felt tired. I hated lugging that suitcase up and down hostel stairs and from place to place. But I trudged on for a few more stops.

My first solo stop was a WorkAway attempt, at an animal rescue north of Oaxaca City.

Nice place, but…. I felt wrong about being there pretty much immediately. I’d taken a chance on going, thinking it might be relaxing to do some volunteer work with animals and get to know rural Oaxaca. But I couldn’t override what I was experiencing physically… my body did NOT want to be there and literally itched to get away. I couldn’t sleep, because of heat and being bitten by bugs through the night. I lasted four days, probably due to bonding with another volunteer from Germany named Molle. I felt guilty for leaving early but proud that I heeded the message from my body, even if it was later-rather-than-sooner.

Beautiful fool that I am, I then tried going to another WorkAway place, a guest house closer to the city but tucked into the hills. This place was gorgeous, the owner was lovely and immeasurably kind. But a different version of the same thing happened: I couldn’t sleep. I had one of my worst nights ever, completely overwhelmed by a combination of heat, bugs, and incessant loud barking by neighborhood dogs.

Dear God, I am so so glad to be out of range of those horrible dogs now.

I’m sure if it was right-place-right-time, I would have been able to deal with all that stuff. But my nervous system was DONE with new places and I was at the end of my rope, and had apparently very little capacity to deal with demands on my system.

As my mom said to me on the phone, “Sometimes it’s just time for something to end.” That’s how my trip felt, at that point. Period.

I checked out the next day to go back to Oaxaca City and stay at a hostel in Jalatlaco for my remaining days, and I moved my flight home to be earlier.

Discovering My True Needs: Longing For Home

The mind can be seduced by fantasies and ideas, but it didn’t come from my mind.

It happened in my body, and the body doesn’t lie.

It happened in my heart, and the heart doesn’t lie.

I had so much excitement at my fingertips… so many places to explore… yet in my heart I was crying because I missed my family. And not just from this trip, but from longer… from a whole young adulthood of trying to go be something out in the world. Trying to go do or become something that could make my family proud. Meanwhile, being far away from the people I was born to… and accruing a debt of quality time and connection. This feels wrong and backwards to my soft inner heart.

My heart reminded me, in moments of feeling alone and far from home: while I am away, my parents are aging… My grandparents are aging… And I’m not there with them. It feels wrong.

When I’m out hiking by myself in the hills of Oaxaca, acting out some fool’s errand of proving that “I can do it!”, I’m struck with terrifying visions of getting hurt while hundreds of miles away from home, in a country where I barely speak the language.

Who will be there with me if something goes wrong out here? I can practice Faith that the Universe will provide and the world is full of kind strangers… but, even so, what if I don’t want my life to be so full of kind strangers? I need something stable, something that stays the same. I need my own people, people who stay together and grow together for the long haul. I need Home.

Years ago my brother and I talked about one day having a garden together. But I’ve never lived near him, not since being in high school. That’s the kind of broken dream my heart grieves for when I am out chasing adventures far from home.

I am “well educated” but somehow missed the crucial lesson on the importance of creating “Home”. Home was provided for me by my parents and family as best it could be… and a lot of what I took for granted was the feminine, nurturing kind of home-making that no one schooled me in, though my instincts now cry out in longing for it. It’s like I’ve been focused on how to survive like a Man in the world – how to make money, how to materially make ends meet, how to be strong and independent in my physical body and in my finances – but not how to be a Woman. Not how to rest, how to nurture myself, how to create a Home where I feel safe. Not how to live cyclically and in tune with the seasons.

I have all these missing pieces in my life, like a brokenness in my innermost being expressing itself in a life half put together and half falling apart, and it’s excruciating.

So this is the crux of what’s in front of me now. On the surface, it’s gridlock on my decisions about what to do next as a “nomad” in my “sabbatical” from my working life. Underneath, it’s a confrontation of these big questions of Life, and what matters, and how do I want to invest my energy for the long haul? What are my true needs? What does Home actually mean to me and how can I start making that real for myself?

Hypothalamic Amenorrhea & Infertility: The Body Doesn’t Lie

The other thing that was really weighing on me as my Movement trimester came to an end, and as I tried to imagine myself having more of a travel adventure and just couldn’t get fully on board with it… was a growing anxiety about my health.

I’ve been superficially focused on living a “healthy lifestyle” for a long time, by being very physically active and conscious of what I consume.

But it’s time to get more real… my “healthy lifestyle” was at least partially created by that foundation of fear. And the proof that it hasn’t actually been 100% healthy is that I haven’t had a menstrual cycle in almost two years.

I’ve self-diagnosed myself with HA – Hypothalamic Amenorrhea.

I’m immersing myself in all kind of material about it, finally… and it just fits.

