I Was Not Supposed to Be Here

There are moments in life where you look around and realize you have crossed so many impossible thresholds that your existence itself begins to feel surreal.

I have been thinking about that a lot lately.

I am not supposed to be here.

And I mean that statement in every way possible.

I did not expect to live this long.

I did not expect to survive the things I survived.

I did not expect to become someone with degrees, scholarships, awards, publications, and academic accolades attached to my name. I did not expect to sit in university classrooms discussing theory and empire and systems of power after spending years simply trying to survive my own life.

I did not expect to become the first person in my family to obtain a university degree.

And I certainly did not expect to watch the life I spent years building begin to collapse around me, pack everything I could fit into a car, and drive thousands of kilometers to Cancún, Mexico.

I was supposed to be in India right now.

That was the plan.

India represented research, archives, temples, intellectual expansion, fieldwork, and the continuation of a life I had fought unbelievably hard to create. I had spent years orienting myself toward that direction. Years building credentials. Years proving myself. Years trying to earn legitimacy inside systems that often felt impossible to survive.

And yet, here I am.

In Cancún.

By the ocean.

Thousands of kilometers away from the life I thought I was moving toward.

And honestly?

Some days it still feels difficult to explain, even to myself.

Because grief and freedom can exist together.

Relief and devastation can coexist in the same body.

There are days I feel immense clarity. There are days I feel profound uncertainty. Days where I feel deeply grounded in what I know. Days where I wonder if I have lost everything. Days where I recognize this move may have saved my life. Days where I mourn the version of me who thought she could keep surviving environments that were slowly destroying her.

What nobody tells you about radical change is that it rarely feels cinematic while you are living it.

It feels disorienting.

Quiet.

Uncomfortable.

Messy.

It feels like sitting in uncertainty long enough for your nervous system to stop expecting constant impact.

It feels like learning who you are outside of survival mode.

It feels like exhaustion meeting possibility at the exact same time.

This past year has been a roller coaster of emotions and ideas and growth and stagnation and patience and surrender and acceptance and letting go.

And perhaps most unexpectedly:

it has also been a confrontation with identity itself.

Who are you when the plans collapse?

Who are you when the institutions no longer validate you?

Who are you when you stop organizing your life entirely around achievement, endurance, productivity, or proving your worth?

Who are you when you finally stop overriding yourself?

I do not have polished answers to those questions yet.

But I think that is part of the point.

For most of my life, survival required movement. Constant adaptation. Hypervigilance. Performing competence. Managing chaos. Anticipating collapse before it arrived.

And now?

I am learning something entirely different.

Stillness.

Discernment.

Patience.

Listening.

Not every season of life is meant for relentless forward motion.

Some seasons are about rebuilding your relationship with yourself after years of fragmentation.

Some seasons are about grieving.

Some are about recalibrating.

Some are about learning that walking away from what harms you is not failure, even when the thing you walk away from once represented your greatest dream.

I think about that often now.

Especially because from the outside, people tend to narrate dramatic life changes as bravery or freedom or reinvention.

But from the inside?

It often feels far less glamorous.

It feels like uncertainty.

It feels like mourning.

It feels like trusting yourself before you have evidence things will work out.

It feels like standing in the middle of an entirely unfamiliar life trying to remember that survival alone was never meant to be the end goal.

And still — despite all of it — there is something beautiful emerging here too.

Not the performative kind of healing sold online.

Not “high vibe” reinvention.

Not escapism disguised as spirituality.

Something quieter.

More honest.

More grounded.

For the first time in a very long time, I am beginning to understand what it means to build a life that is not solely organized around endurance.

And maybe that is what this chapter is really about.

Not running away.

Not giving up.

Not collapsing.

But finally listening to the part of myself that knew something needed to change long before my mind was ready to admit it.

I do not know exactly where this road leads yet.

But I know this:

I am still here.

And after everything, that alone feels extraordinary.