My friends and I swam in the ocean, ate locally grown foods, hiked through the rain forest, and danced all night. We stayed in hostels with scorpions and cockroaches, traveled on buses down dusty roads to explore the Pacific coast, and got so used to lugging our backpacks around they became like extra limbs. I felt like I had entered a whole new phase of life, with a brand-new version of myself. Every day I was growing more independent. Meditation became as easy as breathing. The world was my oyster and everything was new. I didn’t want to cling to that old part of me that I’d been holding on to out of fear of the unknown. I started to trust myself.
Still, almost every day I made my way to a pay phone to call Jonathan. He was my one connection to my old life, and I felt the contrast with the life I was creating in Costa Rica. I started dreading going to the phone booth and began putting the calls off more and more. I still loved him, but talking to him felt like wearing shoes that were two sizes too small. I’d grown, and it seemed like the rest of my life back home hadn’t caught up. During one of those calls, Jonathan said he’d gotten a tattoo of my name. I froze. A part of me already knew deep down that he wasn’t my future, but I hadn’t been able to figure out exactly how that would happen. He’d sensed I was drifting away . . . so he tattooed my name across his back. The permanence of a tattoo shook me into the reality that I wasn’t in love with him anymore. This next chapter was about me, but the transition wasn’t going to be easy. We’d been together for all of my adult life—I grew up alongside of him. And worst of all: I would have to break his heart. The thought of it pained me and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go through with it. Again, I had to ask myself: What is more loving? Is there a loving way to break someone’s heart? I went to meditate at sunrise one morning and, holding my hands to my heart, I felt all the love I had for Jonathan. It was huge—but there was something in the way. I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him anymore. I was falling in love with myself! And that relationship wasn’t something I was prepared to let go of—I’d just found it. Continuing down this path with Jonathan felt impossible. I didn’t want to pretend or have to fake it—it would be an even bigger betrayal. Tears started streaming down my face as I realized the inevitable decision I’d arrived at: the most loving thing was to let go.
My friends and I made our way down to Dominical, a dusty little surf town south of where most tourists go. It was a quiet town, and we found a hostel a short walk from the beach. We took surf lessons, shopped handmade bracelets from vendors, and drank cold beer at sunset. I had barely had time to unpack my backpack when I met Mike, the manager of a vegan restaurant in town. Mike was tanned and muscular in that surfer way, with big brown eyes and an irresistible smile. I’d been with Jonathan for almost four years and never before felt the urge to be with someone else. And now here was this guy, the opposite of Jonathan—laid-back, easygoing, happy—and our attraction to each other was palpable.
Mike had left the States to move to Costa Rica and he was vegan and all about natural living. He woke up at sunrise every morning—just like me—to meditate and surf and was so excited about a new project he was working on: a way to transform his diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. Everything about him was new and intriguing. With him, I felt like I could be whoever I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be Rachel with the sad story, or Rachel the party girl. I was just Rachel, the current, evolving version, the Rachel who meditated, who loved to read, who wanted to travel the world and discover all that life had to offer. I broke up with Jonathan by phone immediately, feeling so detached from my old life and so sure of what was ahead that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. I tried to keep the phone call as brief as I could, thinking it was best to just rip off the Band-Aid. The truth was, I didn’t want to stick around long enough to hear the agony in his voice. I barely paused to think about the chaos I had created back home; I just wanted to be happy. Jonathan would find a way to be happy on his own, too, I thought.
A few weeks after we met, I spent the night with Mike. It was so different from anything I’d ever experienced. Lovemaking with Jonathan was passionate. With Mike it was soft, gentle, and easy. I started spending every night with him at his house in the jungle. I stopped wearing makeup and transitioned into veganism. I devoured every book on the subject I could find and soaked up knowledge like a sponge. I’d never given any thought to my diet before that—no one had told me about the meat industry and what excess animal protein does to your body. My new diet changed my body—my skin cleared up and the asthma I’d suffered since childhood subsided. After a while many of the allergies I’d struggled with for most of my life completely disappeared. Every day I felt better, stronger, and healthier. There was no stress in my body, no worries, no anxiety. I felt so at home, not just in Costa Rica but within myself.
After three months in paradise, it was time to go home. As the trip wound down, I knew one thing for sure: this was not the end of my journey—it was the beginning. Mike drove us all to the airport in San José, and although it was hard leaving him because we had fallen in love, it wasn’t the end of the world. I knew I would see him again, but part of me knew he wasn’t my end game either—just an important piece of my moving forward.
