I built a life in Houston, Texas for 7 years, and now I have to dismantle it and somehow make it fit into a suitcase and a backpack.

When I first started thinking seriously about leaving, one of my immediate concerns was extremely practical. What the hell do I do with the TV?

The little things, I can deal with. I can pack clothes, sort through books and plates. I know how to make piles for keep, sell, donate and trash. I’ve moved addresses before, all by myself, so packing, unpacking, labeling, hauling and everything involved in dismantling and mantling a home are not alien concepts to me.

It’s not that I’m particularly attached to these possessions, but it’s more of a logistics thing.

The Things That Don’t Fit

The TVs, the bed, the couch, the ottoman, the full-length mirror… those things don’t fit in my cute little hatchback.

Not to mention, I’m no weightlifter. How do I physically get this shit out of my apartment?

This is one of the uglier sides of independence that doesn’t make it into inspirational reels on Tiktok or Instagram. I’ve become so good at doing things myself that I have become very bad at asking people for help. And when I realized I didn’t exactly have a village standing by, well, I accepted my fate.

I’m at the mercy of places like LoopDeco, Houston Furniture Bank or GoLoadUp, which I have actually used before and highly recommend.

Frankly, doing this alone isn’t new. That’s probably why it feels familiarly difficult, if such an adjective exists, because I’ve done this before and I know I can do it.

The only difference is this time, the move is semi-permanent and unidirectional: out of the United States.

And while I’m perfectly capable of packing and sorting the multiple glasses and mugs myself, I will admit that it would be nice to have another person who’s as invested and as into it as I am.

No, I don’t need another human being to function, but this would just go so much faster if somebody else is packing up the kitchen while I deal with the bathroom.

I’ve always understood “independence” as not being reliant on someone/something in order to function. So yes, by that definition, I am independent. Doesn’t make it any more fun, or less isolating, though.

It turned out that the furniture was the easy part emotionally.

Proof That I Was There

The harder things were the little pieces of other lives I had accumulated along the way. I like buying souvenirs from my travels— usually magnets and pictures/paintings— but over time, I gravitated more towards things that I could actually incorporate in my daily life, like an alpaca throw, a choreador from Costa Rica, a tapestry from Peru, a 2-in-1 bonnet/balaclava from Ecuador, coasters from Spain.

These things weren’t just for reminiscing, nor did they just sit untouched on a shelf. I actually used them.

And maybe that’s why it was harder to let them go, because they were both memories and ordinary household objects at the same time. They were proof that I had been to places I once only read about but they had also quietly become part of the background of my everyday life.

After a trip, I get post-travel blues and everything seems unreal. I remember thinking more than once, if it weren’t for the pictures, I’d think the trip didn’t happen. Of course I knew it happened, but memories blur surprisingly quickly. Having those objects remind me that yes, I went to those countries because how else would I be draped in an alpaca poncho in the middle of the Houston heat?

As much as I treasure these mementos, however, I know I need to get rid of some of them. Of course, a twinge of sadness washes over me each time I deliberate whether to put this magnet in the Keep box or donate it.

But maybe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

When you finish a book, you reach the last page and close it. The story didn’t lose value just because it ended. The story stays with you long after the final chapter closed, and there is actually something satisfying about completion.

So, I kept some things. Some are coming with me. Some went into what I have started calling my “Shit-hits-the-fan-and-we’re-back-in-Texas box”. Others, unfortunately, I decided to donate.

Not because those things meant less, but I fully understand that something simply gotta give if I want to move forward.

The same thing goes for my nursing career.

So, What Do You Do?

For fourteen years, I have been a nurse.

And now, I’m not working as one.

That should be an easy enough sentence to say, and technically it is. The problem is when somebody asks, “What do you do?”

I fucking hate that question, because… what do you mean, what do I do?

Do you mean what do I do for work? I don’t work at the moment.

You mean, what am I doing in your country? Galivanting.

What do I do with my Tuesday afternoons? Scratch my non-existent balls.

It annoys me for the same reason “Where are you from?” annoys me. Do you mean where I was born? Where I live? Where I was immediately before arriving here? My ethnicity?

Why can’t people just ask what they actually want to know, for Christ’s sake.

For most of my adult life, the answer to “What do you do” was easy:

“I’m a nurse.”

Now, the technically accurate answer would be, “I’m a nurse but I’m not currently practicing.” But that sounds like an explanation when nobody asked for one.

But saying “I’m an English teacher”, isn’t accurate either because… I’m not. I teach Medical English and IELTS Preparation. I teach how to English in healthcare, if that makes sense. Please don’t come to me asking about the present perfect tense because we’re both gonna have a bad time.

So perhaps, for the foreseeable future, my answer will simply be, “I’m traveling. Nice to meet you.”

The One Thing I Know How to Do

You know, the weird part— now that we’ve talked about nursing—is that nursing itself gave me very little beyond money.

It’s not as if my numerous encounters with life, death, and literal shit were good material for writing my blog. It didn’t feed my creativity. If anything, it dried up all my creative juices because nursing isn’t a profession where creativity is particularly encouraged. There are protocols, standards, policies and procedures, and there are very good reasons why you cannot decide to origami your way through a central line dressing change.

It did not give me a deeper appreciation of life either. You’d think that after seeing people get back from the dead — we call it ROSC but y’all can call it the miracle of life or God’s plan— I’d get some enlightenment and be on my way to Nirvana and be the Sage of the Six Paths (wait, am I confusing Naruto here?).

Actually—no. Years of exposure to illness, death, infections and dysfunction deepened my cynicism and pushed me into periods of depression and borderline alcoholism.

And obviously, nursing did not make me happy because if it had, I probably wouldn’t be throwing away a perfectly good, stable American life to embark on a midlife-crisis-fueled sabbatical.

Nursing, to me, was a parasite that fed off me, and the product of its metabolism is the ever-coveted money.

At least here in the States. I heard that other countries have it shit in terms of monetary compensation. My condolences, fellow RNs.

_{(On that note, y’all wanna get the US nurse money? Come study Medical English with me, and let me teach you how to talk back to racist mfers without losing your license. Just kidding.)}

Still, I can’t pretend nursing is irrelevant to me now just because I quit my job.

I just closed the door on nursing, but I didn’t lock it. And it isn’t one of those steel doors I’ve slammed shut in my lifetime.

What I’m saying is, I am aware and I fully accept the very real possibility of returning to nursing if the situation requires me to.

I built a fourteen-year career, and I know that even if I walk away from it for a year or two, that history is strong enough to get me through at least an HR interview if shit hits the fan.

That is simultaneously comforting and irritating.

Comforting because I have a fallback.

It’s irritating because I spent so much time being a nurse and not being anything else, that I don’t have many other marketable skills that I can leverage. For instance, I cannot bake cookies for money. I cannot get a gig as a barista without quitting by lunchtime from all the different sweeteners and multiple pumps of breast milk, and what the fuck is an Oleato?

I cannot teach little children without somebody eventually crying, and there is a decent chance that person would be me.

I can’t even make cute arts and crafts to sell on Etsy without slicing off my finger.

But fuck it, give me a Foley catheter and I can get that fucker into a female urethra with one hand tied behind my back.

Building My Own Safety Net

For some people, a sabbatical is a break. They stop doing their jobs for a while, go somewhere, get some rest, see some things, and when they have had their fill, they return to their previous lives refreshed and ready to resume what they’ve left behind.

Mine is different.

Mine is an experiment to see if I can be anything other than a nurse.

More specifically, it is my attempt to find out what happens when nursing becomes an option rather than the default.

Now, because this is an experiment— and as a Taurus, I’m quite risk-averse— I tried to make this as safe as reasonably possible.

I’m talking about savings. Emergency funds. Credit cards. My nursing license. My American citizenship. Friends in Houston. Asset liquidation. Return plans. Backup plans. Backup plans for the backup plans.

It might seem like overpreparation for others, but to me, who doesn’t have inborn security nets, I gotta make them myself.

I learned early on in life that security is necessary. That money matters.

If I had twice as much saved, I’d feel safer. In no universe will I ever bullshit myself into pretending otherwise.

Originally, I set my emergency fund at $10,000, and then realized after more research and planning that I had underestimated what returning to Texas would actually cost. I had not properly accounted for things like one or two months of rent deposit depending on the landlord, transportation costs while looking for another car, and all the other annoying little expenses involved in rebuilding a life from scratch.

So, I increased the budget. I did the same for all the other funds and the entire timeline, in fact.

Just to be clear, though, that wasn’t anxiety moving the goalpost for no reason. It was better information producing a better plan.

The same thing happened with the way I wanted to travel.

At first I thought I could simply enter countries as a tourist and leave whenever my allowed time is up.

Then I remembered who I am. I’m brown, broke and third world… and a Taurus. And I’m also too old for that backpacker shit.

I don’t want to spend months hopping from one hostel to another, dragging my entire life behind me and sleeping in bunk beds beside eleven strangers, pretending to be a social animal. I need a base of operations, so to speak. Somewhere I can stay long enough to establish some semblance of life.

That was why the Ecuador professional visa mattered so much to me. It represented stability.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the same privileges as some people do, so I tried to manufacture my own stability.

But then my beloved alma mater, FEU, happened.

When Plan A Goes to Shit

Without turning this into an essay about Philippine politics and bureaucracy, there were documents required for the professional visa that depended on my university cooperating with requirements from SENESCYT. What followed was the same bureaucratic red tape and buck-passing I grew up with, apparently preserved in fucking adobo marinade and completely untouched by time.

Putangina was said an unmeasurable number of times.

I had a genuine crashout because for a moment, it felt as though the whole sabbatical had collapsed before it even started.

Eventually, after the anger subsided enough for my brain to return to focus, I realized something painfully obvious:

A detour is simply a detour.

The road did not disappear, Point B is still there, and Ecuador didn’t evaporate.

The professional visa was just one way of entering the country. In fact, Ecuador itself is just one country out of the entire South American continent, and the rest of the world.

That means I can still enter Ecuador as a tourist, stay, and leave when I need to. If it doesn’t work, then there are other countries.

Honestly, that isn’t my ideal path, but that’s the one available to me so I’ll make it work.

Weirdly, that whole experience made me both more relaxed and more structured at the exact same time. I’m more relaxed because I realized I no longer interpret a failed plan as “abort mission”. It simply means, let’s pull up Plan B.

But that flexibility only works because I have other plans waiting. There would be no Plan B to pull when Plan A fails if I never bothered creating Plans B through Z.

So I still need structure.

Apparently, These Are the Necessities

A funny discovery I made while I’m getting rid of seven years’ worth of possessions is that I keep finding things I genuinely need for the next version of my life that I did not own before.

Things like:

-Immodium

-Pimple patches

-a compact backlit keyboard

-a second monitor

Apparently, after disposing an entire apartment, these are the necessities.

I know perfectly well that I can survive without a separate keyboard, or a desk pad, or a second screen. I’m sure nobody has ever died because their Airbnb work setup only had one monitor.

But I also want to write more in this version of my life. I want to blog. I want to research without squinting at 12 tabs compressed into one laptop screen. I am building The BedsideLingo Academy. I want to be able to Google teaching methods that I can apply to my students.

If I am deliberately designing a life where teaching, writing and creating occupy more space than nursing did, then I need the tools that make those things easier matter to me.

And that’s probably the biggest correction I have made to my definition of “need”.

Making Room

I’m not contesting the very real problem of overpacking, but honestly, I don’t want to become a minimalist. That doesn’t mean I’m a maximalist either. I mean, I’m Filipino; we say “matutong mamaluktot habang maiksi ang kumot” — learn to curl up while the blanket is short— but I don’t intend to live forever with a maiksing kumot.

I don’t think owning less is more virtuous. I like things. I like comfort. I like having objects around me that are useful, beautiful, and familiar. In fact, I’m bringing some ridiculous things—like my money cat— halfway across the world because they make my life better, and I have no intention of apologizing for that.

What I’m learning in this journey is that necessity changes when life changes.

Some things that were useful in Houston have no place in the life I’m building next. Some things I once thought were absolutely essential turned out to be just one of the many paths that could take me where I plan to go. Some things I thought I could never leave behind because of the sentimental value turned out to be things I can safely store without losing the memories attached to them.

And some completely ordinary things I never thought about are suddenly worth precious suitcase space.

Like Sinigang Mix and Mang Tomas.

I suppose that is what letting go actually looks like for me.

I am not emptying my hands just for the sake of shedding weight.

Rather, I am making room for something else and so much more.

SABBATICAL FAQS

Official Public Information Release

Following increased public inquiry regarding Pamela’s decision to resign from a perfectly good American nursing job and apparently wander off to foreign countries, the Pamela Office of Transitional Affairs (POTA) has authorized the release of the following information.

Members of the public are strongly encouraged to review this FAQ in its entirety before submitting follow-up questions.

The Bureau of Questions Already Answered is currently operating at capacity.

Is Pamela going on vacation?

Not exactly.

Pamela is taking a roughly nine-month sabbatical. She is resigning from nursing, giving up her apartment, selling her car, and a considerable amount of her belongings, and leaving the United States for a while.

There will be travel and sightseeing. There will also be groceries, laundry, boring Tuesdays, language study, writing, online teaching, and days when she does absolutely nothing interesting.

This isn’t a nine-month vacation package. It’s temporary unemployment with better scenery.

Next question.

Where is she going?

Europe first, followed by South America.

Ecuador will be the primary base, with other destinations before and after it.

Why Ecuador?

Because she wants to live somewhere for several months rather than merely visit.

Ecuador is comparatively affordable, Spanish-speaking, geographically interesting, and Cuenca makes sense as a base for the kind of daily life she wants to try.

No, she didn’t see one TikTok titled QUIT YOUR JOB AND LIVE LIKE A QUEEN IN ECUADOR FOR $700 A MONTH and immediately buy a ticket.

There have been spreadsheets.

So. Many. Spreadsheets.

How long is she staying?

The entire sabbatical is planned for approximately 9 months, with several months in Ecuador.

She wants enough time somewhere that it eventually stops feeling like travel and starts feeling like normal life.

The goal includes reaching the thrilling stage where she has strong opinions about which grocery store is better.

Why doesn’t she just take a long vacation instead of quitting?

Excellent suggestion.

Unfortunately, this mythical “long vacation” is not among the benefits currently available for redemption.

Pamela has approximately 235 hours of unused PTO. Getting roughly 60 hours approved can already require email negotiations resembling an international treaty.

If 60 hours is already a battle, exactly how is she supposed to win the war over 235?

More importantly, even if several consecutive weeks were miraculously approved, there would still be one unfortunate feature at the end of this glorious vacation: She would have to go back to nursing.

The problem is, Pamela no longer needs a vacation from nursing.

Pamela does not want to be a nurse anymore.

But she has a good nursing job!

Correct.

And it pays well!

Also correct.

Then why would she leave it?

Because something paying well is not enough reason to stay.

Pamela has been a nurse for approximately 13 years across three different countries, different healthcare systems, workplaces, and roles.

She is tired of nursing.

She is tired of cleaning up other people’s shit— literally, administratively, clinically, and organizationally.

The salary explains why she stayed.

It does not require her to stay forever.

Why doesn’t she just find another nursing job?

This inquiry has been forwarded to the Bureau of Unsolicited Career Advice.

The Bureau reports that suggested interventions have included:

“Try another hospital.”

“Try another specialty.”

“Try another nursing job.”

After approximately 13 years of field testing, POTA considers the available sample size adequate.

It is clear: Pamela does not want to be a nurse anymore.

The Bureau is currently experiencing severe backlogs and respectfully requests that duplicate recommendations cease.

Why doesn’t she find another job before quitting?

Because then this would be a career transition, not a sabbatical.

For years, Pamela operated under a highly sophisticated scheduling system known as:

Saka na. Sa day off na.

Writing? Sa day off na. Spanish? Sa day off na. TBLA? Sa day off na. Exercise, hobbies, errands, having a life? Please forward all requests to Day Off Administration.

Unfortunately, Day Off was also responsible for groceries, laundry, appointments, chores, recovering from work, and preparing to return to work.

Day Off Administration has since collapsed under an unsustainable workload.

Eventually, saka na stopped meaning later and started meaning not happening.

POTA has therefore declined the proposal that Pamela immediately acquire another full-time employer and resume normal operations.

For several months, work will have to arrange itself around Pamela’s life.

We apologize for the disruption.

So she’s going to be unemployed?

Yes.

Please remain calm.

Pamela saved money specifically to support herself during this period and will continue teaching English online to some extent.

She is not attempting to immediately replace her nursing salary.

That would defeat the purpose.

How can she afford nine months without a nursing salary?

She has a secret AFAM.

We thank everyone for their interest and ask that you respect the happy couple’s privacy during this exciting time.

…

The Legal Affairs Division has instructed the spokesperson to stop talking.

The AFAM Verification Unit has additionally concluded its investigation and reports that the allegations are unsubstantiated.

Unfortunately, the real answer contains considerably less chismis: She saved.

There is no mysterious foreign benefactor. No wealthy European gentleman has offered to finance Pamela’s Eat-Pray-Love era. No Ecuadorian hacienda owner awaits her arrival. No previously undisclosed fiancé has assumed responsibility for the quarterly budget.

Pamela built a sabbatical fund and is liquidating things she will no longer need.

Her savings are not accidentally disappearing.

This is what the money is for.

POTA apologizes that several years of financial planning are substantially less interesting than a secret AFAM.

But what if she needs money?

If the thought of Pamela wandering South America without a biweekly nursing paycheck causes significant emotional distress, the public is welcome to participate in the following fundraising campaign:

GoFundMe.com/HelpPamelaRemainUnemployed

Suggested sponsorship levels:

$5 — One empanada
$15 — Coffee and cake while contemplating her life choices
$50 — One unnecessarily nice dinner
$100 — Sponsor a day trip
$500 — Executive Patron of Unemployment

Pamela has learned that some travelers genuinely ask strangers on the internet to fund their travels. (The caucasity—per Pamela).

This discovery has significantly expanded POTA’s understanding of what is apparently socially permissible.

Why should Pamela discriminate against herself?

Isn’t it irresponsible to quit without another full-time job?

It is.

Fortunately, Pamela has prepared for this particular outbreak of irresponsibility with savings, budgeting, emergency reserves, and years of planning.

POTA apologizes for making the irresponsibility disappointingly organized.

POTA would also like to make the important distinction that these reserves are for Pamela’s use— other people’s irresponsible choice not to prepare does not constitute an emergency on Pamela’s part.

In simpler terms, she will not lend you money.

How much money does she actually have?

Enough for HER needs.

The Department of Finance will not be releasing detailed account balances to the general public.

Yes, Ms. Gonzales from Abante Tonite, we see your hand.

No. She doesn’t care if someone is sick.

Next question, please.

Isn’t she scared of spending her savings?

For herself? No.

There is risk involved.

That is why Pamela planned this rather than rage-quitting during a Tuesday shift and boarding the next flight to Quito with $846 and a dream.

Money saved indefinitely for freedom one never actually takes is eventually just a very impressive number on a screen. At some point, the money has to perform the job it was accumulated to perform.

What about retirement?

Pamela remains aware that aging exists.

She is making a deliberate trade-off: several months of foregone salary, retirement contributions, and career progression in exchange for several months of her life now. She considers this an acceptable transaction.

Why doesn’t she wait until retirement to travel?

Because 65-year-old Pamela may have more money.

But she will not have 35-year-old Pamela’s body.

Current medical technology does not allow her to deposit her knees, back, stamina, and general tolerance for bullshit into a Roth IRA and withdraw them thirty years later with compound interest.

She therefore intends to use some of them now.

But 65 isn’t old!

Correct.

The claim was that 65 is not 35.

This finding has survived extensive peer review by the passage of time.

Next question.

What is she actually going to DO all day?

Read. Write. Study languages. Teach. Walk. Ride horses. Practice Arnis. Explore. Travel. Buy groceries. Sit in cafes. Look at mountains. Pet alpacas. Eat guinea pigs. Do laundry. Take naps. Get lost and hitchhike.

There may even be entire Tuesdays during which Pamela produces nothing of measurable economic value.

The LinkedIn Compliance Division has opened an investigation.

The Human Being Department has declined to cooperate.

Is she thinking of starting a business? She should!

Uhh…

TBLA?

The BedsideLingo Academy?

The Medical English project whose Facebook page Pamela has repeatedly asked y’all to like? That TBLA?

What did y’all think it was, an online casino gig?

TBLA Corporate Affairs confirms that the organization is, in fact, a real project.

Pamela may use some of the sabbatical to develop it.

Please take note of the word some.

The sabbatical is not a nine-month unpaid internship at TBLA. Pamela is not quitting one job so she can immediately install herself as the most demanding boss she has ever had.

If TBLA grows, excellent.

If Pamela spends Tuesday wandering around Cuenca, buys bread, comes home, reads a book and accomplishes absolutely nothing for TBLA, no performance improvement plan will be issued.

The CEO has approved the absence. The CEO is Pamela.

Isn’t Ecuador dangerous?

Some parts of Ecuador have significant security problems.

Pamela is aware.

Risk varies considerably by location, and she intends to make decisions based on actual conditions, rather than either pretending Ecuador is perfectly safe or treating an entire country as one homogeneous danger zone.

She has traveled independently before. Even hitchhiked.

She possesses both caution and Google. And enough arnis skills to turn a cane into a weapon.

Next question, please, from the gentleman in the back.

She’s going ALONE?!

Yes.

ALONE alone?

The Office of the Spokesperson is unfamiliar with a second category of alone. Next question.

Does she know anyone there?

No.

That is not a prerequisite for entering a country.

Why doesn’t she wait for someone to go with her?

Because waiting for another adult to possess the same money, availability, interests, risk tolerance, and desire to spend months in South America would be an excellent way to never leave.

Won’t she get lonely?

Possibly.

She also occasionally gets lonely in Houston.

Geography has unfortunately not solved the human condition. Next.

What if she hates Ecuador?

She leaves.

Ecuador has not submitted a marriage proposal.

The sabbatical is the plan. A particular country is part of the plan.

What happens after nine months?

To be determined.

