I want to tell you about the moment I regretted moving to Mexico.

There was no dramatic incident out in the world. No crime, no catastrophe. It was my dog Viggo clipping my heel in the office and my skull hitting the hard tile.

I didn’t have time to catch myself. No hands out. No twisting away. Just- crack.

I lay there with the tile about an inch from my eyes as I realized that I was on the floor and had hit my head, hard, and just whispered “please let me be ok”.

I got up slowly, looking at my wide eyed dogs, doing what nurses do: running through the checklist. Neck. Sensation in my arms and legs. Speech. All working. But there was something rising on my forehead that didn’t feel right, and the world had gone very very quiet, and that’s when it started.

Not just the pain. The doubt.The fear.

What are you even doing here? You moved to a foreign country alone. You don’t know how the hospitals work. You don’t have an emergency contact. You can’t even name the nearest clinic. What if you hadn’t gotten up?

And underneath all of that, quieter and uglier: Maybe you’ve been fooling yourself. Maybe this whole thing was a mistake.

Moving to Mexico. The whole thing: driving down, leaving my career, thinking I could reinvent my life at this age. I wondered if I’d been fooling myself. I wondered if I’d made another life altering mistake.

I want to talk about that. Because I don’t think I’m the only one who has ever chased something that felt true, a new life — and then hit the ground and wondered.

The fall didn’t cause the regret. The pump was already primed for that.

I had been in Mexico for over a year at that point. I had slowly cultivated peace and found joy in the beauty around me. But in the weeks before the fall that peace and joy had been eroded. I had certain stressors: a house in Oregon that I couldn’t find a tenant for. My beloved street puppies, that I had been feeding for months, disappeared. Car and visa issues. Taxes.

Mexico for me had been soft and steady, like a warm hand on my back. And then, without realizing it, I let go of that hand. One task, one worry, one browser tab at a time.

At first nothing seemed wrong.

I was still in love with the mountains. I still paused for hummingbirds and fireflies. The light still poured through the pine trees over the lake and took my breath away.

But somewhere between morning coffee and the next browser tab, I began to leave the moment. There was no grand event, no thunderclap of change, just the quiet click of an old pattern resuming its post. 

That old, efficient self I’d built in the hospital… she started running the show again. And she was good at it. Ruthless, really. Get it done, get it right, keep everything from falling apart. 

That old version of me, the one who got things done no matter what, she stepped back in without announcing herself. I didn’t resist, because I barely noticed.

But something else faded with her return.

The softness. The stillness. The presence.

I didn’t mean to abandon those things. I just… forgot to tend them.

My brain became a spreadsheet. My body, a vehicle for to-do lists. A monarch drifted past the window one morning, and instead of watching it, I Googled property tax deductions. I was still living in paradise, but I could barely see it. The view was just background now, like a painting you forget is hanging on the wall. I was still in Mexico but I’d left in every way that mattered. 

I’d wake up with a pit in my stomach and fall asleep still calculating. I told myself it would pass. That once I got through the paperwork, the sale, the taxes, then I could exhale. Then I’d come back to the garden and the fireflies. And the peace I’d worked so hard to find.

And then I had the fall and hit my head.

I sat on the couch with ice pressed to my head, my heart pounding in my ears, adrenaline starting to fade, and that’s when the real panic began.

Not the sharp, clean kind. The murky kind. The kind that mixes with fear and doubt and a sinking sense that maybe you’ve been kidding yourself all along.

What was I even doing here?

I’d moved to a foreign country alone. I didn’t know what would’ve happened if I’d been knocked unconscious. What if I hadn’t gotten up?

What if I’d broken something? Or needed surgery? What if the dogs were left barking over my body and no one came?

And worse, what if this was a preview of what was coming? What if this whole dream of reinvention, of freedom, was just… foolish? Irresponsible?

The thought lodged somewhere deep and ugly:
  You made a mistake. Again. See? This is why you don’t deserve freedom.

The puppies were gone. The Oregon house was draining my savings. The joy I’d worked so hard to find had vanished beneath paperwork and panic. And now here I was: dizzy, bruised, and scared, in a place where I couldn’t even explain what had happened without tripping over the language.

I wasn’t thinking about growth or peace or lessons. I wasn’t thinking about anything except how incredibly fragile I was, and how far I was from home.

Wherever that was now.

Two big black eyes appeared.  My head ached. I walked the dogs slowly under the pines and jacaranda. Every step hurt a little. Pain forced me into the present; no spreadsheets, no lists, no ghosts of Oregon.
Just breath, trees, sunlight.

Halfway down the path, a hummingbird hovered in front of me, wings beating faster than wind.
It flashed once, a green spark in the shade, and vanished.

---

I didn’t regret moving to Mexico. I regretted losing myself again. And it took cracking my head on the tile to notice it had happened.

The fireflies were still out there. I just had to remember to go look.

Maybe you know that experience in your own life. To leave a demanding job and find yourself recreating the same pressure in the next one. Or slowing down after a health scare and then, six months later, running at the same pace again. 

A slow backslide into an old pattern.

We built these patterns over years, probably decades. They have deep grooves in our brains. When pressure comes, real pressure, the kind with deadlines and money and consequences, your nervous system doesn’t reach for the new way of being. It reaches for what is familiar. 

The new way of being, the slower, more present version, is still young. It hasn’t had decades to calcify in our brains, and it requires active tending. The moment you stop tending it, the older pattern fills the space. And that’s what happened to me. Not out of malice, just out of seniority.

If you’ve watched my videos over the last year you’ll know that I’ve been very happy in Mexico. But it wasn’t just leaving the dreadful job and starting a new life. 

In those years of pain and unhappiness, years of struggle, I didn’t know how to deal with it. And I wouldn’t let myself change. 

I could have brought all of it with me. The stress, the belief that I wasn’t allowed to rest, the feeling that everything was always about to fall apart. And sometimes I do. Sometimes the old pattern walks right in and takes over.

But I know how to come back now. Not perfectly. Not permanently. Just- back to now. And that turns out to be enough.

There are stressors anywhere. Accidents can happen anywhere. Fear finds you wherever you are.

Mine found me on the tile in my own office.

But the fear wasn’t really about Mexico. It was the storm in my head. And that storm has no address. It would have followed me anywhere.

The only thing that ever touched it — the only thing that has ever worked, even briefly — is stepping out of it. Not fixing it. Not solving it. Just… coming back to where I actually am.

And where I actually am is a garden. Viggo and Olive at my feet. Pine trees. A lake that turns gold in the evening.

I don’t regret moving to Mexico. I never want to go back to my home country. And that’s not just because I built a soul sucking life for myself in the States. It’s better here. There is a simplicity that I love. People are not as much on their screens. The quiet allows perception to expand externally and internally. It’s the space where intuition speaks. And I can feel my own presence. And the presence of the trees and the clouds.

Listening is an art that becomes eroded by too much noise. Overflowing inboxes, posts, alarms, notifications, images. They all seem urgent until none are important.

To withdraw from all the noise is not monkish, it’s to gain sovereignty over your own mind.

And my nervous system relaxes. Deeper breaths, less tensed muscles, and eyes that can see the beauty around me. And I am in paradise again.