WHY I LEFT EVERYTHING BEHIND, QUIT MY JOB IN SPAIN, AND MOVED TO BALI
est reading time according to chatgpt : 15 mins
As I lay there in the middle of the street, freshly humbled, bleeding (again), equally terrified of being hit by oncoming traffic as I was stoked to have gotten my first scooter crash out of the way, I began to revisit this question once again:
wtf am I doing
Luckily dying then and there on the street wasn’t my fate, and no less than 8 Indonesians came to my rescue. I had learned to surrender to the drama of needing help rather than resisting it, something my previous week attempting to reach Everest Base Camp had taught me well. I decided to put a pin in my existential question for now.
That was only a few weeks ago. Although, if I didn’t know any better, I would have told you that happened months ago. Time seems to be moving even more expeditiously than usual now that she knows I have personal deadlines to meet. “Nature never hurries and yet still everything gets accomplished” I half-heartedly tell myself to soothe the chronic ache of feeling so lost and behind. Behind who? I am not so sure. It’s hard to know exactly where you stand when you don’t know where you’re going. Thankfully, I’m in my early 20s, so feeling lost is a right of passage and arguably unavoidable, or so I choose to believe.
Tori one month ago may have overestimated how much we would have figured out by now. Estimating accurate timelines has never been my thing.
I’m a visionary more than an executor and occasionally that can get me in a bit over my head. Sometimes I get so deep in these messy, larger-than-life ideas that I feel like I’ve walked in on my imaginary toddler writing on my crisp white walls with permanent markers— I am livid, but she’s only three, and I am equally dedicated to preserving her creativity and artistic talent as I am the integrity of my eggshell-white walls. So I must find it within myself to foster some form of gentle but firm boundaries moving forward in an attempt to redirect her creative genius.
Here’s what I know: I know I don’t want to rot away at a 9-5 I hate forever (is the 8-5 rumor in America true I’m so scared of u guys), I know my teaching job in Spain is (was) leading me to a dead-end in terms of career growth, and I know (even though some days it’s harder to see than others) that I have a unique skill set and authentic voice that yearns to be expressed and heard. That’s all beautiful, but wtf am I gonna do about it?
Since the start of 2024, I have been a huge proponent of following my inner voice. If you had asked me a few months prior to that date what that meant I would have told you it was something people say to help themselves cope with their inability to rationally think. I was lucky enough, however, to have experienced a somewhat catalytic event towards the end of the year (more on this another day) (if ur lucky) that forced me to come face to face with that voice, and look at all of the ways I had been betraying it the past several years of my life. I vowed to myself that I would never stray so far from it again and I immediately put systems in place in my life to support me doing so. The three main ones being daily meditation, journaling, and opening myself up to be in constant conversation with God. (I am happy to go into detail on the specifics of all of these habits + what they looked like another day if that would be useful to you) (lmk)
When I talk about God, I’m sure each of you has a different perception or ideal of what or who that may be. For the sake of this being my blog and my stream of consciousness, I will attempt to give you my personal operational definition of God so we can be on the same page moving forward. My God is not a man with a white beard, nor a woman, although that would be sick. The God I think of now is not the same God I thought of when I identified heavily as a Christian. My God is, however, pure love. The fabric of every material thing in this Universe and every thought I’ve ever had. God is empty space as much as God is everything in between. I feel God the most when I am outside of a Circle K at 4AM with a bunch of Indonesian men singing What’s Up by Four Non-Blondes or when I am an hour deep alone in a meditation in my bedroom. I find God in connection with myself and everything else because God is everything. Omnipresent, loving awareness. I call God a number of things and I believe it is imperative we don’t allow a variance in nomenclature to abstain us from feeling the pulse of God in everything we do. When I say I opened up constant communication with God, I mean that I opened up that once-rejected channel between me and connection to all that is. Conceptually, it’s vague, it’s strange, and it’s messy. Sometimes it’s prayer, sometimes it's gratitude, and sometimes it’s just being present with what is inside of me no matter how inconvenient or painful I perceive it to be. I stopped allowing myself to consciously shy away from the part of myself that felt. I stopped pretending I couldn’t hear my intuition (God) screaming at me and learned to listen to the whispers. Anyone else who is walking the path (and that's the best way I have of putting it for now) knows what I mean.
