A note I found from 2023 (when I separated from my fiance and traveled for the first time)
What have I learned on this journey? (A summary of Thailand) It all started with me and Emma separating. Without going into details, it was chaos, like a world war. For a long time, I had been processing the idea of breaking up with Emma, because I felt that she should be with someone who could give her more joy than I had been able to the past year. For years, I’ve been drawn to the idea of going abroad and just saying “fuck it,” but I’ve always seen it as an escape behavior, and because of that I’ve fought against my own intuition with “reasonable thinking.” Then, when me and Emma separated, in the middle of all the chaos, depression, stress, anxiety attacks, drugs… I found a sense of calm in my soul after a session with a healer in Bollnäs named Jonny, who I asked for advice about going abroad. During that session, it felt like someone was speaking to me from the other side, telling me to go. The idea of just packing my things and leaving was terrifying to me, but I sat down with Emma on the couch and told her the truth. I needed to get away. Not to escape, but to face myself, to face my intuition, and to live my own truth. You see, I have never lived my own truth, because I have never interpreted my own truth as something good. I was judged from the beginning. That’s what happens when you grow up in a small town. You never form your own identity. People do it for you. Because I never saw my own truth as something good, I’ve always been shaped by other people who I thought were living a better truth than me. They had a better reputation, more money, and seemed to live life in a more honorable way than I had managed to achieve. The problem with never living your own truth is that you never learn to love yourself for who you actually are. You end up hating that part of yourself, even though it’s just as present now as it was then. And if you never love yourself, you are never capable of loving another person. You might think you do, but your understanding of love is distorted.