nothing was wrong with me, i just forgot where home is

Where do I begin?

I am a traveller and explorer at heart. I’ve visited 39 countries already, yet never did I expect to leave a piece of my heart in northern Argentina. It is the most breathtaking corner of earth I have ever seen.

It surprises me, especially because I once lived in Paraguay for a year and never felt the pull to explore its neighbouring countries. Instead, I stayed

within Central America, moving back and forth between places that felt easy, familiar, and alive with a strong backpacker lifestyle.

Reflecting back, I see it now. It almost feels like a matter of maturity.

Back then, I was still searching for purpose, for roots, for belonging. I wanted to feel free in any way I could, and I often tried to find that freedom through people, places, and movement. Not to mention, my travels began during a time when the world itself felt restrictive, during the global pandemic that tried to confine us to our homes, or even just to single rooms within them.

Naturally, I wanted to break free. I wanted to wander, to feel limitless, to be rootless.

But after about a year, I slowly started to realise that I wasn’t free at all. I was clinging to the idea that a nomadic life equals "inner freedom".

( Spoiler: it doesn’t )

When I thought about South America back then, I actually felt repelled. The vastness of it, the slower pace of travel, it intimidated me. Central America felt small, fluid, easy to navigate solo. The community was immediate and young in lifestyle.

South America felt... different. Slower, deeper, perhaps more confronting in ways I couldn’t yet articulate. And, there was also something more personal.

In 2023, while living in Paraguay, I found myself in a relationship that became deeply eye-opening. It ended in a way that left me facing betrayal on a level I hadn’t experienced before, while they were travelling through South America, no less. So, without fully realising it, I began to associate those places with pain and lies. Avoiding them felt like protecting myself from reopening wounds I wasn’t ready to face.

And yet, life has a way of circling you back, hey?

Three years later, I returned to visit my parents for the first time since that chapter. And naturally, I am no longer the same person I was then. The growth didn’t happen while I was moving. It happened when I stopped.

After those three years of traveling, I moved to a small town nestled in the mountains of Tyrol, Austria (a place I never ever thought I'd end up in) . It was the first time I truly committed to a place after living “freely” for so long. And while a part of me deeply craved roots, another part quickly realised something confronting: I had to find home within myself first.

There were still feelings I hadn’t allowed myself to feel. Wounds I had never fully processed. Patterns I had carried to all the places I had visited. Because yes, travel can create a sense of lightness. It can open your perspective, shift your energy, and help you leave environments that no longer serve you. However, it cannot replace presence. You cannot outrun what deeply lives within you.

And so, when everything slowed down, it all caught up with me, finally.

The year that followed was, without exaggeration, the most challenging periods of my life. I didn’t just process that heartbreak in Paraguay, but I processed all the ones before it. The ones I had never consciously allowed myself to feel.

I grieved people who were still alive but scattered across the world.

I grieved past versions of myself.

I grieved beliefs I had outgrown but held onto for far too long.

I simply... grieved.

And in the stillness, in what felt like stagnation at times, everything I had pushed away for years began to rise. Imagine 25 years of unprocessed emotions surfacing all at once. It was intense. It was raw. It was so so real. And looking back now, it almost feels surreal, almost like a fever dream I was caught in for at least a year. A trance of discomfort that blurred time.

But it was necessary. And in many ways, I am still moving through it.

What I can say wholeheartedly, is that I have built a home. Not just externally (though I am surrounded by mountains, forests, and lakes and the love of my life) but internally as well.

A home within my body. Within my heart. Within myself.

The path there was everything but linear and perfect. I began reconnecting with my body through breathwork, releasing layers I didn’t even realise I was holding. I lovingly and gently pushed myself beyond my comfort zone, step by step. The universe met me in unexpected ways, like a retreat that I won in a giveaway, where I was surrounded by women, by nature, by the ancient wisdom of herbs and earth.

I spent countless days outside. I listened. I softened. And somewhere along the way, cacao found me, or perhaps, I found her.

She deepened everything that had come up for me, and that I was still integrating.

My relationship to the earth and moon. To my body. To my heart. And of course, to love.

One of the things I’ve struggled with most in my life is learning how to mother myself. To feel safe within my own presence. I often moved through life feeling like I needed "saving", while at the same time not knowing how to ask for help.

While cacao didn’t fix that (as she is never here to fix anything), she still held me as I learned to soften into it. There is an indescribable power in that connection. A feeling of being supported... not from something outside of me, but from something I am part of.

Like the earth herself.

And maybe that’s what this deep reflection is really about, beneath all the words;

I’ve learned many ways to cope with pain, anxiety, and uncertainty. But the one thing that grounds me daily, the thing that makes me feel safe (enough) to be with it all, is the relationship I’ve cultivated with the earth and through that, with myself.

A devotional practice that meets me where I am. Always changing. Always honest. Always rooted in what I need in that exact moment.

Even now, as I write this, I’m sitting outside in the early morning. Birds singing their own melodies. A warm cup of cacaos still moving through me, opening my heart. And I find myself thinking back to a cacao ceremony I held last month from the lands of Paraguay, the same land that once held so much pain for me. Now, when I think of it, I feel so much warmth. I feel belonging.

(There is more to that story, and I’ll share it in the next post)

There is one more thread I’ve been sitting with recently, that I would love to share with you.

Before the image of "God" as the father in the sky became dominant, many indigenous cultures prayed to Pachamama, the earth, the mother. She was the one who held, nourished, and taught. She was honoured through ritual, through presence, through deep relationship, through sacrifice and ceremony.

And something about that feels so aligned and true, because while the sky invites us to look up to the unseen, the spiritual, the beyond, the earth invites us to feel what's already here. To root. To belong right where we are.

And yes, both matter, but for a long time I had forgotten the one beneath my feet. And since reconnecting to her, something within me has softened that I often am at loss for words for. It feels less like desperately searching and more like remembering something that was always there. Like I was never alone to begin with.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what made me ready to return to the places I once avoided and to the lands that held both pain and beauty.

To South America.

To Argentina.

To Paraguay.

But this time, I didn’t return as the same person who left. And that's where the next chapter begings 〰 blog post about my time there to follow soon.