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“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~T.S. Eliot
In my early twenties, I packed a backpack and boarded a plane alone with a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia. It was a move that baffled my father, inspired my friends, and quietly terrified me.
I was drawn by something I couldn’t fully articulate at the time: a craving for freedom, truth, and a kind of belonging I hadn’t yet known. What I didn’t realize then is that this two-year trip would imprint on me a version of myself I’d spend the next twenty years slowly forgetting, and then, almost by surprise, begin to reclaim.
Three weeks into that trip, I found myself in Northern Thailand feeling completely lost. I wasn’t sightseeing like I “should” have been, or checking off cultural highlights. I felt aimless. Lonely. A bit ashamed that I wasn’t “making the most” of the experience.
The structure I was used to (school, expectations, a tidy plan…) had fallen away. I felt unmoored, as if I’d made a huge mistake. Who was I to think I could just wander and have it mean something?
And then I met Merrilee.
She was older, solo, sun-wrinkled and wise—the kind of woman who carries stories in her skin.
Over an afternoon spent talking at our quiet guesthouse, she helped me see something I hadn’t yet understood—that the point wasn’t to fill the time. The point was to be with myself. To let the lack of familiarity and structure teach me how to listen inward. To begin trusting my own rhythm and desire without external cues.
The kind of freedom I’d dreamed of required discomfort first and a willingness to stop outsourcing my worth to what I was doing.
That single conversation changed the entire arc of my trip. And it changed me. Forever.
For the first time, I felt connected to myself not because I was achieving something, but because I was simply attuned. I moved at a pace that felt good. I made decisions from joy, not obligation. I stopped trying to prove anything. And in the middle of that season of self-connection, I met the man who would become my husband. A new chapter began rooted in love and partnership, and eventually, in motherhood.
And slowly, without really realizing it, the version of me that woke up in Thailand began to dim.
Over the years, I became a mama to two beautiful boys. I cultivated a stable career. I managed a household. I became, in many ways, the kind of adult we are told to strive for: organized, reliable, efficient, productive. I wore those traits like armor, and at times, even like a badge of honor. But beneath it, there was a soft ache.
I had flashes of her—that younger, aligned me—the one who had danced through temples, laughed with strangers, trusted the moment. I saw her in photos. I reread journal entries and marveled at how whole I’d felt. But the distance between us seemed too wide. I didn’t resent the life I’d built. I just felt like I’d built it around everyone but me.
Some seasons are shaped by who needs us and how we choose to show up. And when we decide to set aside our deepest longings for the sake of others, it can serve as a useful contrast.
Maybe that soft ache was there to remind me that while raising children, tending to aging parents, or holding together the invisible threads of a household can offer deep meaning and purpose… it’s not the whole of me.
Somewhere in my early forties, with my kids nearly grown and a job that no longer felt right, the stirring got stronger. Roaring and insistent.
Only this time, it didn’t send me packing to the other side of the world. It sent me inward. And I was ready for it now. I had the capacity to respond.
I began exploring new trainings. I started a side business that brought me alive in ways I hadn’t felt in years. I slowly reduced how much I was giving to my secure job to devote more time to the work that felt aligned with my soul. I was awakening again, but with responsibilities and relationships that complicated the path.
Eventually, I knew it was time to leave my job entirely. It was a leap that, while intentional, shook me more than I expected.
The weeks after submitting my resignation were not the liberating breath I’d anticipated. Instead, I felt untethered, afraid, and riddled with doubt. Who was I now? What if I failed? What if all of this was some naive midlife fantasy?
Every structure I had leaned on—title, paycheck, certainty—was gone. I felt like I was falling. And then it hit me: I’d been here before.
That lost, floating, what-the-hell-am-I-doing feeling? It was the exact same emotional terrain I’d walked through in Thailand. Only now, I had more to lose. The stakes were higher, so the fear was louder, but the lesson was ultimately the same.
To let go of structure without losing myself. To trust the process of becoming before I had evidence of it all working out. To believe that flow, intuition, and joy are valid guides, even in business.
This time, there was no Merrilee waiting for me on a bamboo veranda. But there was embodied memory. There was me. There was the version of me who had lived it once and come alive because of it. The gift of having that experience in my early twenties wasn’t just the adventure. It was the blueprint it gave me for how to find my way back when I felt lost.
I didn’t have to figure it all out from scratch. I just had to remember who I was when I felt most alive. What she trusted. How she moved. What she believed.
She didn’t need five-year plans or marketing funnels or perfect clarity. She needed space. And courage. And breath. She needed to like herself and to let that be enough.
And so, I began letting that version of me take the lead again.
Building a business, especially one rooted in healing, service, and soul, isn’t just about offers and strategy. It’s a spiritual path. It asks you to meet your edges, again and again. It confronts your conditioning. It stirs up your doubts. But it also calls forward your truest voice: the one that got quiet when you were busy being “good” and responsible and reliable.
For years, I looked back on that time in Asia with a kind of reverence—a fond and distant memory of a life I couldn’t believe I was once brave enough to have lived. I never saw it as a departure from real life, but I did place it in a separate category, a luminous chapter that shaped me, but felt hard to access again.
Now I see it more clearly. That moment was the original map of who I am when I’m not trying to be what the world wants. And now, in this middle chapter of life, I get to choose her again.
Not by backpacking across the globe (though I admit that’s tempting), but by waking up each day and building a life, a business, a version of myself that’s led by truth, flow, and trust. It’s scarier now. But it’s also richer. Because I know what it feels like to come home to myself.
And I know the ache of the contrast if I don’t.
Maybe you’re reading this and feel like you’re standing at a similar threshold, untethered, uncertain, trying to trust the pull of something deeper.
If so, let this be your Merrilee moment.
The path might feel blurry. You might question whether you’re wasting time, or if you are foolish for wanting more.
But what I continue to learn in new ways is that the process of returning to yourself and recentering your needs doesn’t always come with clarity. It often arrives with chaos. With fear. With silence. With the pain of letting go.
But what’s waiting for you on the other side of the unraveling is a more vibrant you. And that person is so worth meeting again.
About Natasha Ramlall
Natasha Ramlall is a trauma-informed mind-body health practitioner. She helps individuals see their pain in a new way which moves them into more evolved levels of mind-body health, wholeness and healing. To learn more or work with her, visit humanistcoaching.ca and get her curated Spotify playlist Love, Natasha to nudge your nervous system back into balance when you’re having ‘one of those days’.