So, like I was saying, 2024 rolls around and I am all about me. Finafuckinglly. These systems I had begun to implement in my life kept me in a state of connection with myself and brought me closer to my inner voice than ever before. When only a few months prior, I couldn’t hear it when it was standing in front of me screaming, “PLEASE STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND WAKE THE FUCK UP WOMAN”, I had now developed a sensitivity towards it that was upleveling every area of my life bit by bit. I can (and likely will) do a whole blog post on this blissful, aligned era of my life. But if you can’t wait for that I literally have every second of it documented on Tiktok.
This was about the time that I got really into yoga. I have been doing yoga off and on since I was about 16 years old, but now it had evolved from a vibey workout to a practice that fed all three dimensions of me: mind, body, and spirit.
trigger warning if you have a spiritual allergy and I haven’t somehow scared you off already, you might feel safer hiding in the ‘What Im Listening to’ section or otherwise
One of the fun parts of building a meditation practice is surrendering into full receiver mode and feeling more connected with the creative ether than ever. Ideas flowed to me effortlessly as I continued to practice creating a safe, quiet, void in my mind for them to land. So it should come as no surprise that I received my brilliant idea of spending a month in Bali that summer in savasana at the end of my yoga practice one random Saturday in March. It was perfect and effortless and despite my limited knowledge of Bali it had been a place I’ve wanted to visit since I first saw vlogs on Youtube of Alexis Ren being hot and scootering around the island. Plus, I knew that it was a huge hub for yoga. It just made sense. And simultaneously no sense at all. Perfect.
Fast forward to July of that year: I am tanner than ever, lonelier than ever, but regardless, I was happy to be where I was. It was my first time ever travelling internationally solo and I was proud of my rather large undertaking. And I had learned how to ride a scooter, something I swore I would never do. My comfort zone was non-existent by this point and that gave me more reasons to feel proud of myself. I had fallen in love with Bali. It felt like the foreign guy I had been seeing that I told my friends all about but they never get to meet him, making our luv all the more special.
I spent my days pouring myself into my yoga practice, going to 90 minute classes at my favorite studio everyday, often twice a day. On one of my last days there, a sign I had passed by at reception no less than 50 times before suddenly seemed to reveal itself to me as if for the very first time. It was an offer for a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training right there in that coming December. My initial thoughts were:
No
You can't just do that
Too much money
You're not good enough at yoga to teach
That is for people who have their shit together
But the damage had already been done. I couldn’t rid myself of the persistent nag of my inner voice telling me to follow that urge.
“Fine,” I told myself, “if my favorite instructor is leading it, fuck it, I’ll sign up.”
+ the rest is history.
I didn’t have any clue how I was going to swing a month off of work (still to this day have no idea how I pulled that off), and I had no clue what I was going to do with a YTT certification, but I knew that I could trust my inner guidance system to reveal these things to me in due time.
**4 months later**
I’m back in Bali babyyyyyyy this time feeling worse than ever beforeeeeeee
The past 3-4 months of my life had been some of the most mentally draining of my life. I was struggling with a lot internally.
About a week into my yoga teacher training I was confused why I hadn’t yet ascended into my Julia Roberts Eat Pray Love final form and transcended all of the problems I had been dealing with the past few months and I was beginning to feel worse about myself than ever. How much more could I take of feeling this way before something gives? I remember one particularly low day asking my sister if she would pray for me. I didn’t even know for what but I hoped that she and God could figure something out. I include this part of the story because I think it’s imperative to note that this notion I see fluttering around on social media that if you move abroad suddenly all of your problems will magically disappear is just not true. I often see people in Tiktok comment sections romanticizing life anywhere but America but the inescapable reality is and always will be: wherever you go, there you are.