This has generated concern because adults are apparently expected to produce a five-year strategic plan before being permitted to enjoy a Wednesday afternoon.

POTA has possibilities and fallback options.

One purpose of the sabbatical is to discover what she wants when she finally has enough distance from her current life to answer that question properly.

Predetermining the answer would somewhat defeat the experiment.

What is something goes wrong?

Then something will have gone wrong.

The appropriate contingency plan will depend on the nature of the shit that has hit the fan.

POTA cannot provide detailed solutions to hypothetical disasters whose nature, location, severity, and existence remain unknown.

Yes, preparedness is important.

No, Mr. Reyes from Huling Hihirit, “but what if SOMETHING happens?” is not an actionable emergency scenario.

What if she runs out of money?

Then she will need to earn more money.

This groundbreaking financial principle has been forwarded to the Nobel Committee.

Pamela has savings, emergency reserves, employable skills, and more than a decade of professional experience.

If necessary, she can work again.

Yes, including nursing.

Please understand that “can return to nursing if everyone goes to shit” and “should remain a nurse forever to prevent anything from ever going to shit” are NOT equivalent propositions.

The Bureau of Unsolicited Career Advice has been copied on this response.

What about the gap on her resume?

There will be one.

When asked about it, Pamela intends to deploy the highly sophisticated professional explanation:

“I took a planned sabbatical.”

Recruiters are expected to recover.

What if she regrets quitting?

Then she will possess new information.

Quitting a job is not an irreversible medical procedure. Thirteen years of professional experience will not disappear because Pamela spent several months doing something else.

She refuses to remain indefinitely in something she already knows she does not want because she might hypothetically regret leaving it.

Isn’t she throwing away her career?

No.

Thirteen years have already happened.

The Philippines happened. The UK happened. America happened.

The experience, qualifications, skills, and money earned during those years remain real. A career does not become worthless because somebody eventually leaves it.

More importantly, preserving a nursing career indefinitely is not Pamela’s objective.

Leaving nursing is not an unfortunate side effect of the sabbatical.

It is partly the point.

Sayang naman. Nurse na siya sa America.

The Office requires clarification.

Which component is sayang? Alin ang sayang?

America? Ano bang akala nyo sa America?

The United States is just a country, rather than a grand prize.

Pamela has lived there, worked there, became a citizen, and knows what her salary actually buys.

Reports that the streets are paved with gold remain unverified. Rivers flowing with milk and honey have been disputed.

Nursing?

Pamela has already used nursing for approximately thirteen years. That has not gone to waste. It has been thoroughly consumed.

If leaving nursing constitutes wasting her potential, POTA would also appreciate clarification regarding whether teaching, writing, entrepreneurship, and every other profession on Earth are worthless because they do not involve administering medications and documenting bowel movements.

Yes, ma’am, you have another question?

But she worked so hard to become a nurse!

Correct.

When Pamela finishes an expensive meal, she does not continue eating the plate because she paid for dinner.

Past investment is not a lifetime contract.

Sana all.

Thank you.

Next question.

Sana all may pera.

Please refer to the GoFundMe above.

Pamela believes strongly in creating opportunities for others to participate in her success.

Sana all pwedeng basta mag-quit.

Pamela agrees.

It would have been considerably easier if the sabbatical had simply materialized without the saving, planning, budgeting, liquidation, and acceptance of financial risk.

Unfortunately, the Department of Sana All reviewed Pamela’s application and found extensive evidence that the requested outcome had been deliberately planned and funded.

The Department regrets to report that the requested outcome did not simply materialize.

E di ikaw na.

Yes. That’s what the passport says.

**eyeroll** Next.

Isn’t she scared?

Yes.

Planning does not produce immortality or omniscience.

Pamela is doing something uncertain, not undergoing a personality transplant.

Fear is information. It isn’t automatically a stop order.

Her family is okay with this?

They don’t know.

THEY DON’T KNOW?!

The Communications Office thanks you for providing a live demonstration of why the information remains embargoed.

Next question.

But shouldn’t she discuss something this big with her family first?

This inquiry was forwarded to the Office of Parental Authorization.

POTA regrets to report that the Office was abolished when Pamela became an adult.

All remaining functions have been transferred to the Communications Office under: NOTIFICATION ONLY.

But what if they say no?

Please see previous answer. The Bureau of Questions Already Answered has now joined the briefing.

Isn’t she abandoning everything she built in America?

She is selling a car and leaving an apartment, not setting fire to her citizenship at the airport.

Her education remains hers. Her professional experience remains hers. Her citizenship remains hers.

Her money remains hers, except for the portions enthusiastically transferred to airlines and accommodation providers.

The United States has also declined to disappear during her absence.

What if she comes back and has to start over?

Then she starts again with 13 years of professional experience, experience living and working across multiple countries, teaching experience, citizenship, and whatever she learns during the sabbatical.

POTA considers this a peculiar definition of zero.

Why would anyone give up that much security?

Because security is supposed to protect a life, not restrict it.

At some point, Pamela became interested in whether it could also be used to live one.

The savings, career, and stability were not the final destination. They created options, and she has now committed the controversial act of exercising one.

But why would she do all of this when she already has a good life?

This is probably the only question at today’s briefing that actually matters.

Because having a life that looks successful and choosing that life are not necessarily the same thing.

And this is where POTA must unfortunately become serious for a moment.

Pamela has spent much of her life doing what she was supposed to do.

She became a nurse because that was the future chosen for her. She followed the path expected of her. She worked, migrated, built a career, became financially stable, and eventually constructed a life that looks, by most conventional measures, successful.

And to be clear: Pamela made many of those decisions herself.

Nobody held her at gunpoint.

But, Pamela insists: if you never really believed you were allowed to say no, how much did your yes mean?

The Legal Affairs Division has advised that POTA will not be litigating 35-years of family history during today’s briefing.

Thank you, Legal.

What matters now is that Pamela is 35 years old and, for perhaps the first time in her life, has enough independence, money, distance, and freedom to ask a much simpler question:

What do I actually want?

Not what is practical enough to satisfy everyone. Or what makes the family proud.

Not what produces the safest career. Not what pays the most.

Not what she can tolerate.

What does she choose when the choice is actually hers?

That is what the sabbatical is really about.

Final question: What exactly is Pamela trying to accomplish?

…

sighs

She is trying to fucking live her own life.

Did we not—

Okay.

The Office of the Spokesperson apologizes for that brief departure from established communications protocol.

For 35 years, Pamela became extremely good at doing what needed to be done.

She followed the path laid out for her, one that was chosen by other people. Then she became good at surviving it. Then she became good at succeeding in it.

And somewhere along the way, saka na, sa day off na became the operating system for everything that actually belonged to her.

Writing? Later.

Languages? Later.

Travel? When work allows it.

TBLA? When there is time.

Rest? When she can.

Boyfriend? After college. After work stability. After supporting the family. After… after…

The life she might actually want?

Eventually.

Except eventually is not a date on the calendar.

So no, there is no KPI for this sabbatical.

Pamela does not need to return with a profitable business, fluent Spanish, a new career, 12 countries checked off, a book deal, or a spiritually transformative relationship with an Ecuadorian alpaca.

She wants something considerably less measurable.

She wants to know what it feels like to make decisions because she chose them.

To say yes because she means yes.

To say no without needing to prepare a defense for it.

To stay somewhere because she wants to stay.

And to leave because she wants to leave.

To work because the work serves the life she wants, rather than constructing the life around whatever work demands.

Pamela has spent 35 years becoming the person other people needed her to be. She would now like some time to find out who she is when ‘need to’ is no longer making every decision.

There.

That’s what she’s trying to accomplish: a life in which her yes is a real yes because her no is finally allowed to exist.

The Office genuinely does not know how much clearer we can make this.

No further questions, please.

END OF BRIEFING

The Pamela Office of Transitional Affairs (POTA) thanks the public for its interest.

The Office of the Spokesperson will not be taking further questions regarding Pamela’s bank balance, employment status, retirement contributions, marital prospects, secret AFAM, resume gap, parental authorization, or hypothetical demise in Ecuador.

All remaining inquiries should be directed to the Bureau of Questions Already Answered.

**gestures broadly at the preceding document

Thank you.

…

No, sir.

The briefing is over.

I’ve been planning this sabbatical alone and I mean that in the most literal, operational, unromantic sense possible.

There is no partner sitting across the table from me while we compare visa options. There is no husband asking whether I remembered to cancel the electric bill. There is no wife taking over the spreadsheet when my brain is fried. There is no second income quietly absorbing the cost of a bad decision. There is no company relocation package, no employer paying for movers, temporary housing, immigration lawyers, or plane tickets. There is no sponsor. There is no family fund. There is no inheritance. There is no mysterious passive income arriving every month while I contemplate my next move from a café somewhere warm.

There is one nursing income, and that income belongs to me.

Which means every decision about this sabbatical has to pass through the same brain that is already tired from making decisions for a living.

Every Dollar is an Extra Shift

People hear “sabbatical” and, depending on their life, imagine something soft around the edges. Maybe someone saved enough money, booked a one-way ticket, put their things in storage, and decided to see what happens. Maybe someone’s husband got transferred overseas and they tagged along. Maybe they have a pension. Maybe they have investments. Maybe they have parents with a spare room waiting if the whole experiment turns into a flaming pile of shit.

Must be fucking nice.

For me, every purchase connected to this sabbatical requires an internal audit because money is never just money. Two hundred fifty dollars for a consultation with a CPA or immigration lawyer does not register in my head as simply $250.

It registers as one extra nursing shift.

One more twelve-hour shift clocking in while the world gets ready to tuck in, receiving report at 1900H, dealing with admissions, call bells, charting, doctors, patients, family members, discharge planning, and whatever fresh hell the hospital has invented that week.

Two hundred fifty dollars is one more day spent doing the very thing I am trying to get away from.

So when I book a lawyer consultation, I think about it.

When I hire someone to help with paperwork, I think about it.

When I pay for a document, a certification, a flight, luggage, insurance, or anything else that belongs to this sabbatical, I think about whether it is worth another shift of my life.

Other people might have the luxury of making a financial mistake and brushing it off because there is another income in the household, or a pension, or investments, or a spouse, or a family member who can help them recover. I do not have that margin, so I think about everything until I’m sick of hearing my own thoughts.

I Don’t Need Permission, I Need a Second Brain

When I say I wish I had someone to consult, I don’t mean I want permission. I am not looking for a man, a best friend, a parent, or a committee to approve what I am doing. I have spent enough of my life being told what I should do that I am not particularly interested in recreating that structure voluntarily.

What I want is a sounding board.

I want another competent adult sitting across from me who can listen to the plan and say, “Yes, that makes sense,” or, “Pamela, what the fuck are you doing?”

I want somebody who understands the cost of leaving a stable life to tell me whether I am thinking clearly or just shooting for the moon because I am pissed off and tired.

Unfortunately, and this may be one of my own flaws, I am extremely selective about whose advice I value.

My friends are wonderful people, but most of them are not useful planning partners for this specific thing because none of them have really done what I am trying to do.

Many of us have migrated. That is not unusual in my circle. We are Filipinos and half our national personality is apparently built around leaving the Philippines, sending balikbayan boxes home, and explaining to relatives why the exchange rate does not mean we are suddenly rich.

I have friends who moved countries. I have friends who left nursing.

I have friends who travel. I have friends who have reinvented their lives in all kinds of ways.

But I do not have many people around me who had what most Filipinos would call swerte and then voluntarily walked away from it because, in the stupidest and most oversimplified version of the truth, hindi ako masaya.

Because that is how the plan sounds when I explain it.

I have a career. I have a car. I earn U.S. dollars. I have a stable job. I have money. I have gold jewelry. I live in America.

And I am planning to leave all of that so I can wander around countries that, to a lot of Filipinos, sound like vaguely dangerous places from a Netflix documentary.

Ecuador?

Bolivia?

Colombia?

South America in general?

A lot of Filipinos know very little about that side of the world, and honestly, I do not really blame them. We grew up looking toward America, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Australia.

South America does not occupy much space in the average Filipino imagination unless somebody is talking about Miss Universe, boxing, cocaine, drug cartels, or some telenovela that got dubbed into Tagalog twenty years ago.

My more Americanized friends are not necessarily better because big ol’ fat America has a way of making every place outside feel like either a vacation destination or a geopolitical footnote.

So when I explain the sabbatical, there is always one question EVERYONE asks me:

Why would you leave all this?

And I understand the question.

But I just do not know how to answer it in a way that makes sense to someone who thinks having a stable life means you should automatically want to keep it.

The internet should theoretically solve this problem because there are endless expat groups, relocation groups, travel forums, retirement groups, digital nomad groups, women-traveling-alone groups, and every other possible variation of people who have left somewhere and gone somewhere else.

The problem is that I often cannot relate to them either.

I am not a retiree figuring out where my pension stretches furthest.

I am not twenty-two years old with a backpack, a hostel booking, and an Eat Pray Love fantasy.

I am not a mother evaluating school systems and neighborhoods for my children.

I am not a tech bro who can open a laptop in Bali, write three lines of code, and casually call himself location independent.

I do not have blond hair, blue eyes, and whatever invisible social lubricant comes with looking comfortably Western in parts of the world where Westerners are still treated as if they arrived carrying money and answers.

I also do not have papa’s basement waiting for me if my personal Eat Pray Love era turns into a financial disaster.

I Am the Plan B

If I go missing, there is a very real chance nobody will know immediately.

Because I am the Plan B.

That sentence sounds dramatic until you actually look at the logistics.

If I get robbed on a bus and somebody takes my passport, phone, wallet, and money, I lose the tools I would normally use to solve the problem.

Who gets me to the U.S. Consulate?

Who sends emergency money?

Who books the hotel?

Who buys the replacement plane ticket?

Who sits on the phone with the bank while I am somewhere trying to prove that I am actually me?

Who helps me reconstruct all the documents I need if I have lost access to everything?

Theoretically, yes, I can return to the United States because I am an American citizen, but there is a very big difference between having a country you can legally return to and having somebody waiting there to catch you. (Besides, have we all forgotten about ICE

My parents, you ask?

E ako nga nagpapadala ng pera sa mga ’yun until I stopped three years ago.

What is my younger brother going to do when he still occasionally asks me for money and he is in the Philippines?

What is my best friend going to do from the Philippines besides worry and try to help however she can from thousands of miles away?

My nurse friends here in the States have their own lives, marriages, children, schedules, mortgages, responsibilities, and emergencies.

I do not have a boyfriend, nor a husband.

I am no one’s emergency.

All I have is me, which is why, respectfully, I cannot “just do it” the same way other people have.

My Italian teacher, for example, has done this kind of thing, and at one point I asked him about his experience because I genuinely wanted to hear from somebody who had lived outside the conventional path. We eventually had a falling out over it because our personalities and approaches to risk are very different.

He belongs more to the “just do it and leave” school of thought.

I belong to the “if you cannot afford the $250 lawyer consultation to understand the visa pathway, just say so, because personally I would rather spend the fucking $250 and know exactly what I am walking into” school of thought.

He has the charm of extroversion and the privilege of an Italian passport. I have the caution of an INTJ and a Taurus, the cynicism of a war veteran, the funds of a career woman, and the curse of being brown, broke, and third world, all packed into a thirty-five-year-old body.

And respectfully, our risk calculations are simply not the same.

If everything went catastrophically wrong for him, he still has family infrastructure in Italy. There is a nonna. There are parents. There is a house in Milan. There is somewhere to return to.

Similarly, my Spanish teacher can travel around Georgia and Central Asia and still know that, somewhere in Ecuador, he has family and a country that is familiar to him.

Retirees living abroad often still have pensions arriving every month and a first-world country they can return to if they get tired of the experiment.

A lot of people have some version of a shore.

Me? I have a map, a calculator, and enough Quiapo street smarts to turn both into a contingency plan.

So no, I cannot “just go” in the same way they did.

If I am going to do this, I need Plans C, D, E, F, and every other fucking letter because Plan B is already me.

Plans C Through Z

This is where my particular brand of insanity becomes useful because I built an emergency fund whose sole purpose is getting me back to the United States and allowing me to start over if the sabbatical fails.

That fund covers rent, food, transportation, utilities, and basic living expenses for more than six months because I understand that this sabbatical is still an experiment. I can romanticize it all I want, but experiments can fail.

I hate nursing. I would love never to return to bedside nursing again, but hatred does not erase the fact that nursing is still the most reliable money-making skill I have, so I built enough money around myself that, if the whole thing collapses, I can return to the thing I hate with some dignity.

That matters to me because I don’t want failure to look like landing in Houston with forty-three dollars, no housing, and desperation forcing me into the first shitty job willing to hire me.

If I have to go back, I want to go back on my own terms.

I even built what I call my Financial Abort Guidelines, because apparently I cannot simply have an emergency fund like a normal person. I need a fucking protocol.

There are specific alarms that tell me when the experiment is no longer financially viable.

The first is tied to my main bank account. If it drops below a certain amount, I do not immediately panic and book a flight home. I shrink the cost of living first. I look at cheaper regions. Ecuador already stretches my dollars further than the United States, but there are other places in South America where those same dollars can stretch even further.

The second alarm is tied to my online teaching income.

If the teaching does not produce enough to cover my minimum daily living costs, then I audit my availability, look at how many hours I am teaching, recalculate my actual average income, and drop my lifestyle burn rate to match reality. That means if I am truly making only $22 a day, then apparently we are living on $20 a day now.

That sounds severe until you remember that I am brown, broke, and third world.

I have been poor before.

Going back to poor does not psychologically destroy me in the way it might destroy somebody who has never had to count coins.

I am not above cooking every meal, chopping ingredients finely so they stretch across multiple dishes, eating rice, eggs, beans, leftovers, cheap vegetables, and making one chicken somehow survive three different reincarnations before I finally throw the bones away.

But there is also a point where frugality defeats the purpose.

If I have cut the budget so far that I am trapped inside an apartment eating beans, rice, and eggs every day because I cannot afford a coffee, a museum, a bus ticket, or one fucking weekend somewhere else, then I am no longer on sabbatical. I have simply created a cheaper prison.

This is when the glass case gets broken, the flight back to Houston gets booked, and the scrubs come out. And before I even land, I would have an RN job offer waiting for me.

The sequence is already in my head: secure the job, coordinate a few nights of couch surfing with a friend if needed, fly back, get whatever documents and practical things I need sorted, and then clock in at 0700 to receive report in my new nursing job.

See? Fourteen years of cleaning other people’s shit might still be useful after all.

I also built non-financial abort guidelines because money is not the only way this experiment can fail.

One of those is what I call the Laptop Dread.

If opening my laptop to teach starts creating the exact same misery I feel walking into a twelve-hour nursing shift, then what the fuck am I doing?

I might as well return to nursing, where at least the dread is paid at a premium.

Another one is the Apartment Prisoner Metric.

If I can technically afford to continue but the only way to do it is to sit inside an apartment every day and deny myself every small pleasure that makes being somewhere worthwhile, then I am done.

There is a difference between living simply and existing miserably. And again, not to sound classist, but I am not a 20-year old backpacker, existing on hostel free breakfast and busking for tonight’s meal. That is simply not the purpose of my sabbatical.

The whole point of this sabbatical is rest.

If I rebuild the exact same misery in another country but with cheaper groceries and prettier mountains, congratulations to me, I guess. I have successfully relocated the problem.

On top of the emergency fund, I also have assets I can liquidate, which brings me to gold.

When I wrote in my journal that I had “no partner, no sponsor, no company relocation package, just balls, gold, and anger,” I meant gold literally.

Actual gold jewelry.

A friend influenced me to start buying gold jewelry from Dubai, and there was a period where I was buying gold almost every day— which now feels slightly unhinged in retrospect— but those pieces have become investments and liquid cash. I have sold some of them already, and they are funding the sabbatical.

There is something strangely satisfying about that to me. Things I bought while working the life I am leaving are now being converted into the money that helps me leave it.

I also have a managed brokerage account that I can access if it ever gets to that point, although I would prefer to leave it alone unless things really go to shit.

Then there is the rest of the paranoia, which is probably what happens when you know nobody is coming to save you.

I have what I call my If I Go Missing binder, both physical and electronic, which contains the information someone would need if I disappeared or became unable to communicate. Select friends and family will have access to it.

I have embassy addresses and phone numbers saved in my phone and planners.

I am getting travel insurance.

I have a backup phone.

I will have cash hidden in different parts of my luggage and gear so one stolen wallet does not turn me into an idiot crying on social media in a foreign country.

I am also creating a Google Photos album that I can update regularly so people I trust have some idea where I have been, what I have been doing, and what the last known version of Pamela looked like before she wandered somewhere else.

This is apparently what freedom looks like when you are your own emergency contact.

Doing It Alone Since 1991

And the funny thing is that none of this actually started with the sabbatical. I have been figuring shit out by myself since 1991.

Hence the title.

I was the eldest daughter, which in a Filipino family can sometimes mean you are born a child and then immediately promoted into unpaid middle management.

I was parentified.

I was raised to be the golden calf.

Why are your brothers crying?

I could not say, “I don’t know, I am also a child.” So I learned how to make sure there was nothing for them to cry about.

I bathed them.

Fed them.

Clothed them.

Sat them in front of the TV so they were clean, plump, and entertained.

Why is the house dirty? Because I wanted to play outside with my friends.

Except that answer does not work when rice has not been cooked yet, your father is coming home in an hour, you still have homework, and your mother said to do it because she said so.

So I cleaned the house, cooked the rice, did the homework later, and learned very early that wanting something means… you can’t want it until other people’s wants and needs are met.

Then adolescence and adulthood arrive and the same lesson simply puts on different clothes.

My phone got stolen because I had to commute and walk through a dangerous eskinita in Morayta? Too bad.

There was no money for another phone, so I had to figure out another way to contact my classmates because I still had a school project to finish in the Nursing course that I didn’t even want to study in the first place.

I needed an ID to apply for a job?

Fine. I was an adult now, which apparently meant everybody stopped explaining things and started acting surprised when I did not already know them.

Go ride the jeepney, find the right office, talk to the right person, fill out the right form, and make sure I did not incur any extra charges because the money in my pocket was exactly enough for the fare.

