How do I begin to describe how my life has unfolded over the past decade? When I tell people I showed up in the Bahamas on my sailboat to a remote and breathtakingly beautiful island, met my future husband, and then spent those earlier years island hopping around these strange lands, I generally get a look of disbelief. A reality tv show couldn’t compete with what I’ve seen and experienced. And I’m not trying to brag, it just is what it is.
The weather has been lovely, but it hasn’t been all rainbows and unicorns. The highs have accompanied colossal lows. I’ve realized that just because you change your external surroundings, doesn’t automatically change things within.
Throughout it all, I’ve shared my stories by way of written words. My early days of writing began with documenting my travels on my 32’ sailboat Pegasus. I had a sail blog when blogging was just emerging. It was a no-frills site but it was fairly popular with my family and other adventurers that I met along the way. When I set foot on land again, I started another blog called Wine Glass Beer Stein, a tribute to food, craft beer, and tasty wine. Once I was firmly rooted in the Bahamas I created the brand Out Island Life and began writing for an online publication called Women Who Live on Rocks. My love/hate with the islands (or I should say, the reflection of my internal challenges) was shared through satirical stories. The blogs became an outlet, and a way to maintain my sanity by sharing some of the outrageous scenarios I experienced. Out Island Life grew and gained popularity, and eventually led to writing two books; a travel guide to the Bahamas and a relocation guide called Escape to the Bahamas.
At some point in the midst of all this, I hit a major low. Depression set in. I was ironically living in paradise, and simultaneously the most miserable I had been in my life. People would tell me how lucky I was to be living in picture-perfect Harbour Island, and I’d just scoff and find something to complain about.
Remember when you were young and you let your imagination take over? Remember the feelings of Christmas? The smell of freshly blown-out candles on your birthday? The fragrant scent of grass on a warm summer’s day? Sensations that invoke a sense of anticipation, elation, community, and kindness. Over the years those things that used to excite you begin to fade away, and one day you wake up and wonder if anything will ever make you feel happy again. You wonder…is this it?
As happiness seemed to become more fleeting, I grasped onto a yoga and meditation practice to attempt to find grounding. It took me years of fumbling through therapy, plant medicine, energy healing, self-help books, and various other modalities before I finally began to feel like myself again. Sometimes a healing journey is just a slow unfolding, layer after layer of pain, peeled back and exposed and gently nursed back to wholeness. Maybe you never even realize what you healed, but one day you feel like you have breathed life within you again. I can now hear the call to adventure, after so many years of an anxiety-driven inability to leave the house.
Speaking of the house, maybe you are aware of the house we’ve been building around us for the past 10 years. When I met my husband, he had a shell of a structure up on the hill overlooking the ocean. Four concrete walls without a roof. We spent years living amongst 2x4 framing and bare concrete floors. That story deserves its own blog post, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but I do realize that the house has been a reflection of the chaos of my internal world, the unhealed parts, the angry parts, the sad and abandoned parts. Slowly as I healed myself over the years, the house began to come together, until finally, we are nearing completion. With completion comes freedom.
And with that freedom, I have a choice to make. I could stay in this giant mansion overlooking the ocean, host fabulous parties, and show off the fruits of our difficult labors, or I could set sail again. That same call that led me to the Bahamas so many years ago has returned to haunt me. It’s Mexico whispering to me this time, ven acá.
What I hope to do now, is to go back to sharing experiential stories. I know I have another book in me, but now is not quite the time. Now is the time for short stories of lighthearted adventures. When I look back at my blog posts on this website over the years, there’s a lot of darkness there, and a lot of posts under the category Overcoming Adversity. While it can be therapeutic to share those stories of struggle, I think it’s time to bring some fun back into the mix. So, let’s open up that book and start a fresh new chapter, together.
