I ran away and I don’t regret it.

sometimes you just gotta go

If you’re reading this (my inaugural Substack article), you probably know me. Maybe we’re friends, maybe you’re my mum (hi, Mum!) or maybe you’re a relic from my past and we orbit each other on Instagram or Linkedin. Whatever the case, you probably know that I went to Mexico two years ago and never came back.

When I left I was thirty-three and I was suffering. 

I certainly didn’t broadcast that suffering on social media. Instead, I broadcast images of my brave and bold decision to go to Mexico, all alone, as I tried to stem the imaginary tide of judgement I had convinced myself I was receiving. 

Why would someone do that in their (nearly) mid thirties?

How sad, she’s all alone. 

She’s running away. 

In truth, I was running. Far, far away from everything that was making me miserable in Australia: all the friends I was losing to marriage and babies, all the terrible Hinge dates, a career I’d set on fire and crucially, my bone-deep loneliness. 

If I could just climb outside of myself, I thought, I might be less alone. I seemed to be my biggest problem. I know the logic doesn’t stack up (I moved 13,000km to a place where I didn’t know anybody and didn’t speak the language) – but intuition and logic aren’t the same thing.

Four months before I left, I had been dumped by yet another emotionally unavailable man (I’d lost count by then), leading me into a heartbreak that precipitated a three-month low-grade illness. My body was begging me to listen: you cannot go on like this woman, it pleaded with me. I promptly ignored the pleas and instead picked up freelance work which I would muddle through from my bed, in between bouts of tears. Soon enough I realised no-one was coming to save me. Not with chicken soup and a back rub, not with a satisfying career, and not with the big exciting life for which I had always yearned and had looked for in all the wrong places. 

Then somewhere in the midst of my dark night of the soul, it occurred to me that no one was holding a gun to my head, forcing me to live in a pool of my own tears. I could just… leave. And so, very quietly, I booked a flight to Mexico (for no other reason than my gut told me to), renewed my passport, packed up my life, sold my car, and slipped out of the country. That is to say: I ran. 

But of course, there's running from something and there’s running towards something. It’s impossible to tell the difference just by looking at said runner, without seeing what’s in front of, or behind them. It’s even harder to know when you’re the one doing the running. 

That time exists in my memory with the emotional quality of detachment. As someone who could have made an Olympic career out of holding on too tightly, that feeling – that floating – was like taking off a pair of tight shoes. However mad it seemed to the people around me, I felt like I had a fistful of knowing. Against all logic, I knew I was walking towards something, as much as I was running.

As I sat alone at the airport gate waiting for my flight, I cried heaving sobs. It wasn’t the self-wallowing sadness of the previous few months. Inexplicably, it was grief. Grief for a version of myself that was dying and grief for everything that version of me had endured. As I boarded the plane, I wasn’t entirely sure to whom I was saying goodbye. 

In the two years since, that feeling has become more and more familiar. It’s a return to something that has always been there. An essential truth, I suppose. And when that sleeping ‘something’ begins to yawn and stretch open, it can be scary as hell. There’s grief and there’s reckoning.

For me, there was the impossible truth that I couldn’t turn back, even if I had wanted to. 

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I’ve spent the last 2+ years figuring out what lies between the person I once was and the person I’m always (forever and ever until I die) becoming.

Right now, that person is someone who is (finally) healing long held attachment wounds in a healthy relationship, navigating life in a foreign city (hola! Who knew speaking Spanish could be equal parts joyful and humiliating), and connecting with creativity, spirituality – s o u r c e – and her intuition. 

Welcome to my Substack: The Return.

I hope you stay with me for its evolution.