Lose one peso and I was walking home.

Later, the scale gets bigger.

My aunt said America is better, so go there.

I was in Eastbourne, broke, with no savings because I had been sending money home to feed grown adults and help send younger brothers to school, and now I cannot afford the fare to Houston?

Oh well.

Just trust God. He will find a way.

Funny how God kept delegating the logistics to me.

And His instructions aren’t even written with a bold, red marker across the sky. Shoot, not even a burning bush appeared at my doorstep.

Maybe that is why I am so difficult about advice now. I had been told to “just trust” and “just go” and “it will work out” enough times to know that it won’t. That I am still usually the one who ends up solving the fucking problem.

So yes, I need numbers. I need options. I want contingency plans.

I need somebody to tell me exactly where the weakness in the plan is because “just trust” has historically meant I still end up being the person to do the work.

This is also why I do not romanticize independence.

People love independence when it photographs well.

Solo woman.

Solo traveler.

Independent.

Strong.

Fearless.

Sure.

But independence looks very different when you strip the branding off it and admit that sometimes, it simply means doing everything by yourself and that if you fuck up, you fix it by yourself too.

And yes, I know, there is strength in that. I have proof that I am capable because I have spent my entire life collecting proof.

But I am fucking tired of strength being the only option available to me, because competence stops feeling like a compliment when it becomes the reason people assume you can absorb everything.

Which brings me to the last two things in that journal note: balls and anger.

The Anger

The anger is easier to explain.

Anger is what finally pushed me into saying, Fuck this life. I don’t want any part of this anymore.

I am angry at the life I built because somewhere along the way, saka na, sa day off na stopped meaning later and started meaning never.

I am angry that work depletes me so much that basic activities of daily living have become math. If I work three night shifts in a row, when do I grocery shop?

If I wash my hair tonight, do I still have enough energy to cook?

If I clean the apartment after work, what gets sacrificed tomorrow?

If I go somewhere on my day off, when exactly do I recover enough to go back to work?

Every small act of living has to be fitted around the giant object sitting in the center of the week.

I am angry at nursing because it has taken things from me that I do not know how to get back.

My hair.

My weight.

My skin.

My creativity.

My whimsy.

My words.

My voice.

My energy.

My youth.

My time.

And I didn’t even want to become a nurse!

I know nursing has given me things too. It gave me income, mobility, skills, legal pathways, and the ability to build a life in countries I was not born in. I am not pretending otherwise.

Pero putangina, it collected a lot on the way.

I am angry at my parents and family for conditioning me so thoroughly into becoming the perfect Filipino daughter that sometimes I do not know where they end and I begin.

Do I actually like reading books, or did I learn early that being smart was the only acceptable way?

Do I believe A because I genuinely believe A, or because nobody ever put B, C, and D in front of me long enough for me to compare them?

How much of my personality is actually mine, and how much of it was built around being useful, responsible, intelligent, obedient, and good?

I am angry some damn guy with alphabet soup after their name can decide when I am allowed to sleep in.

I am angry that vacations require permission and that how long I can disappear depends on somebody approving a request in a scheduling system.

I am angry that apparently, sick calls in a rolling calendar year is totally acceptable.

I am angry that productivity in nursing gets reduced into metrics even though so much of nursing cannot be meaningfully quantified.

And yes, I am angry that I am thirty-five and only now asking some of these questions while other people get to ask them at twenty-two, fail at twenty-five, recover at twenty-seven, try something else at thirty, and accumulate multiple versions of themselves before I even reached the starting line.

I am angry that I am brown, broke, and third world.

Some of that anger is fair and some of it is probably irrational. But when is anger ever rational, anyway?

At this point, I don’t care anymore because it moved me, and movement is useful.

The Balls

Then there are the balls.

By balls, I mean courage with just enough recklessness mixed in.

The image in my head is that collected hitman in a movie who has listened to the target beg and bargain long enough, sighs, pulls the gun out, presses the nozzle against the guy’s head, and ends the conversation.

No speech.

No grand declaration.

Just the point where you know the talking is over.

That is what this decision feels like to me. I have always been afraid of failure, and I have every right to be.

When you are the Plan B, failure has consequences.

There is no family money smoothing out the landing, no partner quietly carrying the bills while you reinvent yourself, no safe childhood bedroom preserved exactly as you left it, waiting for you to come home and regroup.

But this time I am willing to pull the trigger on the life I built even if I am the one standing at the other end of the gun, because this time, I am the one pressing it.

That matters more to me than I can explain.

For so much of my life, choices were made around me and then handed to me as responsibility: Take care of your brothers. Cook the rice. Be the good daughter. Study nursing. Find the job. Send the money. Move here. Work harder. Be grateful. Trust God.

Figure it out.

I figured all of it out.

Now, I am using the same skill that kept me alive inside that life to build a way out of it.

There is no rescue team.

There is me, the money I earned, the gold I can sell, the systems I built, the emergency fund, the backup phone, the missing-person binder, the brokerage account, the Financial Abort Guidelines, the scrubs sitting somewhere in reserve, and enough anger to finally stop treating exhaustion like a personality.

I am still doing it alone. I have been doing it alone since 1991.

The difference is that this may be the first time all that effort is going toward something I actually want.

And I am tired.

I am tired in every possible way a person can be tired. I am tired of being the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the person who knows what to do, the person who can stretch the money, solve the paperwork, work another shift, find another route, absorb another disappointment, and somehow land on her feet because apparently that has been my fucking job since 1991.

The sabbatical is my rest.

And if I die doing it, at least I die rested.

So I started researching Ecuador’s temporary residency visas, and the professional visa looked like the most doable route for me.

A lot of the articles and Facebook threads I found were written by retired “expats,” and most of the visa options they talked about simply did not apply to my life. I do not have pension income. I do not have retirement checks magically arriving every month. I do not have a portfolio of investments throwing off enough money that I can casually prove passive income while sipping wine by the coast.

The digital nomad visa also looked stricter for my situation, so eventually I landed on the professional visa because, well, I am a professional registered nurse. I have the degree. I have the credentials. I suffered enough for that nursing education, so I might as well use the damn thing to my advantage.

The professional visa would allow me to stay in Ecuador for two years, which sounded perfect because two years would give me stability and predictability.

Two years meant I could rent an apartment and actually settle into it. I could unpack properly. I could buy stupid little household things without thinking about how much space they’d take up in my luggage later. I could buy an electric kettle, for God’s sake, and just let it sit there in the kitchen like a normal person instead of staring at it and thinking, Hmm, how many cubic inches is this going to eat when I have to pack again?

At that point, two years sounded like the closest thing to a home base that I wanted from this sabbatical. I just needed Ecuador to give me permission.

And this is where the shitshow began.

How Many Fucking Documents Does One Degree Need?

I severely underestimated what “professional visa” actually required.

The first phase involved getting my university degree registered with SENESCYT in Ecuador, which meant gathering several documents from the university where I earned my nursing degree in the Philippines.

I needed my original diploma, my transcript of records, a study modality letter from the registrar, and a UNESCO letter from the registrar indicating the UNESCO code corresponding to my field of study.

Already, this was not a simple matter of calling the registrar and asking them to email me a PDF because I live in Texas, my university is in the Philippines, and their business hours overlap beautifully with the hours when I am usually trying to keep people alive at work. Between the time difference and my schedule, I knew very quickly that I could not realistically do all the legwork myself, so I hired a representative in the Philippines to handle the process for me.

Thankfully, I found DAAP. Shout out to DAAP because they became my boots on the ground and saved me from losing my mind much earlier than I eventually did. They handled a lot of the communications and physical legwork, but even with a representative, it took four fucking months just to get the university documents.

Four months just for the university documents, and that was still only Phase 1.

Those documents then had to go through certification, authentication, and verification with the Commission on Higher Education before they could be apostilled. The registrar letters created their own special circle of hell because apparently, those letters were not documents universities normally issue, which meant they needed a different process involving the Regional Trial Court for a CANA before they could even be apostilled. Then the entire bunch had to be apostilled, shipped to Ecuador, and submitted to EcuaAssist, the law firm helping me with the professional visa.

By the time the documents finally left the Philippines, something like six months had passed.

The whole time, though, I had this lingering feeling that everything was not actually okay yet. I don’t know how to explain it other than that annoying little voice in my brain that kept saying, Hindi pa ’to tapos.

Maybe it was anxiety. Maybe it was pattern recognition from having dealt with immigration systems before. Maybe it was my “gift of prophecy,” as that lady from church told me years ago. Whatever the hell it was, I remember thinking that shipping those documents to Ecuador did not mean the nightmare was over.

Sinabi ko na nga ba.

SENESCYT rejected the UNESCO letter. Putangina.

After months of dealing with university offices, CHED, certifications, authentication, apostilles, special letters, courts, representatives, international shipping, and a million fucking emails, SENESCYT looked at one of the letters and rejected it because it did not contain the specific wording they required.

I was working when I received the email from EcuaAssist.

I remember opening it and immediately feeling my whole body go hot. I was pissed to the high heavens, but there was also this horrible sinabi ko na nga ba e frustration because some part of me had already been expecting another problem.

I cursed. I cried for a few minutes. Then I sat down in front of my computer and ignored the damn admission queue because apparently that day I had decided fuck nursing, fuck the job, we are doing UNESCO ISCED codes now.

I opened the email from EcuaAssist and read it once, then read it again because sometimes you reread bad news as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less irritating on the second pass. Then, I spent the next several minutes researching UNESCO classification codes and trying to figure out exactly what SENESCYT wanted from the letter.

Once my heart and brain stopped racing enough for me to form coherent sentences, I drafted two emails. One went to the registrar at FEU. The other went to EcuaAssist.

By that point, I already understood enough of the process to know that I needed to bring in the guns, so I asked EcuaAssist if they could email FEU directly and request the corrected UNESCO letter on my behalf using the exact verbiage SENESCYT required. I had seen their CEO contact FEU once before, and the response from the university had been almost immediate, which felt like witnessing a miracle because getting responses myself had been a completely different experience. I figured maybe the magic could work twice.

That same evening, I contacted DAAP and told them I might need their help again.

Then I did what I always do when something important starts going sideways: I made Plans A, B, and C.

Plan A was simple. FEU provides the damn letter, everything is fine, and I continue with my original timeline.

Plan B was that FEU takes too long to respond, so I wait until a specific date and then adjust the sabbatical timeline around whatever delay they create.

Plan C was the hard line. If FEU either refused or failed to provide the letter, I would pull the plug on the professional visa and restructure the sabbatical around tourist stays instead.

Brown, Broke, and Bureaucracy-Resilient

I wish I could say this kind of bureaucracy was new to me, but the beautiful thing about being brown, broke, and third world is that you get very familiar with systems that require you to prove yourself before they let you do anything.

I had already dealt with immigration bureaucracy when I applied for a work permit in the UK.

I dealt with it again when I applied for permanent residency in the United States.

And again when I applied for Schengen Visas for my trip to Spain and Italy.

By now, I have bureaucracy resilience and what I consider a very high IQ for this kind of shit. I know when to be polite, when to follow up, when to attach receipts, when to quote somebody’s previous email back to them, and when to pull out my corporate bitch lingo.

I know how to write, “Good afternoon, I am following up regarding…” when what I actually mean is, Hello, I am once again asking why nobody in this office seems to know what the fuck is going on.

Being bureaucracy-resilient does not mean I enjoy bureaucracy, though. I fucking hate it. I hate that the hoops exist, and I especially hate that the hoops are not equally difficult depending on the passport, birthplace, money, and institutional access you happen to bring with you.

For people like me, the hoops can feel like they are hanging somewhere above my head, narrow enough that I have to twist myself sideways while jumping, all while carrying notarized documents, certified copies, apostilles, and three forms of identification. Meanwhile, there are people whose passports and circumstances make some of those same hurdles feel much closer to the ground. The rulebook may technically be the same, but the experience of getting through it is absolutely not.

To be fair, I do not think Ecuador was sitting there intentionally trying to make my life difficult. SENESCYT had requirements. Ecuador had rules. The standard was the standard.

But standardized rules do not always create standardized difficulty.

It reminds me of basketball. You can keep the basket at regulation height and say everybody is playing by the same rules, but if you put a team full of giant professional athletes against a bunch of short Filipinos and tell me the setup is therefore perfectly equal, I mean… come on. You do not need to watch through the third quarter to understand that identical rules do not erase unequal advantages.

Funny enough, somewhere in the middle of all this I kept playing Pag Nananalo ang Ginebra, which honestly feels very on-brand in retrospect.

And all of this made me hate the word expat even more.

Because fuck expats, we are all immigrants here.

I have never completely understood the semantic gymnastics around that word. People will argue that an expat is someone living abroad temporarily while an immigrant is someone who intends to settle permanently, and fine, there are historical and dictionary distinctions people can fight about until the end of time.

But socially, the way the words get used has always irritated me because I have watched Westerners live in another country for years, own property, raise children there, send those children to local schools, build businesses, collect rentals, learn enough of the local language to brag that they can “communicate with the locals,” and still insist that they are expats because technically they do not intend to stay forever.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelans who crossed the border are immigrants or refugees.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Your passport does not get stamped EXPAT, cojones. Immigration paperwork does not care about whatever lifestyle branding you attached to your international move. You are a tourist, a temporary resident, a permanent resident, a worker, a citizen, or whatever legal category that country gives you.

And when I was doing this paperwork, I called myself an immigrant and acted like an immigrant because that was the framework I already understood. I treated this process the same way I treated my UK work permit and my U.S. permanent residency. I respected every dot, comma, hyphen, name spelling, date, seal, and signature because I knew that one tiny discrepancy could become another delay.

I wanted to do this right. I wanted to follow the rules of a country I was asking permission to live in.

The part that pissed me off was knowing that my ability to move through the world had always been shaped by circumstances I did not choose, including where I was born and what passport I originally carried.

Whatever privileges I have managed to build for myself as an adult do not erase how familiar I am with the feeling that movement has to be earned, documented, proven, stamped, and approved.

One More Swing

So when SENESCYT rejected the letter, my first instinct was actually to stop.

I thought maybe this was the point where I pulled the plug.

Then that fucking miner meme appeared in my head.

You know the one. Two people are underground digging toward diamonds. One miner keeps going and is almost through the wall, while the other gives up and turns around when he is literally one more swing of the pickaxe away from reaching the treasure.

I hate that image because once you have seen it, every decision to stop something becomes haunted by the possibility that you are quitting one swing too early.

What if the next email fixes it?

What if the next person says yes?

What if you have already suffered through almost the entire process and you are walking away right before the thing finally works?

That thought fucked with me enough that I consulted AI.

Yes, AI.

I am not going to pretend I didn’t because I did.

At that point I needed a sounding board, but I also needed something closer to a partner in the decision-making process.

If I called my best friend, she would empathize with me, let me rant, tell me she supported me, and ultimately leave the decision in my hands. I love her for that, but that was not what I needed in that moment. If I asked colleagues or other friends, I knew I would get a mixed bag of opinions based on their own biases, tolerance for risk, and experience levels, and most of them had never tried to build this particular kind of life anyway.

Another friend might pray for me, and I genuinely appreciate prayer, but at that particular moment my question was much less philosophical and much more immediate: WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO NOW?

Because seriously, when has God ever written instructions across the sky in red marker?

Isn’t it always a burning bush?

I wanted something that could look at the information, the money already spent, the remaining requirements, the probability of more delays, and the amount of energy I was bleeding into the process, and help me think without getting emotionally attached to whether Ecuador worked out exactly the way I originally imagined it.

The AI basically told me that continuing to pour energy into the same path might not make sense.

And because I am still human and therefore capable of making my own decisions despite the “rational” advice offered by a machine, I decided to try again.

This time, though, I set conditions.

-I would request the corrected UNESCO letter again.

-I would provide FEU with the exact information SENESCYT required.

-I would give them a defined amount of time.

If those conditions were not met, I would stop.

That distinction mattered because I have spent much of my life being very good at pushing through things. I am good at enduring inconvenience, finding another workaround, sending another email, trying another route, and convincing myself that I can handle one more round because I have already handled the previous ten.

The problem is that if you are too good at enduring shit, you can accidentally turn endurance into a personality trait and forget that stopping is also an option.

A week after we sent the request for the new UNESCO letter, after practically spoon-feeding the required information to the registrar, FEU replied:

“Please be advised that the Office of the University Registrar does not issue this type of certification, as it is beyond the scope of our office’s services. In most cases, international qualification equivalency assessments are conducted by third-party educational credential evaluation agencies.”

I read that email and felt this incredibly quiet rage.

If I had to turn the feeling into an image, it would be that stick figure meme flipping a table, except externally I was completely still.

I remember thinking, Nope. Putangina n’yo. I’m done.

And I emailed EcuaAssist almost immediately, saying that given the limitations of my university, I had decided to “pause” the professional visa application for now. I thanked them for their work and, because apparently, even during existential immigration frustration, I remain financially responsible, asked whether I still owed them anything.

I had already paid EcuaAssist around $750 as partial payment, with the other half due once the visa was approved and issued. On the Philippine side, I had spent more than ₱30,000, plus around another $200 for various expenses, including authorization letters that I had to write, rewrite, have notarized, and process through the Philippine consulate.

By then, I had spent six months dealing with FEU, DAAP, EcuaAssist, CHED, courts, apostilles, consular documents, shipping, and emails going back and forth across three countries, and somehow I had still not technically finished Phase 1.

Because we had not even touched Phase 2.

Once the SENESCYT registration was completed, I still would have needed an FBI background check and a state background check, both apostilled, and those involved fingerprinting, IDs, proof of residency, more mailing, more processing, more waiting. I also would have needed three recent bank statements, and everything in English would eventually need to be translated into Spanish.

I had started none of that.

I had spent six months trying to reach the starting line of the next phase.

So I took out my planner and started destroying the plan I had built.

Okay, So… What Still Works?

I crossed out tasks. I slashed through reminders. I moved dates around. I erased things. I looked at the entire sabbatical framework and all the little systems attached to it, including my address migration strategy, budget allocations, timelines, and country sequencing, and I tried to figure out what was still standing now that the professional visa had fallen apart.

For a moment, it felt like the entire sabbatical had crashed.

I asked myself whether I should stay in Texas. I wondered whether I had bitten off more than I could chew. I felt scared, but I also felt embarrassed because I had spent so much time planning this thing, and there is a weird arrogance that sometimes develops around detailed planning where you start believing that if you have thought through enough contingencies, reality should eventually cooperate.

Reality does not give a shit about your spreadsheet.

So I started looking at the problem differently.

What would it cost me to abandon the sabbatical?

What would it cost me to continue?

Once I asked those questions, the professional visa suddenly looked smaller than it had before.

The visa was just one path. It was never the sabbatical itself.

That distinction changed everything because the most important thing at that point was no longer whether I could make one particular visa work.

The most important thing was the money.

If the funds remained secure, the funds kept options open, and as long as I still had options, I could find another route.

If the professional visa failed, I could enter Ecuador through the tourist route instead.

Under the rules I was planning around at the time, my U.S. passport would allow me to enter visa-free for 90 days and potentially extend for another 90 days. That did not give me the two years I originally wanted, but it still got me to Ecuador.

Of course, changing from a two-year residency plan to a shorter tourist stay changed almost everything around the trip. It changed my packing list because now I had to think about portability again. It changed the budget because I had to account for another international move sooner than expected. It changed which cities I wanted to visit and how long I could realistically stay in them. It also forced me to think past the first 180 days while I was still sitting in Texas because once Ecuador became temporary, I needed to know where I might go next.

I could no longer mentally file that decision under “future Pamela’s problem.”

Sadly, I am far too Taurus for that kind of chaos.

I need to know what comes next.

Maybe Colombia. Maybe Argentina. Maybe somewhere else entirely. Wherever it is, I need to know the entry rules, the cost of getting there, what my budget looks like, what happens with health insurance, what the next visa-free window looks like, and whether the plan still works financially.

There will be a spreadsheet.

There is always a fucking spreadsheet.

What I lost when I stopped pursuing the professional visa was stability.

That is really what that particular permission would have bought me.

Two years in Ecuador would have meant I could rent an apartment, unpack once, buy an electric kettle, and leave it on the counter without calculating whether I could wedge it into my suitcase six months later. I could build more routine. I could settle into a neighborhood. I could meet somebody and, theoretically, decide to create that privileged Western baby I rage-fantasized about during the worst part of the paperwork.

To be clear, I am childfree.

There will be no babies.

Privileged or otherwise.

But the point is that two years creates enough stability for you to imagine a life rather than a stay.

Without that permission, I can still go to Ecuador. I can still rent somewhere. I can still unpack and still create routines and favorite places and maybe even feel at home for a while. I just have to pack again sooner, and apparently every household purchase now requires a luggage-volume calculation.

That is the practical difference between residency and tourism for me.

One gives you enough time to forget the expiration date for a while. The other leaves the date sitting somewhere in the back of your head while you are living.

The Other Kind of Permission

Which brings me back to what I wrote in my journal: Waiting for Permission.

I meant it literally when I wrote it.

I needed Ecuador’s permission to enter and stay under the category I wanted. That is what a visa is. You gather documents, hand over evidence of who you are, where you came from, what you do, what you earn, what you studied, and whether you have committed crimes, and then another country decides whether you qualify to remain inside its borders for a particular length of time.

You ask, in the most bureaucratic way possible, May I come in? May I stay? For how long?

But somewhere during the six months of documents and emails and apostilles and registrations and rejections, I realized there was another kind of permission tangled up in this whole thing, and that one was much harder for me to name.

I think part of me was waiting for permission from myself to actually do this.

When I first saw how complicated the visa process was, I could have stopped immediately. I could have looked at the requirements and said, nah, this is ridiculous, I am tired of applying for visas, I am tired of proving things to governments, and I already have a stable life in Texas anyway.

I could stay here and keep doing what I had been doing: work, request PTO, hope staffing allows it, wait for my manager to approve a couple weeks off, and plan trips according to schedules, seniority, staffing ratios, budget, and apparently the shape of the fucking moon.

That life is easier because I already know how it works.

The sabbatical requires me to deliberately choose inconvenience.

