When I boarded the flight to Bali, it was just another stop.

I had already spent eight months moving — Spain, Croatia, Austria, Thailand. I had sold everything I owned, walked away from a 15-year corporate career, and said yes to a life that didn’t come with a plan. Bali was next on the list. A few weeks. Maybe a month. Then somewhere new.

It had started the year before, when my daughter left for college. I had become a mother at nineteen and a widow by twenty-one. For nearly two decades, being her mother had been the structure around everything — the direction, the clarity, the reason to know what came next. When she left, the house got quiet in a way I hadn’t expected. And I realized I didn’t know who I was without that role. That question — Who am I now? — was the one that sent me moving.

Then the world stopped.

Shutting Down

I watched it happen in slow motion. Scooters disappeared from the streets. Cafés that had been packed with digital nomads and surfers went quiet. Friends I had made over shared dinners started dragging suitcases toward the airport, booking the last available flights home. The U.S. Embassy sent emails urging Americans to leave while they still could.

I realized I didn’t know who I was without that role as mother to my daughter.

For most people, the answer was simple. They left.

But I had sold everything. There was no home to return to. No lease waiting. No life on pause.

So I stayed.

Not out of bravery. Out of the awareness that sometimes the thing that looks like being stuck is actually the thing you needed most.

The Reckoning

In the fifteen months that followed, Bali became something I hadn’t anticipated— not a destination, but a reckoning. The island didn’t heal me with its beauty, though there was plenty of that. It healed me by removing every distraction I had been using to avoid myself.

There were no new cities to chase. No plans to make. No motion to hide inside.

Just stillness. And everything I had been outrunning for years.

I realized what I was running from–grief. For the version of myself I had built around being needed.

I knew what it was, even if I hadn’t said it out loud. Grief. For the version of myself I had built around being needed. For the identity that had held me together for nearly two decades and then quietly disappeared. Moving had kept me one step ahead of the stillness. New city, new people, new distractions — each one a reason not to sit with the question I was most afraid to answer. Is this all there is? Bali finally made me stop long enough to find out.

I had climbed Mount Batur before the pandemic changed everything — an active volcano, a pre-dawn hike in the dark and loose rock underfoot. Somewhere near the top, a voice I knew well whispered its familiar line: you can’t do this. I kept moving anyway. When the sun rose over the clouds and I was standing above them, I understood something I couldn’t have learned any other way. The confidence I had been searching for wasn’t waiting at the summit. It was built in the climb.

Bali taught me that in a hundred quieter ways.

Building Up

I had crashed a motorbike in Thailand and told myself I would never ride again. In Bali — with the roads emptied and no one watching — I tried again. Slowly. Badly. Then one day, without noticing exactly when it happened, I wasn’t thinking about it anymore. I just rode. I eventually got my motorbike license. Something I had strongly believed I could not do.

I lay there looking up at the stars and felt, for the first time in a long time, that I wasn’t running from anything.

I attended a retreat called Awakened Leadership and sat in a circle while grief I had been carrying for years finally found its way out. A dragonfly landed on the pillow beside me at the exact moment I broke open — my grandmother’s favorite. She had passed only a few days prior, and I hadn’t let myself feel it. Not properly. The island created the space that my moving hadn’t.

On the night of Nyepi — Bali’s Day of Silence — the entire island shut down. No electricity. No movement. No sound except the ocean, the wind and the stars, which appeared in numbers I had never seen. I lay there looking up and felt, for the first time in a long time, that I wasn’t running from anything.

I was just there. Fully.

Finding Peace

There’s a version of solo female travel that gets talked about a lot — the freedom, the adventure, the Instagram-worthy vistas. And all of that is real. I lived it across twenty countries over seven years.

But the part nobody talks about is what happens when the movement stops. When you can’t book another flight to avoid what’s catching up with you. When the beautiful sunset and the stunning temple and the fire dance under a full moon still leave you feeling like something essential is missing.

That’s what Bali gave me. Not the postcard version. The real one.

I had to sit in the discomfort long enough to finally understand what it had been trying to tell me.

The version where you sit in the discomfort long enough to finally understand what it’s been trying to tell you.

I left Bali fifteen months after I arrived, carrying a suitcase and a backpack — the same things I had started with. But I was not the same woman who had landed there thinking it was just another stop.

I was someone who had finally stopped running long enough to come home to herself.

And it turned out, that was the destination I had been looking for all along.