It was such an emotionally turbulent time for me because on one hand, I was surrounded by 25 wonderful, inspiring people for 12 hours a day everyday. My cup was filled with human connection. I met people who inspired me and challenged me to think differently. I loved every second we spent discussing philosophy, and I was so happy to be in Bali despite the fact that it was monsoon season and most days my morning commutes were tainted by torrential downpour. But on the other hand, I was approaching rock bottom in terms of how I felt about myself and the mental weight I was lugging with me was becoming unbearable. In between the pages in my journal filled with Tantric philosophy were pages littered with feelings of disconnection from myself and a particular dissatisfaction with I-dont-even-know-what. That was the most frustrating part. I felt like, despite everything being perfect on paper, and despite my religious adherence to my habits that were supposed to protect me from ever feeling this way, I couldn’t win. I couldn’t seem to feel like myself no matter what I did.
There was one day in particular about halfway through week two that I felt especially bad. Feeling sluggish and uncomfortable in my own skin was something I had become somewhat accustomed to at this point, but this was another level. In the middle of an anatomy lecture I slipped into a deep sleep despite having slept near perfect the night before. Something was so off. I just knew it. I could hear the quiet nag of my inner voice telling me to go to the doctor. I don’t have insurance and I hate going to the doctor so this was a big-ish deal for me. I left in the middle of my lecture and took myself to the nearest clinic.
When I walked in, the sweet clerk barely got the words ‘hello’ out before I crumbled into tears.
literally wth
I apologized for my hysteria as best I could between sobs and sat my ass down. I tried to collect myself and a few minutes later a doctor came in. She asked me all of the normal doctor questions, what's your name, what brings you in today, what's your sign, ah capricorn moon makes sense, are you repressing something, ,,,,,
We talked for a loooooooong time. Well mostly I talked. She was a literal God-send. It was like every word that came out of her mouth was sent to heal me. I felt seen for the first time in so long. I realized how much I had been neglecting and rejecting myself. I couldn’t move forward because I was still holding onto a past version of myself I had idealized in my head that no longer existed. She was telling me things I knew and felt in my bones but having them reflected back to me felt so validating.
“You’re actually… really smart…” she said, as if she was mystified by the dichotomy between my level of self-awareness and my level of stuck-ness. Me too woman
While I don’t consider myself a proponent of needing external validation, sometimes it’s necessary to cater to your humanity. She couldn’t believe I was alone in Bali for so long and her jaw hit the floor when I told her my plans for the next week. She begged me to cancel Everest Base Camp but it was too late.
Those few weeks in Bali and the month I spent there that summer had been some of the most internally transformational of my life. I wish I had this platform back then so I could have shared everything that was shifting inside of me while it was happening.
Since the moment I got here in July, I was pushed. Bali has such a uniquely triggering energy and anyone who spends any significant amount of time here will tell you that. There’s a reason the island is so widely known as a place for intense healing. It almost feels like being on a desert island surrounded by an ocean of all the shit I have been pushing under the rug for years.
When I got here in December, this looked like me figuring out how to make peace with who I had become. So much of me has changed, and still is changing. I kept having moments where I would look in the mirror and feel like I hardly recognized who I was anymore and I wasn’t always kind to myself about it. I spent so much time at the tail end of 2024 looking back at the beginning of the year and wondering what happened to me. It was a cruel punishment for someone who was doing her best to get through the day.
Part of what was so interesting about my conversation with my doctor was that she kept reiterating to me that I needed to stop looking back and let go. She said she could feel how much my past was weighing on me. I believe her, I think intuitively many people could probably feel that energy from me but weren’t consciously aware of it. For some reason, I think sometimes we need other people to tell us what we already know.
Interactions like the one I just described are abundant in Bali. Seldom do I engage in small talk, and often my airport taxi rides start with the driver asking questions like, “Do you think one person can change the world?”