I have to spend money knowing some of it will be wasted. I have to tolerate uncertainty. I have to make plans that may collapse after six months of effort. I have to accept that sometimes the thing I researched for weeks will still turn out differently because some registrar in another country sends me an email saying they do not issue the document I need.

And apparently I also had to learn that persistence is not automatically virtuous just because quitting feels bad.

That miner meme bothers me because it assumes there are diamonds on the other side of the wall.

No one really knows. There could be. Or, there could be just another fucking wall.

If you do not decide what you are willing to spend before you start digging, you can keep swinging forever because you are always capable of convincing yourself that the next swing might be the one.

This time, I set conditions before taking that final swing.

And when the conditions were not met, I actually honored them.

That might be the part of this story that matters to me more than the visa itself because I have not always been good at drawing hard lines. I have spent a lot of my life believing that if something mattered enough, I should keep working harder, tolerate more, stretch further, give another chance, find another workaround, and somehow brute-force reality into cooperating.

This time, when I read that email from FEU, something in me said, This is where you draw the line, Pamela.

So I did.

EcuaAssist, to their credit, still tried to help. They communicated with FEU themselves, and when the university remained unwilling to issue the document, EcuaAssist decided to appeal to SENESCYT on my behalf.

And honestly, that made me appreciate them even more because that is how you treat someone who is trying to follow your system properly. You explain the problem. You help where you can. You do not make the person feel like an inconvenience simply because their paperwork is complicated.

I told EcuaAssist I appreciated the effort and that I would wait for SENESCYT’s response to the appeal. If SENESCYT eventually accepts it, great. I can reassess whether I want to continue the professional visa from there.

If they decline, that is fine too.

I already have another route.

The sabbatical does not disappear because one pathway closes.

I can enter Ecuador legally as a tourist, stay for the period I am allowed, and then move somewhere else. I can rearrange the budget, rethink the itinerary, change the cities, move the dates, and activate whatever contingency plan we are on by then.

Because the professional visa was never the dream.

The sabbatical was.

The visa could have given me stability, predictability, and two years of not thinking about where I had to go next. It could have given me an apartment I could settle into and an electric kettle I did not have to emotionally negotiate with before buying.

But there was another kind of permission that no immigration office, university registrar, lawyer, government agency, best friend, AI, burning bush, or fucking UNESCO letter could issue for me.

I needed permission to decide when enough was enough.

I needed permission to walk away from a path even after I had spent money on it.

I needed permission to stop confusing persistence with obligation.

And once I finally understood that, the decision became surprisingly simple.

A thing is over when I say it’s over.

When I first imagined taking a sabbatical, it looked a lot like what my Spanish and Italian teachers were doing. They were traveling, staying in one country after another while using their teaching income to pay for the trip.

Then my idea of a sabbatical started looking like what every other digital nomad online was doing: lazy days, doing a bit of work on their laptops somewhere exotic, chilling by the beach, eating cheap meals, meeting friendly locals, and somehow having all this free time while still earning enough money to sustain the whole thing.

Eventually, I realized how pretentious that fantasy was, how privileged, and more importantly, how much it did not align with who I am or what I actually value.

The Version of Freedom I Actually Want

When I think about freedom now, I think about slow mornings.

I think about sleeping in, writing my blog when I actually feel like writing, going horseback riding and maybe doing multi-day trips along the páramo, teaching my students, building lessons that I know can help international healthcare workers who want to work in Western healthcare systems, and sharing the lessons I picked up along the way as an international nurse.

I think about chilling in a coffee shop, reading a book with my full attention, practicing my arnis, studying Spanish and Italian without feeling mentally fried all the time, and finally getting out of that constant mental math of scheduling life.

Saka na. Pag day off ko na.

That sentence has ruled too much of my life.

I will write later. I will study later. I will exercise later. I will play later. I will do whatever it is that makes me feel like myself later, because right now I have to work.

So yes, there is a fantasy attached to the sabbatical, but it is not really about becoming some digital nomad drinking coconut water in Bali. I do not want to cosplay that lifestyle because that is not what I am after.

What I want is to stop shelving my life around my work schedule.

The problem is, the internet sells the fun part of this lifestyle without really touching the true and real challenges of immigrating or living abroad.

Heck, most of these people do not even call themselves immigrants. They hide behind the term “expat,” as if that somehow exempts them from the realities of navigating conflicting laws, visa requirements, taxes, border rules, cultural differences, learning a language beyond Hola and Buenas noches, paying for expedited documents, figuring out banking, dealing with bureaucracy, and learning how to function inside another country instead of simply consuming it.

And maybe the reason they gloss over these things is that some of them genuinely do not have to deal with them.

If you are American or British, you can enter a lot of countries visa-free for a decent amount of time. So, oo nga naman, anong pake mo sa visa and border rules if you can just show up with your passport and stay for ninety days?

Some of these “expats” also stay illegally under the radar, sell their damn online course, never really integrate, spend most of their time around other expats, and then talk about how they “live like a local” because they know where to buy cheap beer.

Seeing that expat fantasy, I realized that is not what my version of freedom is going to look like.

When the Fantasy Got a Price Tag

The fantasy started falling apart for me when I began consulting lawyers about the visa paths available to me.

That was when it really clicked that this sabbatical was not the same as the trips I had taken before. This was much bigger than I initially thought because now governments were involved, taxes were involved, documentation was involved, and there needed to be a paper trail for almost everything.

Then I got a quote for legal services and realized two things very quickly: this was going to be more expensive than I thought, and I was not going to be able to execute the plan on the original date I had chosen because I simply did not have enough runway yet.

That was when I really started asking myself how much this freedom was actually going to cost me.

My first estimate was about $13,000.

At the time, that number was basically just the projected cost of living for nine months in South America. That was it. I had not accounted for emergencies. I had not thought seriously about a shit-hits-the-fan scenario where I might have to rebuild my life in America after the sabbatical. I also had not properly considered all the costs I would be accumulating while leaving: move-out cleaning fees, furniture haul services, Ubers while tying up loose ends, flight tickets, visa renewal fees, visa application fees, and all the random transition expenses that happen when you dismantle one life before trying to build another.

I was so fixated on the idea of leaving nursing forever that it blinded me to the obvious reality that my teaching business is still a baby. It has not even properly launched at scale yet, and it definitely has not grown enough to fully replace my nursing income.

So I went back to the drawing board.

I used my previous travel and immigration experiences, scoured the internet for information, looked at my current cost of living in the US, converted those numbers against the currencies of the places I planned to stay in, and, probably most importantly, introspected really hard about the kind of person I actually am.

I did not want to budget based on some imaginary version of myself who is perfectly happy living on instant noodles in a ten-bed hostel for a year because “the experience is worth it.”

That is not me.

After re-evaluating everything, I created different baskets and came up with approximately $32,055.

I have five main baskets.

The first is my SHTF Fund, which is basically my return-to-nursing basket.

The second is the Sabbatical Vault, which is the core twelve-month living fund.

Then I have a Catch-All Basket for apartment purging, move-out expenses, transition costs, and all the random crap that happens before I actually get on the plane.

I have a Travel Fund for flights, regional travel, short-stay accommodations, and transportation between destinations.

And then there is the Preply Fund, where my Preply income goes. That one is supposed to support the Sabbatical Vault and cover small daily expenses along the way.

Basically, Preply is Robin to the Sabbatical Vault’s Batman.

The Sabbatical Vault surprised me the most because that was the basket that needed the most revision and the closest look. Once I started calculating what it would actually take to live abroad for nine to twelve months without relying on my nursing paycheck, the sabbatical started feeling very real very quickly.

And that is before you even account for the income I am giving up.

Right now, I make around $5,200 a month as a nurse.

That is money I will no longer be receiving once I leave.

Seeing the full numbers made me anxious and scared, and there have been many times when I thought about delaying the sabbatical again. Maybe I should push it to next year. Maybe the year after that. Maybe I should keep saving until I have more.

Just until I have enough.

But deep down, I have this very strong feeling that if I delay this again, I will never do it.

There is a voice in my head that keeps saying, If you don’t do it this year, it won’t ever happen again, and you will lie on your deathbed wondering and regretting.

And let’s be honest: how much money is enough, anyway?

There will always be rent to pay, internet, water, power, medications to refill. Children to care for. Pets to feed. Debts to pay.

You don’t stop being a parent, medical emergencies will follow you into whatever time zone you are in, and regardless of how much you make, you will still have to pay rent and utilities. So if you wait until everything settles down, you may never get the chance to live the life you truly want.

So despite the uncertainty, despite the fear, and despite the reality that I may not be fully prepared, I am still doing it this year.

Because when will I ever be fully prepared?

There is a point where preparation is responsible, and then there is a point where preparation becomes an excuse to remain afraid.

You Can’t Just “Just Do It”

That is part of why the phrase “just do it” annoys me so much.

It is not completely wrong. That is the irritating part.

There does come a moment when you have to stop planning and actually move.

But “just do it” is so short-sighted, unrealistic, tone-deaf, and incomplete that it becomes almost useless as advice.

It tricks you into thinking that you can JUST do it. As if it’s so easy to quit your job—the thing that actually pays for your food—pack your bags, and book a flight to some exotic island.

Because fuck your dog, fuck your diabetes, and fuck your house, right? They’ll magically deal with themselves?

Because before you “just do it,” you need tactics. You need preparation. You need money. You need enough health and stamina because, really, you think you’re 25? Girl, you’re an old horse like me.

And more importantly, matatawag mo bang kalayaan pag bedridden ka?

The Stuff Nobody Puts in the Reel

You need to think about all the boring shit that never shows up in the Instagram reel.

What happens if you get food poisoning? If you need medication refills?

What happens when there are bank fees, visa extension fees, international call charges, or some government office tells you that you suddenly need another document?

What happens when your laptop breaks?

Do they even have an Apple Store on your cute little island for your MacBook?

What happens when some random vanity item you take for granted at home suddenly costs three times as much because it is imported?

Do they even have longganisa, bagoong, and itlog na maalat?

Whatever stupid little thing you thought would not matter until suddenly it does.

There is also price gouging. Sometimes locals see you as moneybags and artificially inflate rent, transportation, rentals, or services because they know you earn in dollars, pounds, or euros.

And surprisingly, almost no one talks about the cost of language lessons.

I think part of the reason is that many people do not actually intend to integrate.

They think “living with the locals” will magically make them fluent enough to understand bank notices, government announcements, lease agreements, medical instructions, or bureaucratic paperwork.

It will not.

You do not become fluent because you ordered coffee in Spanish three times, por favor.

And language is only one of the things people underestimate—or even ignore completely. Once I started planning this sabbatical seriously, I realized I also had to account for all the ways the plan could go sideways—not because I expect disaster, but because I live by the mantra: “If it can happen, it will happen. And if it can happen to anyone, it can happen to me.”

If I get sick abroad, I plan to buy travel insurance, but the Sabbatical Vault also has enough wiggle room for medical emergencies. If something genuinely catastrophic happens, I fly back to the States and use the SHTF Fund.

If something terminal happens, like cancer or ALS, then honestly, I would probably fly back to the Philippines and prepare for hospice care there.

If I need to come home suddenly for another reason, I unlock the SHTF Fund and start looking for work as an RN again.

If Ecuador becomes more expensive than I expected, I travel to a cheaper country.

If I cannot find nursing work immediately when I return, then that is what the SHTF Fund is for. And if I cannot find work as an RN right away, I am perfectly open to doing something else. Call center. Costco. Walmart. Uber Eats. DoorDash. Whatever pays while I figure out the next step.

I am not above working.

What I am unwilling to do is romanticize being broke.

My personal warning sign is when the Sabbatical Vault hits $3,000.

At that point, I am not going to start calling poverty “minimalism” just so I can protect my ego and continue pretending the sabbatical is working.

I am willing to downgrade. I am willing to let go of comforts. I am willing to skip tours and go on adventures myself. I can cancel Netflix. I can eat out less.

But I am unwilling to pretend that forced austerity is resource management.

If I am staying inside the apartment because I cannot afford a one-dollar coffee, I am not “living cheap.” I am fucking broke, and it is time to return to a day job.

Doing all your laundry in the sink and sleeping long-term in a cramped ten-bed hostel because you literally cannot afford anything else is not some heroic act of adventure.

It is fucking poverty, Pamela.

Go back and put on your scrubs.

The Bridge Back

This is also why I built the SHTF Fund around what happens after the sabbatical.

The sabbatical, to me, is a bridge.

I leave my nurse life and cross into a different life. If that different life becomes sustainable and I want to stay there, then I stay and burn the bridge.

If I realize I want something else, then I cross the bridge back, refuel, and eventually build another bridge toward something new.

The emergency fund is basically the money I need to cross back.

I set aside about $13,000 for that. It covers rent, internet, electricity, phone service, transportation, and job-hunting expenses like Uber fares for in-person interviews.

The reason that amount can stay relatively modest is because I built a Sabbatical Evaluation Framework. By Phase C, if it looks like teaching is not sustainable enough and I need to go back to nursing, I activate the guideline to start applying for nursing jobs while I am still in South America.

That way, my cost of living remains lower while I job hunt.

Ideally, I come back to the States with a job offer already waiting, and all I need to do is find an apartment. That keeps the $13,000 mostly intact.

I had to think about all of this because I do not have Mama and Papa waiting for me if shit hits the fan—again, another detail most influencers leave out.

My parents are broke. I am also no-contact with them.

There is no family home waiting for me if I crash and burn.

Well, I do have a friend who agreed to keep my SHTF luggage and opened her home to me when I return. I also have a best friend half a world away who acts as my sounding board.

And then I have myself.

I am not trying to sound like some pabebe sadboi here, but I really do not have that much of a safety net in the family sense.

What I do have are options I built.

Now that I am an American citizen, I have the privilege of a strong passport.

I also have fourteen years of nursing experience, which means that even though the job market is shit, I still have a clinical background most nurse employers would consider.

My résumé has variety that I can leverage.

I also have experience living in the Philippines, the UK, and the US, so if none of the countries I plan to travel to end up being suitable for me, I can always go back to the Philippines and lie low for a while. I do not have much support there either, but my money will stretch much farther there than it will in the States.

I also have teaching.

It is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to become another strong safety net.

This is where I realized that freedom is not only about cash.

Cash can only go so far because eventually it runs out. A huge part of freedom is knowing that you have options.

If one thing fails, what else can you do?

Can you return to an old career?

Can you work online?

Can you move somewhere cheaper?

Can you go back to another country where you have citizenship or residency rights?

Can you sell an asset?

Can you survive while rebuilding?

Risk Is Not the Same for Everyone

That is why I get irritated when influencers present their structural advantages as if they are purely examples of personal courage.

No one says:

“I am a white, twenty-five-year-old who got bored with my corporate job in London. One day I decided to travel, so I left my apartment and moved all my stuff back into my parents’ house because they have a spare bedroom. I make these videos because they are monetized, and that is what is really funding a big part of my adventure, not the course I am selling because the course is bullcrap. I barely speak the local language because I mostly stay with other expats. I love how cheap everything is because I get paid in GBP and spend in baht. And if all of this fails, I can go home at thirty-five, still young enough to re-enter the workforce, maybe work as a barista for a while, and live with my parents until I get back on my feet.”

No one says it like that.

But they should.

Because those details matter.

Taking a risk is not the same for everyone.

If you jump knowing that there is a giant cushion waiting underneath you, of course the jump is still scary, but let us not pretend that it carries the same consequences as jumping when there is concrete at the bottom.

That is why I wish people would disclose the real dollar values. How much did you actually spend?

Tell me the real difficulty of dealing with foreign bureaucracy.

Tell me how you contribute positively to the country you are staying in.

Tell me your actual source of income.

Is it social media? Papa’s trust fund? A bogus course from influencers teaching influencers how to become influencers? Investments? Remote work? Social Security check? Afam?

What about the meals you skip because the travel lifestyle is not paying enough?

Were you gonna tell us about the instant ramen lunch you had because you cannot afford both a proper lunch and partying tonight?

Are you really “enjoying the beach,” or is it because joining the tour is too expensive?

Tell me that your “minimalist lifestyle” became mandatory because your savings are disappearing and you cannot swallow your pride enough to admit that it may be time to fly home and get a day job again.

That would be honest.

And before anyone assumes I have done all of this without privilege, I have not.

My RN salary made this sabbatical possible.

My savings made it possible.

My material possessions, which I can liquidate into cash, made it possible.

My US passport helps.

My TEFL training helps.

My IELTS tutoring experience helps.

My clinical experience definitely helps.

I also have gold assets I can liquidate if I absolutely need more funds.

My younger self did not have any of that.

What I have now came after fourteen years of career building and, really, decades of sacrifice.

So yes, I am jumping with a cushion underneath me too. But I want to make the distinction that I built this cushion myself.

What My Cushion Is Made Of

The difference is that I know exactly what my cushion is made of. It is fourteen years of nursing experience, an RN salary, savings, immigration, citizenship, credentials, and skills I spent years building.

And there is something almost ridiculous about realizing that the career I am trying to step away from is also the reason I can afford to step away from it in the first place.

Nursing paid for this sabbatical.

Not just in dollars, either.

It paid for it in years. In hair loss, weight gain, anxiety, and alcohol. In relationships—or lack of them. In missed opportunities.

There is a song by Josue called Agos that captures this feeling almost perfectly, especially the part about setting aside what you really want because you still have to go to work.

That is what it has felt like for years.

I keep putting the things that give me energy aside so I can keep doing the thing that drains it.

And after enough years of doing that, you start wondering exactly what you are preserving yourself for.

Another part of the song talks about knowing what you have wanted since you were young, but being afraid of where pursuing it might lead, and getting tired of ignoring it.

That is probably the part that hits me hardest now.

I do not think this sabbatical is a spontaneous act of courage.

I have privilege now, but I am not going to pretend all of it fell into my lap either.

Even the blue passport was not granted to me by the heavens.

I applied for it.

I paid for it.

I stayed long enough to qualify for it.

I paid years of taxes.

The languages I speak were studied, practiced, and refined.

My nursing career took fourteen years to build.

And no, I do not feel guilty for being able to take this sabbatical.

What exactly should I feel guilty about?

I studied hard.

I developed skills outside of what my job required.

I stayed in a demanding career for fourteen years even while my heart, my body, and my soul were struggling.

I kept my head down and did the work.

And now those fourteen years are the footing I can step back onto if I need to return to nursing after the sabbatical.

That does not mean I am invulnerable.

Financially, I am still very vulnerable because I am not a millionaire. The amount I have can sustain this experiment for maybe one to two years before I would eventually need to dip into the SHTF Fund and return to nursing if nothing else becomes sustainable.

I am also vulnerable to the political climates of the places I move through.

A passport helps, but it does not magically remove racism, bureaucracy, profiling, or political instability from the equation.

So no, I would never tell someone to “just do it.”

I would probably just point them toward these Sabbatical Diaries and let them come to their own conclusion, because telling someone to “just do it” does not take their personal circumstances into account.

You cannot always just do it.

Doing it is a process.

Learn the process first, then decide if you still want to do it.

What I’m Actually Paying For

One of the better questions I found myself asking was not “How much money do I need?” but:

What needs to be true for me to quit?

For me, the number was somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000.

I do believe there is such a thing as being financially ready. It is irresponsible to quit your day job with fifty dollars in your wallet and then call the resulting chaos an adventure.

At the same time, expecting the plan to be perfect is unrealistic.

The number will change along a spectrum because there are too many moving parts: conversion rates, political climates, border rules, travel costs, health changes, unexpected expenses.

That is why I stopped thinking in one fixed dollar amount and started thinking in ranges.

And yes, I think freedom is worth delaying long enough to fund it properly. However, there has to be a deadline, because otherwise, it becomes another pipe dream.

There is also a point where planning becomes another excuse not to leave.

For me, that happens when the planning stops producing tangible material outcomes.

If I keep telling myself I am preparing for a sabbatical while ordering stupid shit from Amazon every week, I am not preparing.

If I say I want to leave but then buy a new car, I am probably not serious about leaving.

The plan has to become physical eventually.

The money has to actually appear in the account.

The apartment has to get purged.

The visa has to get filed.

The ticket has to get bought.

That is how I distinguish prudence from fear.

Fear makes me immobile. Prudence pushes me to volition.

For me, that means making the plan concrete enough to move forward without pretending I can eliminate every possible risk. I am willing to take risks, but I am not willing to confuse unnecessary suffering with bravery.

For instance, I am willing to skip wine-tasting tours and explore a park on my own instead. Or cut subscriptions, eat out less, live more simply, and downgrade some comforts.

But I am not trying to prove anything by being miserable.

My definition of “enough” is actually very simple:

I want to cook breakfast, spend the morning teaching or working on my curriculum and lessons, have lunch at a local restaurant, write my blog, cook dinner, and read a book before sleeping.

On weekends, maybe I stroll through the nearby plaza, browse the Sunday markets, or go on a weekend horseback-riding trip.

For me, that is enough.

Don’t get me wrong, this sabbatical was never about not working.

If it were, I would not have bothered earning my TEFL certificate or building my Medical English curriculum.

I am still going to work. I just want to build a different life around it—one where work fits inside my life instead of my life being squeezed into whatever remains after work.

For years, I lived under the saka na, sa day off na system, and I am fucking tired of it. I am tired of shelving life because I have to work—of having an idea I want to write down while I literally have an IV catheter in my hand, or realizing another week has passed without enough mental energy left to properly study Spanish or Italian.

And that is why, to me, freedom has an actual dollar amount.

It is not the fantasy that some social media influencer or random retired expat sells on the Internet, where freedom somehow means coconut water, cheap rent, and chilling by the beach while selling a generic online course. That was never really what I wanted anyway.

My freedom from nursing and from the rat race costs me somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000.

What I am buying with that money is time, travel, and hopefully myself back—the ability to stop postponing the parts of my life that keep getting pushed to saka na, sa day off na.

And for me, that is worth the price.

I often say that I have been burned out since 2017.

That was the year I left the Philippines to work as a nurse in the United Kingdom.

At the time, I was excited about living in another country. I was not excited about going back to nursing.

