Why I Came to Mexico

I came looking to begin again. What I found was a different understanding of home.

When I was beginning again, everything felt possible.

But there were moments when none of it did.

I knew one thing. The life I had been living was no longer mine. What I didn't know was what I should replace it with. I didn't have a five-year plan or a clear picture of the woman I wanted to become. All I had were questions. So many questions.

How did I even start building a new life?

Could I trust what I wanted when it felt so far outside the norm that it made no practical sense?

Was I following my gut, my desire, my dreams—or running away?

I chose Mexico before I had answers.

I came here to rebuild my life, although rebuild makes it sound as if I arrived with blueprints. I didn't. Mostly, I knew what I didn't want anymore. But there were a few things I refused to compromise on—freedom of movement, adventure, and beauty. I wanted to wake up curious about my own life again. I wanted to be in awe.

For most of my adult life, the definition of a good life had already been decided for me. There were roles to fulfill, people to consider, and practical decisions to make. Even my dreams belonged to a shared future.

With none of that left, I suddenly had to ask what I wanted when the answer no longer had to make sense to anyone else.

Travel became the only solid answer. I had been craving it since my teens.

I wanted unfamiliar roads and new landscapes. I wanted to follow whatever whim caught my attention instead of always having an unbendable agenda. I wanted to find out who I might become when I was no longer living from the same old map.

It sounded brave when I described it that way.

Living it was messier.

Freedom can be exhilarating. It can also be disorienting. When no one else is drawing the boundaries of your life, you have to decide where they belong. When you can go almost anywhere, it becomes oddly difficult to know where you actually want to go.

When I moved to Mexico, I had chosen myself, but that didn't mean I suddenly understood myself.

I was still uncertain. Still grieving parts of what I had left behind. Still wondering whether the desires pulling me forward were trustworthy—or whether I was simply trying to put enough distance between myself and everything that had happened.

Then came Alonso.

I had come to this country imagining a solitary journey. Somewhere in my mind, I believed I needed to prove I could build a life entirely on my own. Instead, just as I was beginning, I fell in love.

That was not part of the plan.

I didn't want to surrender the freedom I had only just begun claiming. I didn't want to shape myself around another relationship until I could no longer tell which parts were mine. But I also didn't want independence to become another kind of hiding place. I didn't want the fear of love to keep me from such a gift.

Alonso and I found each other while both of our lives were changing at the foundation. Neither of us had a particularly convincing plan for what came next. Eventually, the journey I had started alone became one we began figuring out together.

Alonso is from Mexico City. This was already his country—his language, his culture, his history. He understood the roads and the social cues. He knew the difference between something that was genuinely risky and something that frightened me because I didn't understand it yet.

Without him, I would not have had many of the defining, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that came from exploring this country. His knowledge gave me enough safety to go farther. My curiosity gave us reasons to keep turning down roads neither of us had taken before.

We traveled along the Pacific coast. We found some places by accident and deliberately sought out others. We camped near the ocean, lived surrounded by jungle, stayed in container homes, and tried on different towns and versions of daily life.

This was not always as romantic as it sounds.

There was heat, humidity, mold, unreliable internet, rock-hard beds, no water pressure, no hot water, power outages, water outages, flat tires, and the occasional moment when I wondered what on earth we were doing and how I had gotten here. There were places that looked perfect until we tried to live there. There were homes I loved in theory that ended up being disasters. Sometimes we arrived full of hope and left defeated.

For a long time, I thought the purpose of all that movement was to keep going until we found the place that gave us everything.

I'm no longer sure that place exists.

Each home showed us something we wanted, but it also revealed what was missing. One taught us how deeply we need nature. Another showed us how much our surroundings affect our creative energy. Some offered beauty without enough community. Others gave us connection but not the privacy we needed.

We weren't failing to settle. We were slowly learning what home meant to us.

Eventually, we arrived in San Pancho.

After so much movement, my desire to stay surprised me.

I had spent years thinking of permanence as a trap. Even after we began making friends, recognizing people on the street, and developing small routines, part of me remained suspicious of it. If I chose one place, would my world begin closing around me again? Would settling down mean becoming the domesticated, complacent woman I had worked so hard to leave behind?

But that isn't what has happened.

In San Pancho, we have begun to experience roots differently. We can know our neighbors, return to familiar places, and become part of the ordinary rhythm of a community. We can create a home that reflects who we are now, not who either of us was expected to be.

And the road is still there.

This is what I had misunderstood. Home does not have to be the place where movement ends. It can be the place that makes movement possible—the place we leave because we are curious, not because we need to escape.

I think this is why I understand the people who come to Mexico carrying more than suitcases. Often, they are not simply looking for a house or a different cost of living. They are trying to imagine a life that feels more like their own—even if they can't explain exactly what that life looks like.

I used to think freedom meant being able to go.

Now I'm beginning to understand that it can also mean having somewhere I genuinely want to come back to.