“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ~Carl Jung
“Should I move back?” was the question I asked myself. It was 2018, and I had moved to Berlin eight months prior. And everything had gone wrong. So wrong.
I moved here for a relationship, but that relationship ended. I also moved for different work but found myself in a toxic environment. I had very little support from the community after my relationship ended. And I found myself horribly ill and in a hospital.
The easy thing to do would have been to move back to London. It was still a huge move, but I would be back with my friends and support network.
But something stopped me.
Something was going on inside me that told me I would not be any happier if I moved back.
That moving back would be a massive distraction from what was happening inside me. It would allow me to ignore that—to push it aside. And then, hopefully, in London, I would be too distracted to need to deal with it.
I had no idea how transformative that decision would be.
What was going on inside me?
I had come to the realization that I had moved to Berlin to try to escape from who I was. That I was trying to choose only part of myself rather than all of myself, and I was doing this by trying to have a relationship with someone.
But, in actual fact, I was bored. Bored in my life. Bored in a successful career as an international executive—a career I had no interest or passion for anymore.
I decided it was time to figure out who I was. Not just part of me, not just some of me. But all of me.
But I had no idea how to do this. I was drifting about in the dark. Then I realized that was part of the problem—I was trying to break through this veil of darkness to understand who I wanted to be.