I had already worked as a nurse for about five years in the Philippines, across different settings. After leaving my nursing job in 2015, I spent some time teaching as an IELTS tutor at a review center before my departure for the UK.

I did not yet fully understand how much I hated nursing. Maybe I understood it but had not accepted it.

What I did understand was the contrast.

As an IELTS tutor, I was thanked, appreciated, and welcomed. As a nurse, I could perform chest compressions on a dying man or administer life-saving chemotherapy and still be yelled at because I was not moving fast enough while wrapping individual sheets of carbon paper around highly toxic chemotherapy-infused IV tubing.

A surgeon once called me chimay—a derogatory Tagalog term for house help—in front of my colleagues.

The work could demand precision, endurance, and responsibility from me while offering very little dignity in return.

I knew it was not the life I wanted. But family pressure, poverty, and the naivety of youth made that knowledge feel useless.

Knowing you want to leave is not the same as having somewhere to go.

The Dining Table

I remember one moment from 2017 with unusual clarity.

My mother and I were sitting at the dining table. She asked how much I would earn in the UK. She had a calculator and began converting the salary into Philippine pesos.

Then she decided how much I would need to send home.

I responded automatically:

“Kalahati agad ng sweldo ko sa inyo automatic kasi panganay ako. Ganun talaga.”

Half of my salary would automatically go to them because I was the eldest. That was simply how things were.

As the words left my mouth, I felt a sharp ache in my chest.

The conversation continued, but one question remained in my mind:

Why?

It was as though my mouth was reciting the answer I had been trained to give while my mind was finally beginning to object.

But I was inexperienced and deeply conditioned by an environment that weaponized familial piety. I ignored the discomfort and proceeded with the plan.

Looking back, I think of it like cancer.

In 2017, it was a mole.

By 2019, it had grown.

By 2021, it had spread and begun to bleed.

The warning signs were there: the discomfort whenever obligations were assigned to me without my consent, the immense sadness whenever moving to America was discussed, and the pounding in my chest whenever conversations among Filipinos turned toward nursing, sending money home, and sacrificing for family.

So if the signs were there, why did I let it fester for too long?

Well, I kept treating those reactions as personal weakness instead of information.

Why Burnout Was Not Enough

People speak about burnout as though recognizing it naturally leads to change.

It does not.

Burnout is easy to rationalize as tiredness, stress, or the ordinary cost of adulthood.

And when the thing burning you out is also paying your rent, funding your immigration, supporting your family, and keeping you financially secure, you begin to ask whether you even have the right to resent it.

Do you bite the hand that feeds you?

Money was the strongest force keeping me in nursing. I obviously needed to pay my bills, and for years, I also had family obligations.

Then came sunk cost. I had spent fourteen years becoming competent. Don’t get me wrong, I was not the sharpest tool in the box, but I was sharp enough to be relied upon, to lead, and to function with minimal supervision.

Responsibility came next.

Then the lack of alternatives.

Then immigration.

People from the Global North can romanticize reinvention because many of them have fallback options. They can move into Papa’s garage. They can return home if the experiment fails. They are not faced with deportation and legal fees when they feel “lost” in their “spiritual journey”. They can decide to Eat, Pray, Love without first navigating visa applications, legal fees, proof of funds, immigration restrictions, and the requirement to secure somewhere to sleep before even entering the country.

I did not have those safety nets. I was Plan B. I am the fallback.

Fear and identity also kept me in place. Nursing was what I studied. It was the skill I had spent years developing. I did not know what else I could do that anyone would pay me for.

Burnout kept telling me that I needed to leave.

But Reality kept asking me “how?”

Every Cure Failed

Over the years, I tried almost every commonly prescribed cure for burnout.

Vacations.

Therapy.

Remote nursing.

Non-bedside roles.

Luxury purchases.

Exercise.

Hobbies.

Language classes.

None of them solved the problem.

Some made me feel better temporarily, but they were Band-Aids over a bleeding jugular.

Vacations made me happy because I was outside the job. Of course I felt better. I was not wiping asses, responding to alarms, or being held responsible for someone else’s body.

Then the trip ended, and I returned to the same life.

Therapy gave me a safe place to say the ugly things out loud. I could vent, admit intrusive thoughts, and speak honestly to a professional without being judged.

But when the session ended and I returned to work, the relief disappeared.

A non-bedside position removed some of the physical degradation, but I eventually realized it operated under the same extraction principle: the patient is king, and the worker must continue giving.

Luxury purchases gave me a dopamine rush until I had to work overtime to pay for them.

Exercise worked until it became another obligation I had to force into a night-shift schedule. The activity intended to restore me became another logistical problem involving sleep, timing, and recovery.

Hobbies sounded good in theory, but after working three consecutive night shifts, creating something felt like another task.

Language learning gave me temporary stimulation, but I rarely had enough bandwidth to practice outside class. My progress stayed slow because the job consumed the energy required for growth.

But the failure of these remedies still did not tell me what should replace nursing. They proved that I needed to leave; they did not make leaving possible.

Advice for Tired People

Burned-out workers are often given the same advice:

-Stop expecting work to fulfill every part of your life.

-A job is just a job.

-Find meaning outside work.

-Set boundaries.

-Practice gratitude.

-Take a walk.

-Drink some water.

-Just say no.

-Stop caring so much.

-Do the bare minimum.

-Leave work at work.

I hate all of it because they’re coping responses. They’re not solutions. They’re the steady pressure you apply onto a bleeding laceration until you can get to an emergency room.

That advice may help tired people, but it does not help empty healthcare workers.

What does “do the bare minimum” even mean when a patient is in cardiac arrest? Do I do 30 chest compressions and then I get to clock out? After all, I’ve already done my part, right?

What boundary am I supposed to enforce when someone’s mother has soiled herself and needs to be cleaned? Should I announce that I am going on break? Would the family be understanding because I am practicing self-care?

Of course not.

Healthcare does not consistently allow workers to disengage without transferring the cost of that disengagement onto another human being. I can already hear “they need to hire more nurses/staff”, or "the staffing ration needs to change”— as if that negates the true parasitic nature of the profession. As if hiring more bodies changes the extractive dynamic.

That is what much of the advice fails to acknowledge.

The problem was that the work required more— whether I had any left to give or not— and gave nothing back.

Coping advice may help a person survive long enough to make a plan, but it cannot become the plan itself.

I Was Solving the Wrong Problem

For years, I thought I needed an easier nursing job.

Less physical labor.

Fewer hours.

More paid time off.

A better schedule.

A remote role.

But nursing already offered some of those things.

Bedside nurses often work three twelve-hour shifts rather than a traditional forty-hour week. Non-bedside roles exist. Some hospitals offer better leave packages. Remote jobs remove many of the most physically exhausting parts of patient care.

I eventually obtained the kind of nursing job many people would consider ideal: stable, remote, and well-paid.

I was still miserable.

That forced me to confront the actual problem.

The goal was not an easier job.

The goal was autonomy. Freedom.

And as long as I remained in nursing, I did not feel free.

My schedule still belonged to someone else. My travel required approval. My energy was still being consumed by work I did not believe in. Even from home, I remained tethered to the same profession and the same structure.

I had spent years trying to redesign the cage, but had not yet accepted that I wanted to leave it.

An Alarm Is Not a Map

Burnout can tell you that something is wrong.

It can tell you that your body is depleted, your patience is gone, your curiosity is fading, and the life you have built is no longer sustainable.

It can tell you to leave.

But burnout is a poor travel agent. It can point away from the life hurting you, but it cannot tell you where to go, how much the journey will cost, or what you will live on when you arrive.

For years, burnout pointed me away from nursing while offering no destination beyond it. It could not identify which of my other skills might earn money. It could not build my savings, test an alternative career, calculate the risks, or create a timeline.

That is why I stayed as long as I did.

Pain created urgency, but urgency was not a plan. I still had to decide what I wanted my life to look like, find work I could tolerate, and build an exit sturdy enough to survive reality.

Burnout taught me that I could not stay.

Planning taught me how to leave.

There is a special kind of frustration that comes from watching a drama introduce an intelligent woman, ask us to admire her intelligence, and then spend the rest of the series making her behave like she left that intelligence in her work locker.

That was my biggest problem with As You Stood By.

The premise itself was strong. Eun-su and Hui-su are two women pushed to the edge by male violence, class power, and a legal system that offers very little practical protection once abuse happens behind closed doors. Hui-su is trapped in a brutal marriage with Noh Jin-pyo, a wealthy stockbroker from a powerful family. Eun-su, her friend, becomes involved in a plan to kill him.

On paper, this should have been a sharp, suffocating thriller about survival, strategy, domestic abuse, and the limits of justice. It could have been a story about two women trying to outthink a system that was never designed to save them.

Instead, As You Stood By becomes a frustrating mix of melodrama, convenient stupidity, fake-out death sequences, and wasted potential.

Eun-su Was Built Like a Strategist, Then Written Like an Amateur

The most painful character collapse in the series is Eun-su.

The drama does not introduce her as a random ordinary woman who gets swept into a crime. It introduces her as a high-performance sales associate who succeeds because she understands people. She is not merely friendly or hardworking. She is tactical.

She keeps a notebook filled with intimate details about her clients: their dreams, preferences, aspirations, insecurities, habits, and emotional weak points. Then she uses those details in conversation. She drops the right observation at the right time, makes the client feel seen, earns their approval, and sells them high-value products.

That is not a small detail. That tells us something very specific about her mind.

Eun-su knows how to observe. She knows how to read people. She knows how to prepare and how to perform under pressure. She knows how to turn emotional intelligence into a practical result. Her manager praises her as if their entire department’s quota depends on her performance. That is how high the show sings praises of her competence.

She is also a jiujitsu practitioner. Again, this is not random. The show deliberately gives her physical discipline, body awareness, and a skill set connected to control, leverage, timing, and restraint.

Then, after the first two episodes, almost none of that brilliance seeps into the rest of her life.

That is what makes her so painful to watch. It is like watching someone presented as a math wizard at work who suddenly forgets how to use a measuring cup at home. The disconnect is too large to ignore.

A woman who can track a client’s hidden aspirations in order to close a luxury sale should not be this careless in a murder cover-up. A woman trained in jiujitsu should not have that skill treated like decorative character wallpaper. A woman raised in a home where her father beat her mother should have had a more psychologically specific relationship with danger, male violence, vigilance, and control.

That childhood trauma could have explained so much. It could have made Eun-su hyper-alert. It could have made her obsessively prepared. It could have shaped how she helped Hui-su get out of her abusive marriage. It could have connected her past helplessness as a child to her present determination to intervene as an adult.

Instead, the drama barely uses it with any real precision.

Rather than letting Eun-su’s intelligence evolve under pressure, the writers slowly turn her into a more generic heroine: emotional, reckless, defiant, and strangely allergic to good advice. The show seems to confuse female strength with impulsiveness. But ignoring expertise is not bravery. Making obviously bad decisions is not empowerment. Going rogue for the sake of drama does not make a character strong.

It makes the writing weak.

The Jang Kang Passport Plot Was Absurd

One of the clearest examples of this weak writing is Eun-su trusting Jang Kang.

The entire plan depends on a look-alike, and yet Eun-su does not seem to treat this man as the enormous risk that he obviously is. Trusting the success of a murder cover-up to a stranger without a serious background check is already stupid. But then the show takes it further by having him use Jin-pyo’s passport.

How?

Airports use biometric systems now. Incheon International Airport is not a bus terminal where someone can casually flash a passport and hope for the best. The idea that Jang Kang could leave using a dead man’s passport, get through airport security, and then return to Seoul without the show properly addressing biometric verification, immigration records, surveillance, or identity mismatch is ridiculous.

The drama wants the convenience of a high-stakes fake disappearance without doing the hard work of making the logistics believable.

This is a repeated problem. Real-world complications are ignored whenever they would make the plot harder to write.

Jin-pyo is not some anonymous man living off the grid. He is a wealthy stockbroker. He has clients, coworkers, a high-profile family, money, schedules, and social obligations. A meticulous finance professional suddenly “flying to China” should immediately raise questions. His firm should notice. His clients should notice. His family should notice. His digital trail should matter.

But the show creates a strange vacuum around him. The world only becomes suspicious when the writers need it to.

That is not suspense. That is convenience.

Noh Jin-young Should Have Been More Dangerous

This problem is even more obvious with Jin-pyo’s detective sister, Noh Jin-young.

Her position is interesting. She is both a detective and a member of a powerful family with a reputation to protect. On top of that, she is aware of the domestic violence being committed by her brother that she chooses to turn a blind eye to. That should have created a genuinely tense conflict. On one hand, she has professional instincts. On the other, she has family loyalty, class anxiety, and a public image to manage.

But the show does not make her suspicious enough, pushy enough, or dangerous enough.

A detective should immediately sense that something is wrong when a meticulous stockbroker suddenly disappears under vague circumstances. Even if she wants to keep things quiet because of the family’s reputation, that should make her more aggressive privately, not less. She should be quietly cornering people, checking inconsistencies, pulling records, accessing Jin-pyo’s laptops and latest web search histories, watching body language, and applying pressure.

Instead, they set up tense scenes of Jin-young confronting Hui-su but nothing comes out of it. They make her take Jang Kang hostage only to drug him and keep him in her trunk. And that solves what, exactly?

She often feels oddly slow. The show wants her to be a threat, but it does not always write her like one.

That is another missed opportunity. Noh Jin-young could have been terrifying precisely because she had institutional access and personal stakes. She could have represented the system’s double face: the law when it serves the powerful, silence when the victim needs help.

But like many elements in this drama, the idea is stronger than the execution.

The Drama Needed Less Symbolism and More Concrete Attempts to Escape

The series also does not spend enough time showing how the system fails Hui-su.

There is a scene where Hui-su tries to report the abuse, but she panics when she realizes Jin-pyo’s detective sister works there or has connections there. That fear makes sense. If your abuser’s family has ties to the police, reporting becomes terrifying.

But the drama does not do enough with that setup.

For a show supposedly about domestic abuse, it spends surprisingly little time on the repeated, exhausting, practical attempts a victim might make to leave. Survivors often face prolonged barriers: fear of retaliation, lack of support, financial control, institutional dismissal, family pressure, shame, legal complications, and the terrifying reality that leaving can escalate danger. The issue is rarely as simple as one failed police report and then straight to murder.

That is where As You Stood By could have been far more powerful.

Instead of spending so much time on fantasy deaths, symbolic dream sequences, and stylized presentations of the characters’ psyches, the drama could have shown Hui-su trying to escape in concrete ways.

Show her documenting injuries.

Show her trying to hide money.

Show her trying to get someone to notice.

Show her calling someone and hanging up.

Show her attempting to report more than once.

Show a police officer dismissing her because Jin-pyo is respectable.

Show a family member telling her to endure it.

Show Jin-pyo weaponizing his status, money, and connections.

Show Eun-su slowly realizing that every legal route Hui-su tries either collapses or exposes her to more danger.

That would have made the eventual crime feel less like melodramatic escalation and more like the terrible final option of women who had already tried everything else.

The show wants us to believe the system failed Hui-su, but it does not spend enough time dramatizing that failure. It tells us the cage exists, but it should have shown us every bar.

The Murder Itself Was Also Wasted Potential

Even the killing of Jin-pyo feels underwhelming considering how the characters were built.

Eun-su is trained in jiujitsu. Hui-su knows the layout of the house. Jin-pyo is arrogant, violent, and overconfident. The show could have created a tense, carefully planned sequence where the women use preparation, timing, and Jin-pyo’s own assumptions against him.

They could have rigged the house somehow.

They could have poisoned him just enough to lower his inhibitions or slow his reflexes.

They could have used Eun-su’s jiujitsu in a believable way, not as an action-hero fantasy, but as a desperate, disciplined method of survival.

They could have shown a plan that almost works, then fails, then requires improvisation.

Instead, the scene becomes Hui-su screaming and dropping a snow globe on him.

That is not automatically bad. There is a version of that scene that could have worked if the show wanted the killing to feel messy, panicked, and emotionally explosive. But because the series had spent time building Eun-su as sharp, physically capable, and detail-oriented, it feels disappointing that her abilities barely matter.

Why introduce a woman as observant, strategic, and trained in martial arts if the story is not going to let those traits shape the most important act of the plot?

Again, it feels like setup without payoff.

Jin So-baek Was the Only Redeeming Part

The most consistently compelling character is Jin So-baek.

He brings the kind of cool-headedness the rest of the show desperately needed. He understands risk. He understands the underworld. He understands evidence, bodies, leverage, and consequences. He has the street grit that Eun-su and Hui-su lack, but he is not written as cartoonishly invincible. He feels like someone who knows how ugly the world is because he has actually lived close to that ugliness.

That is why I wanted more of him.

Not necessarily more romance. Not more sentimental backstory. But more of his competence. More of his process. More of the practical planning, the criminal logistics. More scenes showing how his mind works under pressure.

The show spends too much time on symbolic fake deaths and not enough time on the mechanics of survival. So-baek could have anchored the thriller side of the series. He could have forced Eun-su to confront the difference between being smart in a corporate setting and being smart in a criminal one.

That would have been fascinating.

Eun-su knows how to manipulate rich clients into buying products. So-baek knows how to survive outside polite society. Put those two forms of intelligence together, and the drama could have had a much richer strategic engine.

Instead, it keeps interrupting its own best material with melodrama.

The Ending Was Not Bad Because It Was Dark

I did not dislike the ending simply because it was sad.

A bleak ending could have worked. Eun-su going to prison and Hui-su psychologically collapsing could have been a brutal but coherent conclusion. The show could have said: this is what happens when the system ignores victims until they break the law, and then suddenly becomes efficient enough to punish them.

That would have been devastating, but honest.

The problem is that the ending tries to have both tragedy and poetic justice. Eun-su is punished. Hui-su is destroyed. But then the show also gives us a convenient car crash and the public downfall of Jin-pyo’s family, as if it wants to reassure the audience that the villains did not fully get away with it.

That compromise weakens the message.

If the show wanted to be honest about power, Jin-pyo’s family should have been able to protect itself. They had money, status, connections, and a reputation worth preserving. In real life, powerful families often do not collapse neatly in public. They manage the scandal. They bury the evidence. They redirect blame. They survive.

That would have been a colder ending, but it would have fit the world the show seemed to be building.

Instead, the finale feels theatrically tragic. Everyone suffers, everyone pays, and somehow the show still does not land a clean message.

So What Was the Message?

This is where As You Stood By becomes most frustrating.

What was it trying to say?

That domestic abuse victims are ignored? Then show more of the ignored reports, failed escape attempts, institutional cowardice, and social complicity.

That desperate women can be driven to desperate acts? Then make the desperation feel cumulative, not merely symbolic.

That murder has consequences? Fine, but that is not exactly a profound statement.

That the system punishes victims once they fight back? That could have been powerful, but the show undermines it by making Eun-su and Hui-su fail through sloppy plotting and inconsistent characterization rather than through a truly intelligent system closing in on them.

The accidental message becomes almost regressive: when women try to take survival into their own hands, they become emotional, reckless, and incompetent.

I do not think that is what the series intended. But because Eun-su is written so inconsistently, that is what it risks communicating.

Her downfall does not feel like the inevitable collapse of a smart woman trapped in an impossible system. It feels like the writers needed her to become stupid so the plot could keep going.

Final Thoughts

As You Stood By had so much potential.

It had a strong premise. It had a morally complicated setup. It had class tension, domestic abuse, female friendship, revenge, trauma, and a character like Eun-su who could have been genuinely fascinating if the writing had honored its own introduction of her.

But the series wasted too much of what it built.

It introduced Eun-su as a high-performance strategist, then made her careless. It introduced her jiujitsu, then barely used it. It introduced her abusive childhood, then failed to integrate it meaningfully into her psychology.

It introduced Noh Jin-young as a detective from a powerful family, then made her less threatening than she should have been.

It introduced domestic abuse as the moral center of the story, then spent too much time on fantasy deaths and symbolic suffering instead of the concrete, exhausting reality of trying to escape.

The only truly redeeming part was Jin So-baek, because he felt like he belonged in the smarter, grittier version of the drama this could have been.

In the end, As You Stood By did not fail because it was too dark.

It failed because it was not smart enough for the story it wanted to tell.

I ask my students this question during our warm-ups in class. While I try not to probe into their personal lives too much, I like to quickly check in on their emotional and mental state, as I believe these can affect their learning. Also, I can’t help it— I’m a nurse.

The majority of my students are also nurses, so we share common ground. I empathize with their stress and physical exhaustion, and most often these warm-ups extend to a mentorship session, when they ask me how to navigate a personal or a professional conflict. And it’s in these mentorship moments that I find nuggets of reassurance and comfort, little North Stars that tell me I’m headed in the right direction.

Today, my student and I talked about our post-shift rituals. Let’s call her Marie. She is a Korean nurse who started studying with me last month. I find her interesting because she learns quickly, asks good questions, and somehow shares the same cynical, dry humor that I do. Some students are pleasant to teach because they are motivated. Some are pleasant because they are polite. Marie is pleasant because the class feels like a conversation between two people who understand the same kind of exhaustion.

Post-shift rituals vary among healthcare professionals, but nurses almost always share the same template: shower, take-out, and TV.

Marie gave a different response, though, when I asked: “So, what do you usually do after your shift?”

She answered very plainly.

“Actually, there are only two things I like doing right now. Your classes and watching TV. I don’t do anything else. I don’t enjoy other activities.”

Her response stayed with me long after the class finished.

It caught me off-guard to be honest. Not in a conceited way, but in a “wha—” kind of way.

On one hand, it sounded bleak. Imagine drawing happiness from crap TV and English lessons. There was something sad about hearing someone reduce her current sources of enjoyment to only two things. Work takes so much from nurses. Energy. Curiosity. Social life. Sometimes even the desire to do anything beyond recovering from the shift.

I know that feeling very well.

On the other hand— and I’m not gonna be a hypocrite— I felt a small, undeniable twinge of joy knowing that my lessons delight her as much as I enjoy teaching them.

And the happiness I felt wasn’t from her admiration of ME, because frankly, I don’t think that’s what she meant. But I’m glad to know that after a long day, she chooses to attend my class, listen and learn communication strategies, and squeeze her brain for English phrases.