Punch line: An over-taxed, over-stressed system. For most women it’s caused by a combination of under-eating, over-exercising, too much stress. Add time to that equation and you get a body that shuts down reproductive function to conserve energy.

This condition is sadly kind of normalized in our culture along with other menstrual cycle and fertility issues but it’s not a casual thing at all… it’s a base-level indicator of a health problem. It’s my body literally telling me “this is not a good environment to grow life.” It’s not something to ignore. It’s not something to run away from. And this is the thing I need to turn and look at, right now. The time has come.

I thought I could blame living in the city, or the USA in general… but I left, and though things maybe started getting better…. I still was not well.

I thought I could blame my work stress… But I quit my job, and though things did start feeling a bit better… I still was not well.

I left San Francisco with some fantasy ideas of traveling and chasing my passions and doing healing work… part of me thought my passion for Movement would heal me. But it may have been just another way I was adding stress to my system.

Much as I don’t want to admit it, all my active hobbies have been a kind of escape for me. Another kind of running away. I wanted to blame my job for my stress, but the stress has been something I’ve been doing to myself, and I’ve been doing it everywhere. How do I stop?

I’m just at the beginning of my “Recovery Journey” with HA, and hope to write and share about it as I go. There’s a lot underneath it with body image and perfectionism, and I know I’m not the only woman struggling with those patterns.

Following the Heart to Family and Rest

It felt really good to come home, and also really hard. Home is full of challenges: it puts me in direct relationship with my own story and history, and brings up feelings of shame for where I am in my life. All the stuff I was trying to run away from… is right here. And that’s hard to sit with.

At the same time, I have this renewed understanding of the importance of home and family. I have this North Star of my heart telling me that quality time here, with these people, really matters. It helps me to remember that and to practice gratitude.

This choice to spend time with family, combined with the choice to lean into the HA Recovery plan, which includes cutting out exercise and RESTING, something I’m terrified of… has meant I’ve been present with family in a way that I’ve maybe never been before as an adult.

I spent a couple nights with my grandpa and his long-term girlfriend for the first time in ages. We had a calm day together at home during my visit. Instead of getting antsy and going for a run to burn off energy, I sat and did puzzles in the newspaper while he read. It felt so… normal. Calm. Lovely. I remembered being a kid at his house, doing puzzles and reading.

I had a slow walk with my dad yesterday – “Slow Walk with Papa”, he called it with a laugh. He needed slow for his knees, and I needed slow to stay in healing mode for the HA situation. Old me was more concerned with fitness (out of fear!) than quality time. It feels hard but good to challenge that a day at a time and to try to discover restful activities that help me connect and be present instead of run away or try to prove myself.

Next I’ll be visiting my mom, which I’m really looking forward to, even though I know it will likely challenge me. I’ll be able to help her go through old photos and do other projects around the house.

My younger brother is getting married in a month and a half. My heart really feels this moment of change in my family, wants to be here for it. These are moments that I’ll never get back, I can only live through. Life really just keeps going, that force of change relentlessly (and gently, if I can let myself believe it) moving us along.

Okay with Not-Okay?

My whole sense of how to move forward is shifting. I’m letting go of plans and opening up to uncertainty and taking it day by day. Sometimes I am completely ashamed of how un-put-together my life is. Sometimes I am consumed by fear. This is NOT an easy moment of my life.

Sometimes I think it was brave of me to leave SF, and brave of me to quit my job, and that those decisions were honest… but now I’m really in the fire, and it can be easy to want to kick myself for putting myself here. It feels very unstable to not have a home or job. It sucks to be looking at health and fertility issues at age 31. I wouldn’t recommend this particular path of change – the “blow it all up” and figure it out method – to others!

On the other hand, maybe it really had to be that way, for me. My system is so wired for stress that everything feels stressful, even rest time. I think it’s going to take some time for that to calm down. I’m not actually in a life-or-death struggle right now – I’ve got time and resources, and I’m safe. Even if I don’t feel it yet.

Ultimately we can’t spend too much time looking back, or forward for that matter, and are better served attending to what’s directly in front of us. I have to accept Life on Life’s terms… and Live and Learn. I can learn to be okay with making mistakes. My prayer is that my life can be put back together in a way that will work better for me. And that I can deepen my trust in my heart and body in the process. It’s going to be a process. Everything won’t be fixed overnight. But it’s the journey, not the destination, right?

I hope to keep blogging. I like to write and share about the highs & lows. It helps me make sense of my nonsense, and also shows me how much nonsense I have — I’ll try to do better bit by bit <3.

Thank you for being here. I love it when people reach out after reading. What touched you? What’s simmering on your end? Will you let me know?

Also, what do you want to hear more about, as I journey forward?

With deep gratitude,

Emma