I landed in Sweden feeling like a brand-new version of myself. I was the healthiest I’d ever been, calm, confident, and happy. The first thing I found when I came home was a huge box on my bedroom floor with all the things I’d ever given Jonathan. Our whole lives were there—most of it smashed to pieces or shredded. I sat down, and looking through the things—photographs, birthday gifts, paintings he’d made me—I felt like I was looking at someone else’s life. I didn’t regret breaking up with him. It was what had to be done. Mike and I stayed in touch, and a few months later, he traveled to Sweden to see me. I was still enchanted by him, but my inner voice was telling me this wasn’t it. However, detaching has never been my strong suit. Having Mike in Sweden was great, but we didn’t have the same easygoing flow that we did in Costa Rica. Almost immediately, I started noticing him distancing himself from me: he slept with his back to me, and he wouldn’t hold my hand in public. I felt starved for attention. I wanted Mike to be “the one” so badly that I ignored the signs he wasn’t. Instead, I focused on superficial things to place distance between us; for instance, the baggy jeans he wore that I thought were so sexy in the jungle were all of a sudden the wrong fit and made him look sloppy. In Costa Rica he was the perfect man. In Sweden, things didn’t feel right anymore, but that didn’t stop me from pretending.
At my dad’s invitation, we traveled from Sweden to Spain. It was a beautiful week of eating tapas, walks along the beach, and shopping in the little markets scattered around town. The weird feelings I had in Sweden let up and by the end of the week when it was time for Mike to fly back to Costa Rica, I was sad to see him go. My dad was leaving for Sweden that same day and I decided to stay in Spain on my own for a little while. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life—where did I belong? I needed alone time to figure it out. When everyone was gone, I felt empty, hollow, and drained. I couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly so unhappy.
After crying all the tears I’d bottled up inside, I drew myself a bath, added some lavender oil, and laid down in the hot water. Slowly, I felt my body relaxing and my breath returning. Okay, I told myself, so I’m alone now. I can be alone. I can be independent. I realized that it wasn’t until I was alone that I started feeling like myself again. I had a pattern when it came to relationships, where I was so scared of being abandoned that I’d fully change who I was to try to fit in with the other person. It had been exhausting, spending those weeks with Mike. I didn’t know it until just now, but I’d actually been longing to be alone. I remembered: my most important relationship is with myself. In the blink of an eye I stopped feeling sad and decided to focus on the art of being by myself.
The next morning I got up at sunrise and sat down on the patio to meditate. After a few deep breaths I felt all the tension draining from my b
ody. I hadn’t meditated a single time since arriving in Europe. Now, finally sitting in silence again, I felt myself grounding. When I finished my session, a memory came to me. I was transported back into the meditation hall at the retreat center the year before, where I saw the woman stretching on her yoga mat, having woken up before everyone else to practice. I decided I could move my body like that, too. I normally suffered from a lot of back pain, but it had eased up a lot over the past few months. I stood up and started to stretch. I wasn’t aware of what a yoga practice entailed, or if I was doing real yoga poses, but the thought of being alone on a yoga mat—like the woman I had seen at the retreat—was what I wanted to connect to. All I knew was, it felt good!
After breakfast I headed down to the harbor and went to the bookstore. The first thing that caught my eye was a book about yoga. I bought it, and in the spur of the moment headed into a sport shop next door and picked up a yoga mat as well. As soon as I got home I started reading the book; when evening came, I rolled out my brand-new mat and sat in meditation. Just as it had that morning, something about the silence of meditation made me yearn to move and stretch. Using the book as my guide, I made my way into a reclined twist. I lay down, crossed my legs, and dropped them over to one side. I heard my back crackle and pop. It surprised me but actually felt good. I moved to the other side, and then continued through a few more poses from the book. Downward-Facing Dog was a challenge—my wrists hurt and the backs of my legs burned. But after a few poses I started getting the hang of it and realized that, just like with meditation, if I stayed connected to my breath and brought my attention inward, it was easy. At the end I laid down in something the book called Savasana—just lying flat on my back on the floor. Closing my eyes, I felt a sense of calm wash over me. I don’t know how long I laid there, but when I opened my eyes the stars had come out. Wow, I thought. This yoga thing might just be something.
Newly inspired, I went back to the bookstore for books about crystals, meditation, and veganism. I started cooking everything from scratch and experimented with new foods and flavors. I discovered I could cook! I’d never cooked in my life, but now I felt a passion for food. Every day I rolled out my yoga mat on the patio, meditated, and practiced yoga. In the evenings I spent hours in the kitchen cooking elaborate meals for myself. My European solo vacation became about meditation, yoga, and cooking vegan food.
I ended up staying in Spain for more than a month. Most of the time I felt at peace, but I still suffered moments of anxiety—always related to Mike. Every time Mike didn’t respond fast enough to an e-mail, or call when I thought he should, I felt abandoned. I became obsessive about making sure we spoke every day, and the more I forced it, the more I felt him pull away. Negative thoughts swirled in my head. What if he doesn’t love me? . . . Why isn’t he calling more? . . . Maybe I’m not good enough. It was the first time I was faced with the disparity between my ability to be present and my mind’s constant attraction to worst-case scenarios. I was reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and started to think that maybe my obsessive negative thoughts weren’t true. If I could stay in the moment and just be, I’d always come back to the same conclusion: all is well. Every time my mind took control, I challenged myself not to get pulled into panic mode. It became a routine: feeling calm and independent and grounded, and at some point being catapulted into anxiety by something as simple as Mike not returning a phone call.