I must admit… I felt flattered.

Not in a vain, performative way. Not in the way people feel when they want applause. It was quieter than that.

It felt good to be… chosen.

I felt happy because I also enjoy teaching her.

There are students you teach because it is your job. Then there are students who remind you that teaching can become something more reciprocal than that.

That is still new to me.

For most of my career, I have been used to work that takes.

Nursing trained me to be useful. It trained me to anticipate needs, solve problems, tolerate pressure, absorb frustration, and keep going even when I was tired. Usefulness became the basic expectation. If I did something well, that was simply the job. If I handled something difficult, that was also simply the job.

I kept somebody alive? It’s just the job.

I cleaned up someone’s poop? It’s just the job.

I restarted someone’s heart? It’s just the job.

The reward for being competent was usually more responsibility, not more meaning.

Teaching feels different.

Not always, of course. Not every class is magical. Some lessons are awkward. Some students disappear. Some days I wonder if I am doing enough, if I prepared enough, if I explained something clearly enough. Hell, some days I wonder if I’m even qualified to do this.

But then there are moments like this one.

A student casually says that my class is one of the few things she currently enjoys.

And suddenly, the work gives something back.

That is the part I am still learning how to name and accept.

Maybe this is what reciprocal work feels like. Not easy work. Not effortless work. Not work without preparation, fatigue, or uncertainty. But work where the energy does not only move in one direction.

I prepare. My students show up.

I teach. They engage.

I correct their grammar. They give me glimpses of their lives.

I do not want to exaggerate it. I am not saving anyone. I am not transforming lives in one-hour English lessons.

But I also do not want to minimize it. I’ve been there. For my students, it’s my Medical English class. For me, it’s my Spanish and Italian language lessons.

Small things matter when someone is tired.

A class someone looks forward to matters.

An hour that feels lighter than the rest of the week matters.

A space where a nurse can speak as a whole person, not just as a worker, matters.

Maybe that is why her comment stayed with me.

Because after years of feeling like my work only measured how much of myself I could give away, it is strange to experience work that allows me to be useful without feeling hollow.

Marie probably did not mean to say anything profound. She was just answering a warm-up question.

But I heard it.

There are only two things she enjoys right now.

Watching TV.

And my class.

And for today, that was enough to remind me that maybe I am building something real.

People often assume that major life changes begin with dramatic moments.

A breakup.

A medical emergency.

Getting fired.

A screaming match with a boss.

Some explosive, cinematic event that forces a person to change course.

That wasn’t my story.

The truth is far less exciting.

Before the sabbatical, my life looked good on paper.

I had a stable nursing job in a stable industry. I lived in the United States. I had my own apartment, my own car, and enough disposable income to afford occasional travel and a few luxuries. I had recently become a U.S. citizen, which meant I finally a strong passport that allows me to travel more easily than before.

To many people—especially those back home in the Philippines—I was living the dream.

And that was part of the problem.

Because when your life looks successful from the outside, it becomes much harder to admit that something isn’t working on the inside.

The Cracks Beneath the Surface

Looking back, the earliest warning sign was simple: I was always miserable.

I spent years trying to fix it.

I went to therapy.

I traveled.

I bought nice things.

I studied languages.

I worked out.

I meal planned.

I read books.

I played video games.

Every few months, I would discover a new solution that promised to make life feel lighter. And every few months, it failed. The misery would return.

Learning to Live for the Next Escape

Then there was the travel.

Whenever I came back from a trip, I would sink into a sadness that felt disproportionate to the situation. At first, I dismissed it as post-travel blues. But eventually I noticed the pattern.

Another realization arrived in smaller moments.

I began noticing how little control I had over my own time.

Something as simple as sleeping in was subject to another person’s approval because work started at a certain hour. Taking a trip required negotiation, requests, approvals, and waiting. The older I got, the stranger that felt.

Because what do you mean some dude behind a desk has the power to tell me when I can take a break?

Work isn’t inherently evil. Not all of us are born with a silver spoon and Papa’s trust fund. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was spending enormous amounts of energy maintaining a life I didn’t actually want.

Burnout wasn’t a single thing either.

It showed up physically through weight gain, hair loss, alcohol use, pre-diabetes, and hypothyroidism.

Emotionally, it showed up as irritability, depressive episodes, anger, and a persistent inability to enjoy things I used to enjoy.

Socially, it left me with plenty of acquaintances but very few people I felt I could truly lean on.

Mentally, it dulled parts of me I once valued. I used to read voraciously. I used to write more easily. I used to be curious. Now, I must admit, I can’t even start a blog post without some assistance from AI.

The version of myself that existed before nursing felt increasingly distant.

Yet despite all of this, I kept telling myself the same things.

“Everyone is tired.”

“I just need a vacation.”

“I should be grateful.”

“Maybe the answer isn’t to love the job. Maybe I just need to love the money the job provides.”

For a long time, those explanations worked.

Until Ecuador.

Ecuador Changes the Question

What made Ecuador different wasn’t the scenery.

It was the distance.

For the first time in a long time, I was far enough away from my daily routine to look at my life like an outsider.

While I was there, I received an invoice from a recent hospitalization and found myself checking work notifications and emails. Looking at those messages from thousands of miles away, I suddenly saw something I had normalized for years.

My life depended on someone else’s approval.

A manager could decide when I traveled, how long I traveled, and whether I traveled at all.

That realization hit me harder than I expected.

When I returned home, I felt the usual sadness. But this time, there was clarity underneath it.

I remember uploading photos from the trip and looking through older travel albums. What struck me wasn’t where I had gone.

It was how much time existed between those trips.

Months.

Sometimes years.

And I realized something: I didn’t want travel to be an occasional escape from life.

I wanted exploration to be part of life.

I wanted the mountain hike to be part of a weekend.

I wanted wandering through a market to be an ordinary morning.

That was the moment I understood that a vacation wasn’t enough anymore.

Ironically, I didn’t call it a sabbatical. I just knew I couldn’t continue exactly as I was. And I knew that it needed to happen now or it never will.

There Was No Breaking Point

People sometimes ask what the breaking point was.

Honestly, there wasn’t one. Just hundreds of micro-shits accumulating over years.

Work emails.

Management reminders.

Another year passing.

Looking at travel photos.

Watching friends build lives that seemed bigger than the one I was living.

Putting on my scrubs again.

And again.

And again.

From Fantasy to Planning

Eventually, the fantasy became research.

Research became planning.

Planning became action.

At first, I just plugged the best countries for solo female travelers. Then countries in Latin America.

Then digital nomad destinations.

Then cost-of-living calculations.

Then visa requirements.

Then housing.

At some point, I realized I wasn’t daydreaming anymore. I was building a plan.

The first real step was creating a teaching profile on Preply. In 2024, I got my TEFL certificate. At that time, I just wanted a “back-up plan”. Well, I guess I’ve always known in my gut that I will be leaving Nursing in the future. So I took the first step out last November.

And it was stressful.

But also, liberating.

And exciting.

And definitely terrifying. It still is. But now I can see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, and that gives me hope.

For the first time, I wasn’t just imagining another life. I was attempting to build one.

Why I Couldn’t Keep Going

If someone asks why I didn’t simply keep going, my answer is straightforward.

I had already lost pieces of my health, my energy, my curiosity, and my sense of wonder.

I wasn’t trying to find a new version of myself.

I was trying to recover the old one. The old me.

The Pamela who laughed more.

The Pamela who dreamed more.

The Pamela who still believed that life was something to experience, not merely endure.

Most people imagine a sabbatical starts at the airport.

Mine started after I came back from Ecuador.

I expected to feel refreshed—like most people usually do after traveling. Instead, I felt something heavier. I would get home, lie in bed, and feel deeply depressed in a way that didn’t pass after a few days. It wasn’t normal sadness. It was the kind where I stopped eating properly, stayed in bed, and wondered if the trip had even happened. I would check my phone just to confirm the photos were real.

At first, I dismissed it as post-travel blues. But it kept happening. Every trip ended the same way.

Then something shifted.

I realized I wasn’t just “sad after traveling.” I was returning to a life that didn’t feel like mine anymore.

Around the same time, I noticed something else. I was cleaning up my social media and saw people who had traveled more than I had. Not wealthy people. Just people living lives that included movement, exploration, change. I had more financial stability than some of them, but less lived experience. I could count my countries on one hand. That gap didn’t feel like coincidence anymore.

That was the first real break in the pattern.

At that point, I was still working full-time as an RN. On paper, it was a stable job that many people would consider ideal. Remote work. Reliable income. Security.

But internally, I was burned out in a way that had been accumulating for 14 years. I was exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally. I was spending money on takeout and small comforts just to get through the week. I had been in the same profession for over a decade, and it felt less like a career and more like something I had been locked into.

That’s when the idea of a sabbatical stopped being abstract.

The main reason I wanted one was simple: freedom. Or at least a temporary version of it. A way to see what life looks like outside of the structure I had been living in for years.

The moment it moved from idea to plan was not dramatic. It wasn’t a resignation letter or a single turning point. It was smaller than that. It was accumulating frustration, and then “friendly reminders” from work that made it harder to ignore how tightly my time was controlled. It was having to negotiate when I take my time off, always at the mercy of the corporate machine.

When my request for a PTO– submitted 3 months in advance– was denied despite following institutional policies, I snapped.

I’m done asking for permission to live, to be sick. To be human.

From there, the preparation began.

I researched. I read tons of articles and blogs, watched YouTube videos, and joined online forums. I spoke to a therapist to make sure I wasn’t just clinically depressed and crazy. I took verified and studied Values Assessment tests to prove that this is truly what I want and not just a stress response.

On paper, it should have been simple: save money, sell things, pick a destination, book a place to stay.

In reality, it looks like this:

• coordinating with an immigration lawyer for a professional visa

• gathering documents through legal channels in my home country

• slowly purging possessions I no longer use

• liquidating assets to fund the transition

• taking extra shifts to build more runway

• teaching online and trying to turn it into a sustainable income stream

• building curriculum and digital workbooks while working full-time

The most time-consuming part is the teaching and curriculum work. It requires switching between two modes of thinking—nursing and language teaching—and managing both at a high level. But surprisingly, that part is not what drains me most.

The heaviest part is the legal work.

The documents, the immigration coordination, the deadlines, the payments, the uncertainty of whether everything will be accepted. That is the “final boss” layer. It determines whether the entire plan is real or not.

Trust me, I’ve been through this part before. As someone from the Global South, I do not have the privilege of the right accent, the right skin tone, and the right social safety nets that the loudest voices on the internet have. So I am very familiar with and experienced in visa applications and bureaucratic red tape.

And most of that is invisible.

People don’t see the legal coordination, the paperwork, or the slow dismantling of a life built around stability. They don’t see the balancing act between working full-time, building a second income stream, and trying to prepare for departure at the same time.

What they see is the idea of a sabbatical. A privilege. A break. A flight.

But what it actually looks like—at least for me—is something closer to infrastructure building while still living inside the system you are trying to leave.

Before I started this, I thought preparation would mostly be about saving money and getting rid of things.

It turns out it is more about managing systems:
emails, lawyers, bank transfers, timelines, and spending money just to unlock other parts of the process. Even leaving is expensive in ways I didn’t expect.

The biggest constraint right now is not just money or time.

It is the fact that I want teaching to become my full-time work, but it is not strong enough yet to replace my current job. So I am building one system while still dependent on another.

Right now, the most accurate way to describe my state is simple: exhausted, scared, lonely.

What feels most stuck is the exhaustion. Not physical exhaustion alone, but the mental load of constantly calculating trade-offs—sleep, shifts, students, deadlines, and whether any decision will affect the fragile balance I’m trying to maintain.

Most people think a sabbatical is an extended vacation. Something you pause your life for and then return from unchanged.

That is not what this is.

For me, this is not a pause. It is a transition.

A bridge between one version of life and another. Maybe I cross it once and keep moving forward. Maybe I cross it back temporarily to rebuild resources before crossing again somewhere else.

But either way, it is not a return to the same place.

This series is about that process—the reality of trying to build freedom while still inside the life you are trying to leave.

Not the romantic version. The operational one.

The post Sabbatical Diaries #0: Nobody Talks About This Part of a Sabbatical appeared first on Wonderlust.

I had already prepared lesson materials before class, so when she told me she wasn’t in the mood for a proper lesson, I panicked a little. I spent hours meticulously preparing the lesson for today and didn’t anticipate this sudden change.

Personally, I hate wasted preparation. So I quickly pulled up some conversation prompts instead, ready to salvage the hour somehow.

But I barely got to use them.

She immediately started talking about her week. Her parents had visited her in Canada recently, and she spent the lesson telling me about the places they went to, the food they ate, the memories they made together. I mostly listened while occasionally correcting grammar or helping her find the right vocabulary.

Then the conversation shifted.

She told me she was thinking about moving to the United States.

Not because she hated Canada. Actually, the opposite.

She told me she loved her unit. Loved her coworkers. Loved the social benefits. She has a boyfriend there. A life there. Stability. Routine. Familiarity.

But then came the sentence that made me quietly stop in my tracks.

The Question Beneath the Question

“I’m very happy here… but …”

She explained that she finished nursing school at 30 and now, past 35, she feels like time is running out. She wants to build wealth. Buy a house. Buy a car. Have a future family someday.

She said she wishes she could’ve spent more on her parents during their visit. She saw how happy and proud they were of her success, so she wants to have them visit more frequently and dote on them more.

Her friends in the United States tell her the salary is much better there, even if the work is harder. A friend who works in New York tells her how she hates it, while another friend said the money offsets the crap.

Then she asked me:

“What do you think, Pamela? What is your experience?”

And suddenly the lesson stopped feeling like a lesson.

Because I knew exactly what she meant.

I heard myself in her almost immediately. Not just in the practical concerns about money, but in that specific guilt ambitious immigrants carry — the feeling that happiness alone is not enough reason to stay somewhere.

Things were going well for her. That was the tragedy of it.

Because when things are going badly, leaving is easy. But when your life is actually good — when you have people you love, a workplace you enjoy, a rhythm you’ve slowly built for yourself — ambition starts sounding less like opportunity and more like an eviction notice.

I understood her because years ago, I had my own version of that conversation.

What I Lost When I Left

The truth is, I was happy in the UK.

Not perfectly happy, mind you. Some of my coworkers were racist motherfuckers. I was broke. I gave most of my money to my family back home and survived on leftovers. I didn’t have luxury bags, gold jewelry, a car, or my own apartment.

But I had friends.

I had a boyfriend.

The patients were generally nice and understanding.

I had time to enjoy my days off.

I was leaner. Healthier. More curious about life.

I felt more alive there.

More like myself.

And what I lost when I left was my whimsy.

That’s the only word I can use for it.

I lost my ability to dream slowly. To write poems and appreciate art. To watch plays. To marvel at every old church and street.

To imagine a life instead of strategically engineering one. To exist somewhere long enough for it to truly become mine.

To love.

A Weak Yes Is a Strong No

I don’t regret the decision to come to the United States itself. I need to be clear about that. Money matters. Financial security matters. Convenience, safety, stability — these things are not shallow desires. It’s easy to romanticize struggle until you’re eating eggs and rice every day and calling malnutrition “minimalism.”

But I regret the circumstances surrounding my decision.

I did not originally want to move to the United States. My original goal was to become a clinical instructor. I was already studying for my Master’s degree at the time. But slowly, subtly, the decision stopped feeling like mine.

I was told that as the eldest child, the “golden daughter”, that it was my responsibility to lift the family out of poverty. That because I was clothed and fed, that my sole purpose was to pay back the tuition fees, pay off the cars, and send my brothers to school.

That because of familial piety and culture, I don’t get to be a human that has dreams and desires.

And because America paid more, the implication became clear: if I truly loved my family, then this was what I had to do.

People call these “choices,” but I’ve started questioning how much of a choice something really is once guilt enters the equation.

Because consent requires honesty.

Consent requires freedom.

And a weak yes is a strong no.

Leaving Too Early, Staying Too Long

That’s the part I wanted my student to understand, even if I didn’t say it directly during class.

I wasn’t trying to convince her to stay in Canada or move to the United States. I simply wanted her to understand that leaving is an option, not a milestone.

Not everything needs to be a Yes or a No. Sometimes, Wait is also valid decision.

People often misunderstand this.

We treat happiness like a temporary phase instead of something we’re allowed to fully inhabit. We think every good chapter must eventually be sacrificed in the name of growth, optimization, or financial progress.

Sometimes that sacrifice is worth it. Again, financial security is a very real and valid need. If moving to a different country provides you that, then leaving is a wise decision.

But sometimes it isn’t.

I think people deserve informed consent before making life-altering decisions. They deserve honesty about what they gain and what they may quietly lose in the process.

Because leaving a place too early interrupts something.

Your rhythm.

Your relationships.

Your identity.

Your understanding of the people around you and your place among them.

You never fully arrive anywhere because you’re always preparing for the next departure.

But staying too long has its own consequences too.

I learned that the hard way in America.

Because there comes a point where “stability” quietly becomes stagnation. Where a cushy environment starts dulling you instead of nurturing you. Where convenience becomes a cage disguised as comfort.

And that kind of stagnation is dangerous because it happens slowly.

You stop dreaming.

Stop exploring.

Stop imagining alternatives for yourself.

You start convincing yourself that this stagnation is what life is supposed to be.

You survive well enough that nobody questions it — including you.

Until one day you wake up and realize you have spent years enduring a life that no longer fits you simply because it was practical.

I think people romanticize suffering too much, but I also think comfort can make people spiritually sedentary.

Growth requires friction. Not constant chaos. Definitely not poverty nor self-destruction.

But movement.

Curiosity.

Discomfort.

Somewhere along the way, I stayed in the United States long after I already knew something inside me was dying here.

And maybe that’s why this conversation with my student affected me so deeply.

Because I have experienced both mistakes:

Leaving a place too early.

And staying somewhere too long.

The post Leaving Too Early, Staying Too Long appeared first on Wonderlust.

I teach more, open up my schedule, take on more students, and eventually build something steady enough to support myself.

The problem is that all of that requires time, and right now most of mine already belongs to the job I’m trying to move away from.

Nursing still pays me far more than teaching does. It covers my expenses and gives me the financial stability I’m not willing to gamble away, especially with the cost of living where I am. Walking away from it before I have something solid underneath me would be reckless.

Unfortunately, it is also the job that leaves me with the least energy to build anything else.

That is the part I keep running into.

To make teaching financially viable, I need more students. To take on more students, I need more availability. More availability means either working less at the hospital or cutting further into sleep and recovery, neither of which is especially sustainable.

So the job that supports me now also slows down the work that could support me later.

I understand the logic of it. I just don’t particularly enjoy living inside it.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I could find another two hours somewhere, or somehow become slightly more efficient, I could finally get some momentum. But there are only so many hours in a day, and apparently none of them have been hiding under the couch waiting for me to discover them.

For now, I work with whatever is left.

A few classes here. An extra slot there. Some lesson planning squeezed between shifts. Progress happens, but slowly enough that it is difficult to recognize while I’m inside it.

Lately, it barely feels like movement at all.

I survive on microwave dinners. The most walking I’ve done recently is taking the trash out once a week. My idea of an “adventure” has become selling off things I don’t plan to take with me so the eventual move will be lighter and, ideally, a little less financially painful.

Technically, I know that counts as preparation.

Emotionally, it mostly feels like emptiness.

There’s something strange about dismantling one version of your life before the next one is ready. You can be making perfectly rational decisions and still look around afterward and wonder why everything feels so bare.

Maybe that’s where I am right now.

The math still makes sense. I need the nursing income. I need time to grow the teaching income. I don’t have enough of both to move as quickly as I want.

So the transition is slower than I would like, and considerably less inspiring than career-change stories tend to make it sound.

For now, I’m still moving. I just happen to be moving at a speed that is extremely fucking annoying.

The post The Math Doesn’t Lie: Transitioning Careers While Working Full Time appeared first on Wonderlust.

Not John, the retired engineer.
Not Molly, the retired second-grade teacher.

A small bowel obstruction.

Because now, at 70, that’s your life.

Gastroenterologist visits every few weeks.
Nephrologist once a month because your ankles are swollen.
Primary care every six months because your amlodipine got bumped to 10 mg after your blood pressure spiked.

A list of pills long enough that nobody reads it twice.

And two weeks ago, you got diagnosed with a small bowel obstruction.

So that’s what you talk about.

The obstruction.
The constipation.
The laxatives.

You press the call light five minutes after the nurse leaves.
Not because anything changed.
Because you need someone to stand there and listen to the same thing again. With care. With tenderness.

Because you realized– from the very first moment your PCP put you on a mix of antihypertensives– that this is how you get people to listen.

When there’s something wrong. When something hurts.

And you learned soon enough, that they’ll stop coming over once you’re fixed. And the attention stops. The knock on the door quietens.

Until the next diagnosis.

This time, it’s your kidneys. You didn’t really pay attention to the guy– I mean, if it’s not the heart, then it’s the lungs or the kidneys, and you’re tired of it.

Right. Except you’re not. Because now they have to keep you “for a few nights for observation”, you already know the drill–

Dilaudid at your fingertips.

A warm blanket at 2 AM.

“Is there something to eat?” at 11PM. “What?! What do you meant the kitchen is closed?! Not even a turkey sandwich?? What kind of place is this?”

‘I’m not a bad person,’ you tell yourself. ‘I’m just not feeling well and I’m very tired’, you tell your daughter on the phone.

But there’s a sick sense of satisfaction creeping in your chest watching the young nurse scramble for a turkey sandwich.

Or listening to the nurse manager in the white coat trying to find euphemisms to explain how the hospital kitchen operates–desperately avoiding ‘negative’ words in an attempt to appease you and get that much coveted patient satisfaction score.

And if by chance, some smart-ass nurse doesn’t fall for your stories, you call the patient liaison because– why not?

Nobody here takes your small bowel obstruction seriously!

And some guy in a business suit enters your room, nods his head sympathetically as you weave the 30-year story that started with the back pain and now has evolved into a small bowel obstruction and you really “just want to get better, you know?”

They know.