And while I never dreamed I would live here, or at least so soon, I vowed to myself that I would spend a month or two here every year. I just knew I had more work to do here. I didn’t know what, but I just felt it in my bones.
My sniffles at the clinic eventually turned to giggles and it turns out I was just severely dehydrated and severely disconnected. I left feeling lighter. Clearer. Connected. And after that day, everything slowly got better.
I debated including this next detail in here because part of me feels it’s oversharing, but I also feel like a piece of my story would be missing without it.
Eight months prior to this, I lost my cycle. If you are a woman who has gone through this, I don’t have to explain to you how draining and confusing the process of getting it back is. This was likely a large contributor to me not feeling like myself those past several months. I was dealing with so many hormonal imbalances that manifested as a range of undesirable symptoms from weight gain, to acne, to mood swings, more mood swings, and likely was a large part of the reason I felt so constantly drained. I spent countless hours researching ways to get it back and ran numerous experiments in an effort to feel like myself again. It became my top priority for those last few months. I felt like I was having to re-learn how to do the most basic human things.
To my surprise and absolute shock, when I got home from the clinic that day, I got my first period in eight months. I found myself sobbing again, but this time it was happy tears. It felt like I had just won an eight month long internal war. Like I said, if you know you know.
The next day when I woke up I felt like I was on top of the world.
“I feel like I just took five adderalls,” I confessed at my YTT.
“How do you know what five adderalls feels like…”
Something noticeably had shifted within me. I felt it, my teachers felt it, and everyone around me felt it. I could see it mirrored back to me in all of my interactions. I felt light. And holy fuck I missed that feeling so much.
It was like I was a clogged drain for months that had just been cleared. You know when the water goes out for a little (or maybe u dont live in a developing country), and when you go to turn on the faucet again, it kind of sputters before it’s a constant stream again?
That’s what was energetically occurring inside of me that day. It was a complete imbalance of energy, to be expected after so many months of stagnation. Luckily, I am no stranger to this phenomenon and I knew exactly what had to be done: go home, rest, reconnect, ground yourself.
I could feel something brewing inside of me. Things of this energetic caliber need to be properly prepared for. Something was coming through. Something that seemed so insane and irrational and impossible. I remember actually physically rolling my eyes at my internal dialogue that day.
But the next morning, that same inner voice woke me up as if tickling my brain with a feather and whispered her crazy idea in my innocent ear.
Im toast
Similarly to when I saw the offering at reception for a 200-hour YTT in December, I decided to bargain with myself. This time my idea was bigger, and crazier, and if there was any chance of bringing it to fruition, it wasn’t going to be a cute little ‘fuck it’ moment like the one that led me here.
The idea that needed attention was: what if I moved to Bali?
Initial thoughts:
There is literally no way
I can think of a million reasons why that can’t happen
I thought you loved Madrid ??
Where would you live? What would you do? What about your apartment and life in Madrid? What would your family think? What would your friends think?
$$$????
I think there's a saying out there somewhere that’s essentially like if you’re asking these questions, it’s already too late.
But still, as type b and go with the flow as my lifestyle may portray me to be, I am actually a very pragmatic person. I couldn't entertain an idea like this without sitting and looking the facts in the face. I guess where the type b in me comes in is the way I choose to do so.
Whenever I have big decisions to make, or big questions that need answering, I surrender them to God, my subconscious, the ether, the Universe, insert whatever you need to call it here. So I wrote out every question I could think of down in my journal. And then I let go. I stopped giving those questions my attention, and I did the best I could to cease daydreaming about what life would be like living in Bali and ordered myself to rest my mind.
And slowly, one by one, those questions began to find answers. I got clarity on all of the moving pieces at hand and all of the things I would need to come together to make it work. I got real with myself about what kind of a financial undertaking this would be to pay rent in two different countries, and I got clear on whether or not that was truly worth it to me. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but the more I looked at it the more I realized that I actually could make it work.
