An Uncomfortable First Week in Mexico

I thought that when I landed in Mexico that I would be washed away with inspiration and have words vomiting onto paper and content out back to back. I expected to feel immediately affirmed, aligned, and alive.

I felt nothing.

I did feel at home, though. Central American and Caribbean cities have a warmth that feels familiar to me every single time.

Honestly, at first nothing about CDMX enamored me. I think that we have this strange expectation of needing to be “wow’d” or absolutely blown away that is a little unrealistic. It’s okay to feel happily neutral. I knew that I was experiencing a little discomfort, overwhelmed by the pressure to produce or “make the most” of my time here, and nervous about the new role in general. So, I landed, settled into my new apartment for the next 4 weeks, and made peace with the fact that no matter where you go, you carry your shit with you. Your baggage travels far.

I quit my full-time job in September, which is how I ended up in Mexico City to begin with. You know to your core when you’re not aligned to your purpose. The brain fog and disassociation lets you know that something has to change, and then I found Sojrn. Ya’ll know I did a lot of solo travel last year, which made writing and story telling make sense to me. It gave me the language I needed to translate thought to paper, and I knew that I someway somehow needed to make this my full-time life.

And so I did.

The amount of times that I have restarted by now is absurd. Restarted my career, my fitness journey, my “commitment to becoming that bitch”, my goals, etc. Some days I care too deeply about the amount of circles that I dragged myself through. I lay, overthinking, yet mind completely unplugged, and let out a deep sigh and think to myself: fuck. Here we go again. Other days like today, shit just makes sense. I don’t think people realize how much stillness and patience we need to make something out of ourselves or to search internally. It’s not always a loud aha moment. Not everything powerful is profound. Sometimes, sense comes subtly. A truth finds its way to you in a whisper.

Finding a sense of purpose is a walk that requires self-reflection, lots of silence, and experimentation. You have to listen. You have to do it even if it feels scary. The thing is, you have to be okay with doing it and failing, doing it, abandoning it, but coming back to it. You have to be okay with the cycle of trial and error. So badly we want all these changes to be made while we stay the same or do the same, and that’s just not how that works.

A welcoming of the unknown is the most important prerequisite of life change and evolution.

That is the very essence of what we call creativity. Reacting to something new, evolving to change, having a response to something unexpected. You have to be okay with not being excellent on your first try, though. Your intuition knows when something is for you, but you may just need a little practice so don’t let your mind shy you from success just because you’re scared to fail. It just doesn’t make any sense. This is a life-long process of trial and error.

So regarding how I feel in Mexico now, I’m inviting stillness. If I want to create I do, and if I don’t want to then I don’t.

For now, this is what I’ve taken away in my first 2 weeks here (with 2 more to go):

1. Sometimes you are being called to be still and to listen.
2. Content is being produced at absurd quantity and speed. And you do not need to feel compelled to keep up.
3. Creativity is a byproduct of experience. You need to live to create.
4. “It’s not that deep”

Now that I worked through that, I’m excited to talk about what I’ve actually been doing here 🥹🥂