Oh… they know.
Every one knows.
Your daughter in California knows.
Your neighbor knows.
The nurse knows.
You know it.

But nobody says it out loud.

They know– you know– that this is what happens when nothing else is going on.

One thing takes over.
Then it fills the space.
Then it becomes the only thing you have.

It’s about a life that’s been reduced to maintenance.
Appointments.
Medications.
Monitoring.

Surviving, over and over, with nothing else layered on top.

So when the admission nurse asks you, “Have you traveled outside of the country in the past month?”

You begrudgingly shake your head. Because if this damn kidneys just worked, and this damn thing in my stomach just worked, and if I just took a some days off from the office 20 years ago, I would’ve been on that cruise.

You know damn well she wasn’t asking for pleasantries’ sake.

But you don’t care.

Because you know deep down, even if you deny it, that the time to travel has long passed. That ship has sailed, both figuratively and literally. The only thing that takes you one place to another is your motorized scooter.

Or the ambulance, if the couch at home is starting to feel too familiar.

And when they wheel you in the next time, and the doctor peers down his mask to ask you, “Mr. Smith, what is it this time?” without you even having to say your name, you sigh.

“I’ve been having this chest pain since last week….”

.

.

.

Sounds familiar?

Too familiar, if you ask me. Because in my 14 years of clinical experience, I’ve yet to hear a different pattern.

But lately, my life doesn’t look that different.

Work.
Sleep.
Teach.
Repeat.

Same conversations.
Same patterns.

Nothing technically wrong. Just… nothing expanding either.

I’m not sick.

And really, this isn’t about small bowel obstructions or illnesses. This happens to everybody. Remember your coworker with a 3-year old?

What was the last thing she talked to you about? Right, her son painting their kitchen red with a marker.

Or what about your other coworker who got engaged? Right, the night her fiance proposed 11 months ago.

And the secretary? What was that story she told you about her husband’s truck? Right, that they never got the chassis working or whatever so he brought it to a shop and the mechanic charged him a hundred dollars more so he’s gonna take it to the other shop.

I’ve seen how a life turns into one topic.
One loop.
One version of itself that just keeps replaying.

And if you stay long enough, that becomes your whole life.

Not because you chose it.

Because you didn’t stop it.

And I refuse to find out how that story ends.

Not if it means staying in a life stuck in a routine.

So I’m getting the hell out.

The post When One Thing Takes Over appeared first on Wonderlust.

I work night shifts, so my days don’t really feel like days. I work hybrid– in-office/hospital half the time, and at home some days. I save up on gas, but you’re wrong to think I save up on sleep too.

Whether I work onsite or remotely, I’m not always able to sleep properly. Sometimes I get five hours. Sometimes less. I wake up feeling heavy, like my body didn’t fully reset.

Somewhere in between, I teach. I open slots even on work nights. I plan lessons, respond to students, create courses, design my own website, try to stay present. Then there’s everything else– laundry, food, basic things that keep life running.

I used to have the energy to study languages after work. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. The first to go was Portuguese–my brain just didn’t have enough strength and space to learn the special nasal sounds the language required. Next was Italian– I antagonized my Italian teacher and my apology is not enough to repair a fractured relationship (I’m not putting forth excuses– what I did was inexcusable. I’m merely explaining). In addition, in between admissions, discharges and teaching, my brain couldn’t keep up with the complicated grammar that we were slowly tackling. Last to go was Spanish– it was just impossible to keep awake and it was taking too much brain power to shift from Tagalog — English — Spanish — then back to English for when I engage with my students.

My brain couldn’t keep up anymore.

I liked that version of myself– the one that was always learning something new. Now, I barely have the capacity. And that scares me a little. I don’t want to become another person who says “I sTuDiED sPAnISH in hiGHschOoL so I Can UNdeRStaND… howlah!” and that’s the extent of what they know.

These days, I try to read books to keep my brain power up. Between work and teaching, my interactions with actual people whom I can learn from are very limited. Most days, if I’m not talking to a patient, I’m talking to a student. And frankly, as someone who’s more abstract than human, I feel like my brain is shrinking bit by bit by the lack of intellectual stimulation. So I read. Slowly but surely, I finished re-reading Animal Farm in 2 months. I’m now reading Fahrenheit 451 (Don’t argue with me– Montag is creepy at the very least.)

Despite of the constant exhaustion, I know I’m building something. I have students who trust me. I’m preparing for a sabbatical I’ve wanted for a long time. I’m investing in a life that I am not living yet.

But right now, it doesn’t feel exciting. It just feels… heavy.

Maybe this is just a phase. As Google Gemini and Chatgpt tell me: You are not late, you are building a life where the number of admissions doesn’t dictate your day.

Maybe this is what the in-between is supposed to feel like– not exciting, not fulfilling, just necessary.

(While I get my sanity together, enjoy this photo of the neighbor’s cat that likes to come up my apartment whenever.)

The post What My Days Look Like Right Now appeared first on Wonderlust.

It started with an awakening.

Not the dramatic kind. More like a quiet pause. A slow realization that I had become stagnant — not out of failure, but out of routine. I knew how to be a nurse. I had studied for it, trained for it, survived it. But when I really sat with myself, I wondered: Is that all I know?

Is this what I really want?

I remembered a different version of myself. I used to write. I used to teach. I had a social life. I had creative stamina. So when I felt the edges of burnout closing in, writing felt too heavy to pick up again. Friendships were scattered across time zones and conflicting schedules.

But teaching? That clicked.

I had done it before, and I enjoyed it. And more importantly, I could do something about it now.

So I enrolled in a TEFL course at the University of Houston. Quietly. Strategically. As a backup plan, if I’m being honest. If things in nursing continued to spiral (and they were), I wanted an exit strategy that wouldn’t feel like a complete leap into the void.

I didn’t expect to love it this much.

Teaching in the In-Between

These days, I still work full-time as a night shift nurse. Which means teaching is squeezed into the small pockets of time between sleep and survival.

It’s hard, and I won’t sugarcoat it. My daily routines require military-grade scheduling. Lesson planning replaces gaming. Rest is fragmented. Coffee is constant. But I’ve never once felt depleted after a class.

Why? Because teaching doesn’t take from me the way nursing does.

In nursing, I’m tasked with keeping people alive — even if they treat me like I’m invisible. Or worse, like shit, which is sadly becoming the norm. There are no boundaries, no say in the matter. It’s my job to keep going, no matter how I’m spoken to, no matter how parasitic the system is.

But teaching? Teaching is reciprocal.

When I prepare lessons in Medical English, my students meet me there. They participate. They ask questions. They say thank you — genuinely. Their growth is visible. Their improvement is the return on my investment. It’s a give-and-take, not an extraction.

One of my students wrote:

“I once wanted to keep Pamela as my own secret, but I realized that anyone who genuinely needs clinical English deserves to learn from her. I am deeply grateful to the friend who introduced me to Pamela, and I feel sincere appreciation toward Pamela after every lesson. If I am able to adapt to hospital life and grow as a nurse, it will be because Pamela believed in me and guided me step by step. Her class didn’t just teach English—it supported me when I needed it most. I wholeheartedly recommend Pamela to any nurse who wants to survive, grow, and thrive in a clinical environment.”

I still tear up when I read that. It’s been years since I’ve felt truly appreciated in not just what I do, but for the thought and energy I pour into other people.

When Appreciation Feels Unfamiliar

A few weeks ago, I posted that review on Instagram. I remember feeling proud… and strangely uncomfortable at the same time. The praise felt oversized. Too… generous.

Tonight, it happened again.

During a lesson, I told one of my students that I am merely a resource person. That at the end of the day, she controls her nursing practice. The phrases, frameworks, and communication tools I teach are there to support her, but I won’t be standing beside her in a hospital room telling her what to say.

She paused and said, “Oh, how I wish you were. I would feel better.”

I laughed. I said something practical. But internally, something shifted.

Later, she told me that once she gets her green card and starts working in New York, she and her friend want to visit me in Texas.

And instead of matching her excitement, I froze.

Not because I wasn’t happy.
But because a wave of impostor syndrome hit me so suddenly, I didn’t know where to place it.

I know she’s praising me, and I know she’s thankful for how I helped her improve her English. But somehow, the praise landed differently.

Why do you look up to me like that?
Am I really that good?

RN# 012589 vs Medical English Specialist

In the hospital, I am a function. A role. A license number. An Employee ID#.
In teaching, I’m more than a tentacle in a parasitic system. My Preply profile says I’m a Medical English Specialist, and I have the much-coveted Super Tutor Badge.

In teaching, I am a person whose presence matters

And maybe that’s why opening morning slots didn’t feel like a sacrifice, even on work nights. Even for $8 an hour.

From a business perspective, it probably makes no sense. I mean, why would you sacrifice sleep for 8 dollars an hour when you’re a specialist with 14 years of clinical experience? How is this going to fund the future you’re building?

But when my students asked if I could open more time so they could study with me, my instinct wasn’t resentment.

It was gratitude.

They want to learn with me.

Not because they have to. Not because I’m assigned to them.
But because they believe I can help.

And in those moments, I forget about business or strategy. I forget that this is technically income toward a plan.

Because while teaching, I am not calculating. I am not pulled in multiple directions, expected to perform a miracle only Jesus can. I am not asked to do more with the little I was given.

In teaching, I am present.

A Different Kind of Exhaustion

After years of night shifts, I’ve become religious about sleep. It’s sacred. Non-negotiable.

So imagine my surprise when I started willingly shaving off an hour or two just to squeeze in a class after a 12-hour shift. I wouldn’t do that for a meeting. I wouldn’t do it for overtime. But somehow, I’ll do it for teaching.

Not because I’m a martyr. Hell, I could be the most selfish bitch you’ll meet.

But because I’m not resentful.

That’s the difference between something that drains you and something that feeds you — even when you’re tired.

Maybe this chapter doesn’t need to mean anything bigger yet. Teaching started as an exit strategy, but somewhere along the way it became evidence that I can still enjoy being good at something. I can still learn. I can still be useful without feeling used.

That may be why my students’ appreciation catches me off guard. At the hospital, being needed is part of the job. Teaching has introduced me to something I’m much less familiar with: being chosen.

When they ask for more time with me, I feel trusted. When they thank me, I feel seen. I’m still figuring out how to receive either of those things without immediately questioning whether I deserve them.

For now, I think that’s enough.

If I had to give this chapter a name, I’d still call it Rialto, after the bridge in Venice. It’s practical and beautiful at the same time, which feels fitting. I don’t know exactly where this is leading yet, but I like the fact that I’m moving again.

It was late. The streets were dark. I was tired in that specific, slightly disoriented way that comes from long flights and new continents.

When I arrived, my airport driver graciously coordinated with the hotel staff to make sure I arrived safely. He called the reception, and made sure hotel staff were aware that I would be arriving late. He also walked me to meet said hotel staff to ensure that I wouldn’t be wandering the streets along at night.

When I finally got to the hotel and realized I was starving, the hotel staff didn’t hesitate. They pulled out their personal phones and helped me order food, well past what I’m sure was their official job description. They went above and beyond for someone who literally just arrived.

That kind of care is rare. In the U.S., it’s almost unheard of. Even in Europe, it’s not something you expect. Ecuador welcomed me gently… before it started humbling me.

When Spanish Loads… Slowly

After a gentle start, things went off-script almost immediately.

On my very first tour, I was casually placed into a Spanish-speaking group. To be fair, the tour company did ask if I can speak Spanish. I mean… I do. Just not well enough for a tour.

I guess I bit off more than I can chew. No warning. No buffer. Just vibes.

My brain hadn’t fully switched languages yet, so my Spanish was… loading. Slowly. Buffering. Occasionally crashing. But the tour guide was patient, and I asked questions in my broken, slightly apologetic Spanish. Somehow, it worked.

Here’s video proof that I made friends with fellow travelers despite the language barrier:

Another part of the plan that unraveled involved buses. Specifically: the lack of them.

My travel itinerary was: Quito –Cotopaxi — Banos– Riobamba– Cuenca.

This was my first time doing extended solo travel in Ecuador, and I quickly learned that no itinerary survives reality intact.

From Baños, I was supposed to travel to Cuenca. The bus ride was around eight hours, so I thought I’d be clever and split the trip. I’d stop in Riobamba for a couple of nights, then continue on.

What I failed to account for was a nationwide transport strike.

Why does this always happen when I’m in town? The same thing happened in Portugal. And Italy. And Spain.

I’m starting to think this is a personal curse.

Buses from Riobamba to Cuenca were scarce to nonexistent. So I improvised and decided to head back to Baños, hoping a bigger city would offer better options.

Well, guess who fell asleep and missed her stop?

And that’s how I accidentally ended up in Puyo, deep in the Amazon, instead of Baños.

At 10 a.m., I stood in a bus terminal being told the next bus to Cuenca wouldn’t leave until 8 p.m. Solo travel confidence is great until logistics and safety start having a very loud conversation in your head.

I seriously considered the odds. Here I am, 5 feet and 2 inches, with barely passable Spanish, about to travel on a night bus. My nurse brain wanted safety, but my traveler brain wanted adventure.

So I did what any rational adult would do: I called my Italian teacher, Mirko, who happened to be in Quito.

His advice was simple: You wanna be safe? Come here to Quito.

That detour turned into almost a week in the capital. I missed Cuenca entirely, but I gained something else — time with a friend, new travelers, unexpected conversations, and the reminder that detours aren’t always losses.

Hitchhiking, Cows, and Other Excellent Decisions

Ecuador also reminded me that my misadventures are not always logistical. Sometimes, they’re… agricultural.

In Urbina, I milked a cow.

Midway through the experience, the cow decided to do what cows do. Poop.

The experience was unforgettable.

Then there was Cotopaxi.

I wanted to hike around Lake Limpiopungo. The driver kindly offered to drop me off at the lake and told me to hike back to the tourist center when I was done. I thought the walk would be easy.

It was — until it wasn’t.

By the time I finished hiking around the lake, I was tired, hungry, and staring at a very long walk back. I ate my emergency banana and had a quiet moment of reckoning.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t afraid of other humans. I was more afraid of the elements. I weighed my options carefully…

And after three cars passed me by, I decided to hitchhike.

Thankfully, an English-speaking couple stopped and gave me a ride back to the tourist center, restoring my faith in humanity and my blood sugar levels.

Yes. I’m safe. I wouldn’t be able to write this blog post if I had been left to die in the Andes.

Horses, Time, and Learning to Let Go

If Ecuador gave me chaos, it also gave me calm. And it came on horseback.

Time slowed every time I rode.

In Baños, Riobamba, and Cotopaxi, horseback riding became my favorite way to move through the landscape. At first, I tried to control everything. I pulled at the reins near puddles. I worried about hills. I micromanaged.

Eventually, I realized the horses knew better than I did.

They knew when to slow down, when to gallop, how deep the water was, and how to avoid it. All I had to do was trust.

That surprised me: how much I enjoyed it, how grounding it felt, how connected I felt to another living being and the land at the same time.

I wish I had spent more time riding. More time letting the world pass by at a pace that made sense.

What Ecuador Quietly Taught Me

Ecuador taught me honesty.

Not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, necessary kind.

I learned to be honest about what I can and cannot do. I’m not elderly, but I’m not at peak health either. I learned to listen to my body. To stop forcing myself into experiences just because other travelers could do them effortlessly.

No matter how many blogs I read or vlogs I watch, my travel experience will always be mine. Discomfort, limits, and adjustments are part of the deal, and embracing them is part of growing.

Meeting other travelers also stirred something uncomfortable and undeniable.

They felt free.

Sure, I don’t know their whole stories, but in my conversations, I realized how much of my life was dictated by schedules that weren’t mine. By approval I had to ask for. By systems that decided when and how I could live.

Ecuador didn’t introduce that thought — it made me accept it. Finally.

When Thoughts Become Plans

Before Ecuador, I lived with a lot of thoughts.

After Ecuador, those thoughts became plans.

The question “If not now, then when?” stopped being rhetorical. It became a principle.

I didn’t need a grand moment to realize this. The images that linger with me are simple: walking through a city looking for a local restaurant, ordering food, wandering without urgency. Imagining a future where life feels lived instead of scheduled.

All my travel lessons, misadventures, reflections, and questions seemed to converge in Ecuador. It gave me direction without shouting. Purpose without pressure.

And maybe that’s what made it so powerful.

Sometimes, the biggest changes don’t come from perfectly executed plans — they come from getting lost, missing buses, trusting horses, and realizing that life is far too short to keep waiting for the “right” time.

Solo travel in Ecuador reminded me that you don’t always need a plan — just the willingness to pivot, trust, and pay attention.

I don’t know when the next misadventure begins, but I do know this: it’ll come with more intention, more stillness, and probably another horse.

Snapshots of My Ecuador Adventure

Quito and Cotopaxi

Banos and Puyo

Riobamba and Urbina

Quilotoa

The post Chronicles of (Mis)adventures in Ecuador: When Plans Detour and Clarity Finds You appeared first on Wonderlust.

There’s been a lot of talk online lately about adult friendships: how hard they are to maintain, how busy everyone is, how “life just happens.”

Just take a look at r/FriendshipAdvice or r/Adulting on Reddit. I’d say 80% of the posts in those communities are about maintaining adult friendships.

The most common sentiments floating around social media include:

• The “I’m too busy” defense. Case in point, this Reddit comment: “I would love a friend, but between keeping my marriage healthy with my husband and raising 2 under 5 I honestly do not have time for anymore relationships. I came to this realization about a week ago.”

• The self-care > everything movement, exemplified by a content creator who said, and I quote: “…maybe they’re just prioritizing rest, peace or their boundaries, which is fine.” (I translated this from Filipino to English for my non-Filipino readers.)

• The belief that adult friendships naturally fade or require less effort. Some people assume that as you grow up, your preferences change, so you just “grow apart.”

People are defending their right to prioritize family, careers, and self-care — and they’re not wrong.

But here’s the thing: when friendships consistently land at the bottom of your priority list, they stop being friendships. They become placeholders. Background noise. Emotional storage lockers you plan to open again someday when you finally have time. And that’s not what friendship is supposed to be.

I understand all of this. I really do. Life gets overwhelming. Priorities shift. No one can show up at full capacity all the time.

But at some point, “busy” stops being a circumstance and becomes a choice. Because friendship, like any other relationship, requires maintenance. And when it’s repeatedly deprioritized, that message lands — whether we intend it to or not.

Friendship Requires Maintenance

Why is friendship always the first to go?

Friendship, like any meaningful relationship, does not run on autopilot. It needs checking in, follow-through, and mutual effort.

We don’t expect marriages to thrive without communication. We don’t expect careers to flourish without showing up. Yet somehow, friendship is treated as optional — something we’ll return to once life settles down.

Friendship is not a lesser relationship. It’s not a placeholder until romance arrives, children are born, or careers stabilize. And yet that’s exactly how it’s treated in adulthood: optional, flexible, endlessly forgiving.

We don’t apply this logic elsewhere. We don’t tell our partners, “I’ll check back in after I give birth.” We show up to work tired or even sick, because we know constant absence leads to consequences. We don’t excuse emotional distance in family relationships by calling it self-care — we still reach out to the son who’s acting out, or the daughter who’s withdrawn.

But when it comes to friendship, neglect is often reframed as inevitability. Suddenly it’s called “growing up” or “setting boundaries.”

Why is friendship always the first to go?

Reciprocity & Responsibility

Friendship, like any enduring connection, requires maintenance. Not constant availability. Not daily communication. But intentional effort, mutual responsiveness, and the willingness to show up even when the timing isn’t ideal.

When someone says, “My priority right now is my partner, my child, my job, myself,” what they are also saying — whether they mean to or not — is that friendship ranks lower. That it can wait. That it isn’t urgent or essential.

And while people have every right to choose their priorities, friends also have every right to believe the message they’re being sent. And to feel hurt by it.

Because relationships are built not on intention, but on behavior.

You cannot claim closeness while offering distance. You can’t ask for understanding while offering silence. You can’t keep withdrawing and expect the other person to keep giving. That’s not friendship. That’s emotional convenience.

Sometimes, friendship asks more of us than convenience. Sometimes it asks us to show up tired, overwhelmed, grieving, or stretched thin. Not because we are obligated, but because that is the cost of having a village that doesn’t disappear when things get hard.

Community isn’t built in ideal conditions. It’s built in the middle of ordinary, messy life.

To treat friendship as less than other relationships is to misunderstand its value. Many of us survive adulthood because of our friendships — because someone checks in, remembers us, makes time, and chooses us again and again.

That kind of connection doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because both people decide it matters.

“But Life Is Just So Busy…”

I can already hear the rebuttals:

“But I have kids.”
“But I’m barely surviving.”
“But I’m going through something.”
“But I don’t have the bandwidth.”

All valid. I believe you. Life is heavy. There are seasons when showing up for anyone else feels impossible.

And listen — I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been the unavailable one: sending “maybe next time” messages, letting texts sit on “seen” for days. I’ve also been the one whose invitations go unanswered, whose voice notes go unheard, the one who waits.

What I’ve learned is that while unavailability might start as necessity, it often turns into a pattern. At some point, it becomes a choice. We start choosing to be unavailable to our friends.

That internet quote says it best: “What you allow, you choose.”

So what happens? We coast through life, choosing everything else over friendship, and then one day we wake up lonely, wondering: “We used to be so close. What happened?”

Here’s what happened: you chose this.

Here’s the nuance: acknowledging your own limits doesn’t erase the impact of your absence. Both can be true. You can be stretched thin and still unintentionally hurt someone who kept reaching out. You can love someone and neglect the relationship until it no longer feels mutual. You can have good reasons — and still cause real harm.

The problem isn’t the hard season. It’s using the hard season to justify indefinite silence.

If a friend says, “I’ve been feeling distant from you,” and your first response is “I’ve just been busy,” you’re asking that friend to understand your life — without offering understanding in return.

Relationships work two ways. If you want grace, you have to offer repair. If you want the friendship to survive, you have to let people in — even just a little. Even a simple “I don’t have capacity right now, but I still care” can be enough.

That one sentence can be the difference between a friendship that grows through the hard parts, and one that quietly dies from neglect.

