Barbados, Caribbean, Life, Popular

But Did You Die?!? The Hangover Before Bangkok

6 February

So… where do I even start? I’ve been MIA, both from my blog and my life, since late October. I was still in Barbados the last time I posted, finally coming to grips (I thought) with where my finances were and unraveling the suffocating tie they’ve always had on my self-worth. Barbados was eye-opening for me in a lot of ways… I absolutely fell in love with the warmth, the beaches, and the people. The Bajan culture is open, welcoming, and fun, and I was starving for social interaction and water therapy way more than I realized. While in Barbados I connected with some amazing women, went on a few dates, and even met someone whom I came to love deeply but would ultimately be nothing more than the mirror I had unknowingly been avoiding for the greater part of my adult life.

When I started this journey back in March 2024, the primary goal was to use travel to get my finances in order. The logic was simple: It’s cheaper to live in almost any part of the world than in the States, so why not hop on a plane? At its inception I knew there would be elements of soul-searching and well, just figuring life out… and honestly, that’s what happened. In Barcelona, leaving the weight of over two decades of working myself to the bone, single motherhood, massive burnout, and constant grinding for a better life (but really, what does that look like?) put me in a state of near withdrawal… I was tired and unmotivated and content to just stay in my dark, cramped, and shared AirBnB for extended periods. It took me almost a month to even go to the gym, something so far out of the character of the person I had become over the three years prior, getting back to it felt like learning a new language. But eventually, the symptoms subsided, and I found myself with a renewed sense of purpose and a vigor to attack the goals I gave myself when I left the States.

At the time I just thought this was a cute picture/happy accident. Looking back though I see the exposure as so much more than a coincidence…

…the irony, and accuracy, of the imagery I was capturing doesn’t escape me…

For years leading up to my exodus it felt like I was drowning, barely able to keep my head above water, and constantly choking on the salt, tears, and trauma that were simultaneously pulling me under and keeping me afloat. By the time I left Barcelona, I could BREATHE again, and oh, how peaceful that simple action felt. Fast forward to July, when I was settled in South Korea and exploiting the type of focus I hadn’t felt since I owned my magazine and popped Adderall to work days on end over a decade earlier. The breath I found in Barcelona was about to leave my lungs once more; I had seen the writing on the wall months prior to leaving the States, which is what prompted me to look at alternatives to the broken promise of the “American Dream” to begin with. By July 7th, the bottom fell out: the tech start-up was no longer paying (8k per month GONE), the side-gig I locked down before I left the states restructured (4k-6k per month became >1k) and my “guaranteed” return on an investment I made eight months prior? Well, let’s just say “guaranteed” appears to have multiple meanings.

I went from pulling in 10k-14k per month to less than 2k, and I was still paying my son’s rent and helping him figure it all out (the irony of the statement “those who can’t do, teach” sounds right at home here). Yet, somehow, some way, I held it all together into my time in Barbados. By October, I had fallen behind on almost all of my bills, but the physical distance from the collection calls and snail-mail notices allowed me to separate myself from the reality of the situation, or so I thought. What was really happening under the surface of my perceived “okayness”, and what I didn’t realize at the time, was that I was giving up… physically, mentally, all of the above. The last several decades of stress and trauma and bad relationships and friendships and childhood bullshit was compounding exponentially, and I chose to remain blissfully unaware and willfully ignorant of what I was really feeling and facing.

And, while I never had a drug problem or addiction like Mr. Bourdain, my own vices have done their part to completely and utterly damage my ability to see the good and talent and purpose in myself, yet I can always find these things in even the most seemingly unredeeming of characters.

Enter the most “well-timed” distraction I’ve had to date. An unexpected, intense, passionate love that came out of nowhere, right on time, and was everything I thought I needed. We talked endlessly, spent almost every day and night together, spent time with my mom when she visited and honestly just had FUN. I felt a sense of love, care, and intention that I don’t know if I’ve ever had before. We claimed to love each other and foolishly made plans for the future, even reworking my travel plans to return to Barbados for several months starting on my birthday. The plan was to be together and see if this thing was indeed, a thing. But that day never came… by mid-January, the mask had fallen and it became all too clear that this unexpected love was nothing more than my own repeated mistakes and cycles of the past fifteen years. I thought I had done the work, created the self-love and exercised the awareness needed to enter into a quality, healthy, adult relationship. But that, like the belief I had finally found my breath, was a self-induced illusion. The relationship was over, my problems remained, and the intensity with which I thought my life was finally taking shape, was nothing compared to that in which my newfound faith disintegrated.