I realized that this was a practice: I was reconditioning my mind, and to do that, I needed challenges like these. The codependency issues I shared with Jonathan hadn’t simply gone away when he did. They were still there. But now I was in a relationship with a guy who wasn’t in that same space, a guy who was used to living on his own, doing his own thing, and having casual relationships. In Costa Rica I had been this confident, breezy girl, but the more serious the relationship got, the more the old me forced her way back and I’d become needy—almost desperate—for love and attention. Of course Mike was pulling away. I asked myself relevant questions: Did I actually love Mike? Did my relationship with him mirror the new, evolved me? Or had I just been fooling him—and myself—when I’d presented myself the way I had at the beginning? Was Mike my forever guy, or a transition from my old life to the one in which I was headed? I spent weeks pondering these questions, journaling, meditating, shifting between struggle and ease. Practicing.
On my last night in Spain I went down to the water and sat at a little bar perched right in the sand. I ordered a glass of white wine, something I normally wouldn’t do. It felt like a very grown-up thing to do: sit alone at sunset with a glass of wine. I was only nineteen and there was so much I’d never done on my own. I’d had a ton of alcohol in my life, but always with the intention to disappear into it, to forget, or to escape. Drinking that crisp glass of wine, I realized that the alcohol wasn’t the problem—it was a symptom. I could make everything excessive and turn anything into a problem, just as I could make anything sacred if I did it with consciousness and presence. Watching the sky turn to pink and purple and gold, I wrote in my journal. I had done so much growing since I’d been there, and most important, I’d been completely on my own. I felt a calm within me now that wasn’t as easily shaken by outside events, and I was beginning to understand that there was a greater purpose to the challenges thrown my way.
As I drank my wine, with my feet snugly in the sand, a smile spread across my face. I wrote: “This is a perfect moment.” It was. I was just beginning to grasp that the love I’d been seeking so desperately in others was really within myself.
I returned to Stockholm ready to figure out my next move. On a whim, I visited my friends Olivia and Daniella in my old hometown of Uppsala and ended up signing up for classes at the university there. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing—I didn’t know what I wanted to do next so why not study for a semester? I planned to return to Costa Rica, but it wasn’t about Mike. Going back had to be about me. I needed my own purpose, my own reason, to stay on my own path. I knew I had to save up some money to be able to go and not look back, so I decided to tend bar at a restaurant in town. I studied by day and my nights were spent serving up twenty-dollar drinks.
I’d been talking to Mike less and less and one day he called to say he’d met someone else. I was sad, but glad he was man enough to be truthful. Holding on to a piece of him, even from afar, meant I wasn’t completely on my own and now I really was. Rather than scare me, the realization filled me with a sense of empowerment. I had my entire life ahead of me—I could do whatever I wanted to do. The thought was exhilarating.
One semester was enough time for me to realize that university life wasn’t for me. By then I had saved enough tip money to return to Costa Rica. It was only a question of when I’d go. The answer fell out of the sky one morning when I woke up. My feet ached from working a double shift the night before. It was freezing outside, the coldest winter in thirty years, and I dreaded getting out of bed. As I looked out at the gray sky, something inside of me clicked. Yes. It’s time, I thought. That same day I booked a one-way ticket to Costa Rica. I had to spend that time back in Sweden to fully arrive at my own conclusion: I wasn’t supposed to do this the way all of my friends did. University wasn’t for me. Sweden wasn’t either. I belonged by the ocean.
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FORGIVE
Being back in Costa Rica felt like coming home. I got on the bus at the airport and headed straight for Dominical. I was a little bit nervous, not knowing what to expect, arriving completely alone. I had a few friends in town, but things were different this time around; I was on my own. I checked into a hostel with the plan to find a permanent place to stay as soon as possible.
Settling back into life there was easier than I’d anticipated. I got a job as a server at an Italian restaurant in town and started bartending at two different bars. I didn’t have a big-picture plan. I just wanted to make enough money to get by. I wanted to swim in the ocean every day. I wanted to fee
l free. In my spare time I practiced yoga, lounged in a hammock at the local dive shop, and hung out with the tourists. The manager of the dive shop was a girl named Laura whose husband was a dive master. I hadn’t really made any close girlfriends during my previous stay. Making friends with women didn’t come naturally to me; I’d always felt more at ease with men. My friendship with Laura happened pretty much by default. She told me she didn’t like me at first. I was “too loud, too blond, and too tall,” she said. I guess I wore her down, because eventually we struck up a friendship.
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