It’s okay not to have capacity in the moment. But the question remains:

When will you?

No one is asking for constant attention or unrealistic energy. But friendship requires awareness. If you can’t meet up, can you send a voice note? If you’re overwhelmed, can you at least acknowledge the message? Can you show up in small ways that still say, “I haven’t forgotten you”?

Because while we all need space, what we also need — desperately — is each other.

Choosing Friendship

Sometimes, sustaining a friendship means choosing it — even when it’s inconvenient. Even when you’re tired. Even when you’re busy.

Adulthood pulls people in a dozen directions: jobs, children, partners, errands, rest, religion, family events. Every hour gets claimed. All of that matters.

But would it really be so much to skip one gathering with people you see every week? Would it be so terrible to miss one Sunday service to make space for someone who’s been waiting — patiently — to feel like they still matter to you?

I’m sure Jesus won’t send you to hell for rescheduling once.

You cannot build a lasting friendship on leftover time. You cannot claim to value someone you never make space for.

And honestly — would you be happy eating someone’s leftovers? So why should your friend be satisfied with the leftovers of your time?

When every other part of life gets prioritized, and friendship is always the thing that can wait, the message being sent is clear:

“This relationship doesn’t matter enough.”

Maybe you think your friend understands. Maybe you believe they’ll always be there when things settle down.

But here’s the truth: no one waits forever. Even the most understanding people eventually stop reaching out when they realize they’ve become optional.

Adult Friendship Is a Choice

The idea of “adulting” shouldn’t mean we lose our capacity for care and connection. If we want true community, we can’t ghost each other in our busiest or hardest moments.

Friendship doesn’t fall apart because people get busy. It falls apart because people decide — consciously or not — that it can wait. That it’s optional. That it will still be there later.

But relationships don’t survive on good intentions alone. They survive on effort, reciprocity, and the quiet decision to keep showing up.

And when friendship is consistently treated as expendable — something to return to when life calms down — it eventually stops waiting.

Not with a confrontation.
Not with anger.
Just with distance.

That’s how most friendships end in adulthood. Not because of conflict, but because one person kept choosing, and the other kept postponing.

How about you? Have you lost a friend this way?

The post What Adult Friendship Demands: On Reciprocity, Adult Priorities, and Choosing to Show Up appeared first on Wonderlust.

This year, I chose to travel in Portugal, a country that had been sitting patiently on my list for years. After Spain and Italy, it felt like the natural next step: another language to learn, another culture to experience, and another chance to try traveling smarter.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t. But I did travel differently—and that made all the difference.

Preparing for Portugal: The Illusion of Readiness

If you’ve read my earlier posts in the (mis)adventures series, you know I never show up to a new country without trying to learn the local language. So of course, I studied Portuguese.

I’ll be honest: it was a beast. Similar words to Spanish and Italian, sure—but the pronunciation? Much closer to French. It’s more nasal, and I even had to borrow pronunciation techniques from my native Tagalog just to get the sounds right. Still, by the time I arrived, I wasn’t fluent. I could understand directions, read train delay notices, and order a coffee or a pastel de nata—but conversation? Not quite there. (Seafood lasagna, however, was successfully acquired. Sorry to my Italian teacher’s ancestors. Haha!)

Outside the language barrier, I made some classic mistakes: fashion misfires, overpacking optimism, and trusting that my gastritis wouldn’t act up in a country where I barely spoke the language and had zero knowledge of the healthcare system.

How does that saying go again? An ounce of prevention is… bullcrap?

Because preparation doesn’t always prevent (mis)adventures.

So come along, dear wonderers, for my (mis)adventures in beautiful Portugal!

(Mis)Adventure #1: Packing With Hope Instead of Logic

Packing is its own art form. What you pack for a city differs wildly from what you’d bring to the coast. I know this. I still got it wrong.

Europeans dress better than Americans—fact. In the U.S., pajamas at the grocery store? Totally fine. But in Portugal? I wanted to step it up.

Did I nail the perfect wardrobe? Nope.
Did I pack clothes I never wore and donated at the hostel? Yup.
Did I buy a few pieces there and wear them more than my original outfits? Absolutely.

Packing remains an ongoing lesson, and I’m realizing my personal style is evolving. I used to love dresses; now I reach more for comfy sweaters and cotton pants.

I used to stress about looking like a tourist. But you know what? I am a tourist. Locals can tell, no matter what I wear. And that’s not a bad thing. What matters more is being respectful of local customs and laws.

And being ready for sudden downpours. It rained hard in the morning when I went to Sintra. Good thing I bought a light, waterproof jacket with a hood that saved me from being drenched!

Lesson learned: Packing is still a work in progress—and that’s okay.

(Mis)Adventure #2: Semi-Wrong Footwear—Once Again

At this point in my traveler journey, I know the value of good shoes. I thought I was ready for Portugal’s cobblestones and tiled streets. I was not.

I had read all about the slippery tiles and steep slopes. I packed my trusty Converse, confident they’d have enough traction.

Then it rained.

One morning in Lisbon, a drizzle turned the sidewalks into slip-and-slides. I had to walk like a cartoon character avoiding banana peels just to stay upright. Thankfully, the sun came out and dried the streets before noon.

To this day, I don’t understand how the locals do it. Some wore the same Chucks I did—and yet, no problem. Do they come with secret cleats?

Will I wear my Converse again in Portugal? Yes. I have them in different colors. But next time, I’ll bring a pair with extra grip.

Lesson learned: Comfort over style, always. And if you still get it wrong? That’s okay. It’s a science of its own.

(Mis)Adventure #3: Trains, Again—A European Classic

Ah, European trains. Beautiful. Scenic. Unpredictable.

What’s a trip without a nationwide transport strike?

Just like in Spain and Italy, I had a train adventure in Portugal too. I planned a day trip to Guimarães, only to find out—surprise!—trains were canceled due to a transport workers’ strike. While I support the cause, it definitely threw off my schedule.

Did I check timetables? Of course.
Did I check the local news? Nope.

It ended up being a blessing in disguise. That same day, my gastritis flared up. If I had gone, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed a minute of it.

Lesson learned: Always check transport updates, even if you think you know better.

(Mis)Adventure #4: Not Taking Up Hiking as a Hobby

Portugal, like Cusco and Cuenca, is a hilly country. And with my sea-lion-level fitness, I struggled.

Every walk felt like a hike. My lungs were constantly challenged. But hey, maybe that’s why I always lose weight on vacation—breathing alone is a workout!

The silver lining? Pastries. So many glorious pastries! While pastel de nata stole my heart, I also loved pão de deus, ovos moles de Aveiro, queijada, and travesseiro.

Also: the seafood. Oh. My. Lord. Grilled sardines, steamed shrimp, langoustine drenched in garlic butter, seafood lasagna… I could go on. Portugal is a seafood lover’s paradise.

And don’t get me started on Francesinha– it ruined burgers for me forever!

Lesson learned: Be gracious in your defeat against hills. Your reward? Heavenly food.

(Mis)Adventure #5: The Trip That Was Too Short

I made the mistake of thinking 12 days would be enough for Portugal. It wasn’t.

I had just 2.5 weeks to split between the UK and Portugal, and I regret not giving Portugal more time. Between the food, the history, the art—I barely scratched the surface.

I constantly had to choose: Should I visit this city or stay here another day? The limited time created a subtle stress, and even small delays annoyed me more than usual.

And when my trip was coming to an end, there was the lingering feeling of “unfinished business”, the bitter sting of having to face reality too soon.

Still, I made the most of it. I visited Porto and Lisbon, took day trips to Sintra and Fatima, and soaked in as much architecture, art, and culture as I could. I tried to speak with locals, snapped all the photos, and yes, even bought medicine in Portuguese when my gastritis hit.

Lesson learned: Some places deserve more than a stopover.

(Mis)Adventure #6: Learning Portuguese Beyond Survival

Despite having just a month to study, learning Portuguese before my trip turned out to be one of the most rewarding decisions I made.

I can’t forget the look of relief from one of the waitresses in a local cafe when I put my order in Portuguese, and even managed to ask if they do non-dairy milk.

Another proud moment was navigating the pharmacy. In Porto, my gastritis struck. Unfortunately, the medication brands I’m familiar with are unavailable in Portugal, so I had to resort to my very basic Portuguese to buy the correct one. Fortunately, the pharmacist was patient enough, and we even had a short chat.

From ordering coffee with non-dairy milk to chatting with a pharmacist about medication, my limited vocabulary went a long way. I even managed laundry and a little haggling!

Knowing the language—even imperfectly—made everything richer. I got to glimpse local life beyond the tourist lens.

And I’ll say it again: learning a language opens doors. Always.

Lesson learned: Language changes the way you experience a place.

A Place I’ll Return To

I’ve already spoken it into existence: I’ll return to Portugal.

My trip was short. Some of my plans were flawed. But every (mis)adventure was part of something bigger. Growth. Curiosity. Continuity.

Is there such a thing as a perfect trip? Probably not. But I’m learning more about myself—and the world—every time I travel. Some places plant seeds in your soul.

Portugal is one of those places. It’s not a conclusion. It’s a promise.

Snapshots of My Trip To Portugal

The post Chronicles of (Mis)adventures in Portugal: Slips, Lessons, and a Lot of Seafood appeared first on Wonderlust.

Belonging is one of those things everyone assumes you eventually figure out — like taxes or how to fold a fitted sheet. But for some of us, belonging is slippery. It changes shape depending on where we stand. When I returned to the UK, a place that once felt like the beginning of my adult life, I found myself asking the same questions I’ve asked for years: Where do I belong? Do I belong anywhere?

Some days I feel like I’m piecing myself together from all the places I’ve lived — a patchwork of accents, habits, and memories that don’t always make sense together.

After years of wandering (and wondering), I realized that belonging isn’t always tied to geography.

Sometimes it’s tied to memory, identity, or the person we once were.

The Immigrant’s Split Identity

There’s a strange loneliness that comes with being an immigrant– a feeling that you exist in two worlds but fully belong to neither.

I’ve always had a hint of identity crisis, even before I knew what to call it. Growing up in the Philippines, I didn’t fully fit in. I openly rejected certain traditional beliefs. I advocated for reproductive rights in a deeply Catholic environment. I criticized the manipulative “breadwinner” culture disguised as familial devotion. And I became agnostic after college (much to the horror of my more religious friends).

When I moved to the UK, I thought assimilation would be easy. I spoke English fluently (though my accent became a constant point of curiosity). I learned to love tea and tolerate beans-for-breakfast. I adapted to British work culture — even if I silently questioned why a 12-hour shift needed two tea breaks, a breakfast break, and lunch, and a smoke break.

Then I moved to America. I adapted again — this time to their hustle culture, which promptly led me to early burnout. I learned to drive, changed my accent, picked up their slang, celebrated their holidays.

But beneath all these surface-level adaptations were deeper wounds.

Racism, for one. I still haven’t forgiven myself for staying silent during moments of microaggressions from colleagues abroad or even from patients here in the States. I remind myself I was young and it was my first time stepping outside the safety of Filipino society, but a part of me still wishes I had been braver.

Another shift happened quietly: my mindset changed. Beliefs I once lived by no longer fit. The Filipino cultural value of meekness in the name of camaraderie, I now disdain. I’ve become bolder, more assertive– even blunt when needed– and I found it liberating. Choosing myself — considered selfish back home — is praised here.

So now I float between worlds.

In the Philippines, I often felt “too Western,” shaped by the independence and mindset I gained abroad. But outside the Philippines, I’m unmistakably Filipino — in my values, my humor, my softness, my way of navigating the world.

It’s a tension that’s hard to explain: you adapt so well that you lose pieces of home, yet you still carry enough of home that you never fully blend in.

That’s the cost of assimilation: language shifts, accent shifts, habits changing.

Even though I still speak Tagalog fluently, I sometimes struggle to express my deepest thoughts in it. Some ideas come out more naturally in English — sometimes even in Italian or Spanish.

I’ve changed so much that I don’t fit the place I came from, and yet I’m still “othered” in the places I move to.

The Quiet Loneliness of Being In-between

Finding genuine relationships becomes difficult when you live in cultural limbo. It’s like trying to sift instant coffee — impossible to separate what dissolves together.

Or like being stuck in a Venn diagram:

One circle overlaps with immigrants who share your cultural roots. Another overlaps with locals who share your newly wired brain. But you never fully belong in either, because you’re too much of this and not enough of that.

Years after leaving Manila, I realized I don’t have a single “home”, only versions of it.

Manila is no longer the Manila I grew up in. I don’t understand the local culture anymore.

My UK friendships have evolved without me; re-entering feels like trespassing.

And the U.S. feels more like an office — functional, practical, and emotionally sterile.

Eventually, belonging becomes something internal rather than external.

The Immigrant’s Truth: Belonging Is an Inside Job

There comes a point in the immigrant journey when you understand that belonging isn’t tied to a flag, a language, or a postal code. It’s tied to who you’re becoming.

I don’t fully belong to the Philippines anymore, but I don’t fully belong anywhere else either.

It feels bleak sometimes, like living in a constant kind of purgatory.

And yet, in this in-between space, I’ve also found freedom.

I learned not to conform to any singular culture’s expectations– after all, I’m not enough of this and I’m too much of that. I can be whoever I want in any given moment, a cultural chameleon, if you may.

Being “too Filipino for the West and too Western for Filipinos” stops feeling like a flaw and starts feeling like a quiet kind of power—proof that I carry multiple worlds inside me, and I don’t have to choose just one. I belong not to the past I left behind, nor to the expectations others place on me, but to the person that I am still growing into.

Returning to the UK: A Mirror, Not a Home

Returning to the UK felt like walking into an old photograph — familiar outlines, familiar colors, but with a version of myself missing from the frame.

London’s trains, the accents, the cold air outside Heathrow… all of it tugged at memories I didn’t realize I still held. But as I wandered through Eastbourne, passing by old haunts and seeing familiar sights that didn’t feel familiar anymore, I felt the sting of distance.

Friends had moved forward — marriages, babies, new careers — and I wasn’t part of those chapters anymore.

It’s hard not to feel marooned. Here I was, planning solo trips because my friends live oceans away, celebrating milestones alone, building a life that no longer mirrors anyone else’s.

I realize the ache wasn’t about the place changing. It was more about me changing. While the places and the people changed, the truth is that I didn’t lose that home. I simply outgrew the version of myself who lived there.

The Inner Work of Starting Over

Starting over isn’t a single moment—it’s a lifelong unraveling and reweaving of who you are.

Every place I’ve lived left its fingerprints on me: the Philippines shaped my roots, the UK nudged me into adulthood, Houston taught me survival, and my travels taught me courage.

Reinvention stops being dramatic and becomes something quiet, subtle, continuous. And along the way, I realize that identity isn’t linear. It’s layered, contradictory, sometimes fragmented, sometimes whole.

Belonging stops being about choosing one place and instead becomes about making room for them all: every city, every version of myself, coexisting in the same heart.

I can belong anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere, as long as I remain true to myself.

The post On Belonging and Starting Over appeared first on Wonderlust.

Back then, I was naive—unsure, overwhelmed, impressionable. I was figuring out relationships, my career, and who I wanted to become. I was just starting to fall in love with travel.

Now, years later, I’m more confident, more grounded, and definitely more experienced. (Though still capable of questionable travel decisions.) That young woman who arrived wide-eyed at Heathrow eight years ago has grown—and hopefully, for the better.

With that said, I’ve always had a longing to return to the UK. My stay there was short, and since leaving, I’ve always wondered, “What if I stayed longer? What if I stood my ground ?”

These questions lingered for years, so returning felt necessary—a way to seek closure, to see if I still belonged in the place where I first learned how to start over.

The UK was not just another country on the map. To me, it was the first version of home I built from scratch. Returning made me wonder whether that home still existed, or whether I had outgrown it long ago.

First Impressions: Familiar Yet Foreign

Stepping off the plane in Heathrow felt like stepping into a memory. The cold air was the same. The accents were comforting. Even the black-and-white taxis felt like old friends.

But then I looked around.

The long immigration lines still existed, but the stern officers had been replaced by futuristic facial-recognition gates. The terminal felt familiar but different—like returning to your childhood home only to realize someone changed the curtains.

I arrived at my hostel with hours to spare before check in, so I went straight to exploring London. Surprisingly, my insider knowledge was still intact. I recognized the general directions of the trains, and I remembered to walk on the opposite side of the road. I thought to myself, “I still got it!”

But my confidence quickly faded when I missed the stops. I’ve forgotten to change trains, and the correct exits. I realized that while many things remain the same, so much more had changed.

That’s when it hit me: Belonging is remembering who you were and realizing you’re not that person anymore.

(Mis)Adventure #1 – Navigating a Life You No Longer Live

One of the first things I did was visit places I never got to see as a resident. When I lived in the UK, Big Ben was covered in scaffolding. Now, it finally stood in its full glory—majestic, gleaming, and surprisingly emotional to see.

Fortunately, time and weather was on my side when I visited. It felt surreal to be seeing the same sights, and yet experiencing it the way I am now.

Back then, I walked along the Thames with someone.
Now, I walked alone—but peaceful, content, and secure in myself.

Back then, I chased validation. Now, I just enjoyed the view.

Next. I reached out to old friends and coworkers. I used to live and work in a town called Eastbourne, an hour and a half south of London. It’s a sunny little place, quiet and relatively peaceful. I wanted to see old friends and reconnect. They occupy a special place in my heart, after all.

However, they weren’t available– and understandably so. They lead busy lives, and my arrival was smack in the middle of a work week. Sadly, none of my Eastbourne friends and acquaintances were able to meet me for lunch. I’ll admit, I felt sad and disappointed. But I also understand. Like I said, they were busy.

Still, I went.

I ate at the old restaurant where an ex once took me on dates. I wandered the pier I used to haunt on my days off. I visited the mall that used to be half-dead but was now thriving.

The old charm of Eastbourne, the way I remember it, was still there, but I felt out of place while I walked along its rocky shore. It felt familiar and yet different. And I realized that it wasn’t just Eastbourne that changed. It was me.

That morning, as I strolled down familiar paths and watched the waves and the people around me, I realized that I can return to a place, but not the version of myself who lived there.

(Mis)Adventure #2 – Old Friends, New Me

As mentioned earlier, most old friends were busy. But I did get to meet one dear friend—Pao—and our reunion was the emotional highlight of my England trip.

The last time I saw her was seven years ago, and yet our conversation felt seamless. She was now married with a little girl. We were both nurses, now working in different corners of the healthcare world. She lost weight, I gained some (balance in the universe, I suppose).

But as we talked, I realized something: Everyone I once knew in the UK has moved on to the next chapters of their lives.

I’m happy for them, but I also feel slightly out of sync. Because while they worry about building a new life with their partners and children, or achieving new accolades at work or getting new degrees, here I am: collecting languages, climbing mountains, riding horses in South America, and writing about my mistakes on the internet.

It made me wonder if I had “fallen behind”. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t… I don’t know. One thing is for sure: my path is different.

As I rode the train back to my hotel, I realized that there’s no limit to how many times you can reinvent yourself. Starting over is not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing practice.

(Mis)Adventure #3: Wicked, the West End, and the Life I Forgot I Loved

One thing I knew I had to do in London was watch Wicked at the West End.

The moment the orchestra swelled and the curtain lifted, something inside me stirred—something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I used to love watching plays, musicals, concerts… anything that fed the creative parts of me.

But life in Houston hasn’t given me much space for that.

Between car payments, insurance, long shifts, and the daily grind, I somehow forgot what it felt like to sit in a theater and let art move me. I forgot what it meant to be inspired.

And somewhere between “Defying Gravity” and the final bow, I realized: I miss this version of myself—the one who enjoyed stories, who supported the arts, who wrote passionately and fearlessly.

It made me want to write again. To be creative again. To give myself permission to love art the way I used to.

Because life was simpler back then. Not easier in an emotional sense, but simpler: no car, no insurance drama, no constant adulting. Just buses, Oyster cards, and the occasional Primark splurges.

Watching Wicked reminded me that even if I can’t bring that old life back, I can bring pieces of that old me forward.

(Mis)Adventure #4 – The Tourist Who Used to Be a Local

It’s a special kind of humbling to get lost in a city you once knew intimately.

I walked into old neighborhoods, half expecting nostalgia to punch me in the face. But instead, I felt… neutral. Not sad, not happy, just aware that things had changed.

I was no longer a local, but I wasn’t a full tourist either. Instead, I was something in between: a visitor with a history.

And maybe that’s its own kind of belonging.

Scotland: Where Belonging Felt Quiet Again

If London made me reflect, Scotland made me breathe.

The moment I arrived, the energy shifted. Edinburgh felt peaceful—green, lush, moody, dramatic, ancient. A place that welcomes you without demanding anything in return.

There were moments in Scotland where I genuinely wondered: What would it be like to live here?

(Mis)Adventure #5 : Rosslyn Chapel, Royal Hearts, and My Knees Betraying Me

I joined a small tour group visiting Rosslyn Chapel—yes, the chapel from The Da Vinci Code. In real life, it’s even more beautiful: intricate stonework, mysterious carvings, and an atmosphere so serene it almost feels sacred.

Next stop: the site where Robert the Bruce’s heart was buried. A little strange, a little poetic, very Scottish.

Then came Hadrian’s Wall.

A “short hike,” they said.
“Easy walk,” they said.

My lungs: You sure about that?

I was breathless—again—but the sweeping countryside made every huff worth it. Endless fields. Rolling hills. Sheep living their best lives.

Unlike London, Scotland didn’t remind me of who I used to be. It showed me who I could become.

What the UK Taught Me About Belonging

Returning to the UK taught me that belonging is not a place—it’s a feeling you carry within you.

England reminded me of the girl I once was.

Scotland reminded me of the woman I’m becoming.

I didn’t find the closure I expected, but I found something else. I found peace with the past, hope for the future, and gratitude for every version of myself who helped me get here.

If you want to read more about how this trip made me reflect on identity and belonging, I wrote a companion essay here.

Snapshots Of My Trip to The UK and Scotland

The post Chronicles of (Mis)adventures in the UK: Finding Belonging in Old Places and New Versions of Myself appeared first on Wonderlust.