Finding solace on the beach…

…while my hair refused to stay on my head…

To say I have never been loved properly is an understatement, and if this past year is any indicator, and if I’m being truly honest with myself, it is in fact because I don’t know how to love myself wholly or properly. I often identify and empathize with lost and broken souls, I’m sure it’s because I myself am still lost and broken on some level. I mean, I idolize Anthony Bourdain… a tall, tattooed, amazingly talented, imperfect man and intoxicating writer, who found joy and meaning in traveling the world and experiencing new food, people, and cultures. He was a man who had the foresight and compassion to meet people exactly where they were, had just a few great loves in his life, one of which was his only child (sound familiar?), and yet still became so jaded with the world he took his own life at arguably the height of his success and notoriety. And, while I never had a drug problem or addiction like Mr. Bourdain, my own vices have done their part to completely and utterly damage my ability to see the good and talent and purpose in myself, yet I can somehow always find these attributes in even the most seemingly unredeeming of characters.

In the few months I’ve been back in the states, I’ve found myself identifying with AB more and more. My vision has been clouded, my decision-making questionable, and the awareness of the impact the last thirty years has had on me, physically, mentally and emotionally, seeping deeper and deeper into my conscious being. I haven’t been in a car accident in over 15 years, yet I’ve been in two in less than two months. I’ve lost so much “good” weight I’ve been battling body dysmorphia and my hair has literally been falling out… in CLUMPS. And while I would never follow in the last steps of Anthony Bourdain’s life, there have been more than a few nights over the last few months I made peace with the idea of falling asleep and possibly never waking again.

…not realizing how much “good” weight the stress was causing me to lose…

….until I got back to the States and really saw the physical change.

So where does that leave me now? Just a few days from my 40th birthday and with the fog of the last six months somehow finally lifting? I’ve spent the several weeks doing a lot of reflecting, reading, and reprogramming how I view things and speak to myself. And now, less than two weeks before I embark on the next leg of this phase of my life, I realize the beauty of being broke (not poor as that is a mindset I will no longer claim) and completely owning who and where I am (my credit is fucked… even if I caught back on everything today my credit will take YEARS to recover), and knowing I don’t want to live in the States permanently again anytime soon, is that I don’t need to kill myself to pay bills that are no longer serving me. Yes, I do have the “moral” and “societal” obligation to pay them back. But honestly? That’s tomorrow’s problem.

The joy of losing it all is the ability to start again however the fuck you want. I’ve spent way too many years, shit, decades, of my life, hiding myself, quieting myself, and making myself smaller for fear of what people will say and think. But I refuse to allow myself to be less than what I am any longer. What exactly does that look like? I’m not sure yet, but I do know it starts today. So, like I did before I got to Barbados, I want to lay out some clear goals for my time in Thailand. And while this will be longer (10 Months) in one place than what I did last year (3 countries in 9 months), I still plan on traveling and making progress with my finances, my own businesses and my physical and mental health.

As such, the goal will be to achieve the following before leaving Bangkok towards the end of November.

Be Social – While I definitely made some wrong choices in Barbados, forcing myself to be social and make human connections ultimately was more enlightening and needed than I realized.
Travel – Although my home base will be Bangkok, I plan on traveling to Singapore, Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Kuala Lumpur and Bali for at each a week each. Additionally, I’ll head down to Phuket for an extended stay when my Dallas girls come visit me in mid-October.
Get on a Set Schedule – I’ve been working remotely since 2012, and as my own boss since 2019. Add to that, I’ve been a single mom for twenty-one years, so the concept of setting and then actually adhereing to a schedule is foreign to say the least.
Full Spiritual Reset
Redirect Content Consumption – I’m on a mission to not only significantly reduce my TV intake, but also start reading more. The goal is to read AT LEAST one book a month. I’ve included two lists below (along with links to each publication), Books I’ve Finished, and as someone who can’t read just one book at a time, Books I’m currently reading:

Books Finished:
1. Call You When I Land by Nikki Vargas
2. The Brand Gap by Marty Nuemeier
3. What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter

Books Currently Reading:
1. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
2. Inner Excellence by Jim Murphey

That’s all I got right now, but I’ll update and round out this list before I touchdown in the Land of Smiles… if that’s not a damn sigh of what’s to come, then I don’t know what is 😀