At some point, healing stops feeling like rest and starts feeling like stagnation.
Costa Rica and Nicaragua gave me what I needed when I couldn’t breathe: quiet mornings, manual labor, animals to care for, water hauled by hand, days without screens or meetings or urgency. Life reduced to the basics. Eat. Work. Sleep. Repeat.
It saved me.
But I didn’t come all this way to disappear.
There’s a moment in movies –usually somewhere between the midpoint and the third act where the hero has survived the worst of it, but hasn’t yet chosen who they’re going to be next. The wounds have closed, but the story hasn’t restarted. The camera lingers. The music drops out. You can feel the pause.
That pause was Central America.
I wasn’t running anymore. I wasn’t breaking down. I was functional. Calm. Steady. And strangely unmoored.
Healing created space.
But space doesn’t stay empty forever.
At first, I thought peace was the destination. I had chased it across borders and jungles and broken Spanish conversations. I found it in pools at sunset, in dogs sleeping at my feet, in mornings where nothing was demanded of me.
And then one day, peace asked a different question: Now what?
I realized I hadn’t lost my ambition –I had just buried it under exhaustion. I hadn’t fallen out of love with creativity –I had been too tired to access it. Wonder didn’t leave me. It was waiting for me to stop equating worth with output.
There’s a line in Before Sunset where Céline talks about the space between people how connection lives not in grand gestures, but in the quiet attention we give each other. That invisible space, charged and alive.
That’s what this moment felt like. Not empty. Just waiting.
Europe wasn’t another escape. It was an invitation. Spain and Italy represented texture again –cities layered with history, streets that demanded you look up, languages that bent your mouth into new shapes. Places where art, performance, ritual, and beauty weren’t side projects but part of daily life.
And somewhere in that decision was magic.
Not the pressure-filled, over-rehearsed, performance-anxious magic I’d burned out on. But the kind that made me fall in love with impossibility in the first place. The kind that asks, What if? instead of What’s the deadline?
Act I taught me how to survive.
Act II would ask whether I still knew how to participate.
I wasn’t healed. I wasn’t fixed. But I was awake enough to step back onto the stage.
The world hadn’t moved on without me. The curtain was still up.
And for the first time in a long time, I wanted to walk forward –not to prove anything, but to see what else was possible.