You know those times when you are randomly inspired to call someone or talk to someone out of the blue and it ends up being a life-changing moment for you?
One morning soon thereafter, I was magnetized to connect with a particularly kind and comforting peer in my YTT. It was one of those conversations where we both spoke life into each other. I explained to her my whole situation the past few months, hitting rock bottom with my health, going to the clinic and feeling like my doctor may have been a prophet and how everything changed after that, how I felt like I was in energetic overdrive, and that forbidden thought that had been bugging my brain ever since. She reflected back to me how much she had seen a shift in me from the start of the training and how excited she was for this new, empowered version of me.
I knew the moment I told her I was thinking about moving here it was already done. She saw me, she understood it, and so did I. Bliss ensued.
Before any of this was real, I needed to tell Abby, my best friend since we went to college together and now (ex) roommate in Madrid. I was about to drop a bomb on her and in the same breath ask her to watch Stevie (my cat) for me while I pursued this wild dream.
I don’t know why I was nervous to tell her because I was met with nothing but love, encouragement, and enthusiasm.
Later that day, I told my beloved friends, Alexandra and Teo, over our lunch break and was once again met with love, encouragement, and enthusiasm. I should have known. I never leave a conversation with them uninspired.
As for my family, I have become somewhat of a pro at articulating particularly jarring news to them and find it more productive to run a soft-launch on my sister beforehand.
Sweet, sweet Haney was undeniably shocked and maybe a little scared. Fair, I was too. But she was supportive. Again, by the end of the phone call I was met with love, encouragement, and enthusiasm for going after what I wanted.
I was planning on waiting several days before telling my parents, hoping that I could present them with a monologue that wouldn’t leave room for questioning or disapproval, but my sister reminded me that my dad was having surgery soon and it was best for me to tell them as soon as possible so they weren’t putting out two fires at once.
One thing to know about me, as unplanned as my life may seem, things were actually really going according to plan. I didn’t realize this until I went to type out a ‘hey Im moving forever byeee’ text to my parents and I remembered that a year ago I had scripted this very scenario.
I had a text typed in my notes with the intent of sending it to my family telling them I was moving to Europe forever and never coming back and I had scripted numerous things I wanted to be true in my life by the time I sent it. Occasionally, I would read it and let it fill me with big feelings and flood me with images of my future. I kept it in my back pocket and I’m so glad I did.
I’ll just let you read the text. I had to make several tweaks obviously because like I said, at the time of writing this I never dreamed I would be in Bali.
Also the group chat name prior to this text ironically was “Tori’s coming home<3”
(not pictured: additional thank you for your support gratitude text from me but thats 4 them)
All my Dad said was: “Putting my brain back together…..after it blew up”
And my mom said she understandably needed some time to let this marinate. I can only imagine what the vibes were like in the house that day.
After a day or two we all talked on Facetime at like 6AM my time (thx Bali time change) and while the conversation started off a little tense, by the end of it I was once again met with unconditional love, encouragement to follow my dreams, and enthusiasm for my courage.
And now here I am. A little over a month later but I swear I’ve lived an entire lifetime since then. Most of my weekdays are spent writing or job hunting in cafes surrounded by other barefoot digital nomads. Usually, I end my nights with a sexy sunset scooter ride to the beach or run around in an overpriced Whole Foods-esque grocery store. Occasionally, I take the day off but it’s hard to do that when you’re funemployed. My weekends are mostly spent with the wonderful friends I’ve accumulated during my time here. I’ve really managed to create a life I am in love with. It’s not perfect by any means, I still feel lost, I miss my mom, and some days I feel like nothing is tethering me to reality. I take everything day-by-day because that’s really all I can do with so much up in the air. I have completely bet on myself which was scary at first, but my track record shows me that I can trust myself to do so. Sometimes I wonder if I should have picked somewhere that food poisoning is an acute probability rather than a fact of life, but all in all, my life here in Bali is beautiful, and every part of it is mine.
