Why I moved to rural Oaxaca
I drove out of Los Angeles early on September 9, 2022. It was a grey morning and rain poured in sideways for the entire 2.5 hour drive from my home to the Tijuana border crossing. I look back on that day and how at the time I thought I’d be returning in three months, renewed and having found whatever I was looking for, but here I am ten months later in rural Oaxaca on what seems like an endless search for Self.
The pandemic, lockdown reality, and the grip of capitalism tightening around all of our necks in the face of so much change, loss and grief were seeds to my desperate search for a place of respite. Worn down from exhaustion, not even my body was a safe haven. My mind was unable to rest on anything besides the new paradigms of my interpersonal relationships, my constantly wavering access to work and money, and the disappeared sense of self that I’d unknowingly attached to these things.
Three ayahuasca ceremonies peppered through 2021 were what opened my eyes to the fact that I had no choice but to come back home to myself, although that ‘self’ would look very different from what I previously knew. These ceremonies made me feel too big for my skin and reawakened desires that were buried under the backburner and forgotten, given up in exchange for making ends meet and a slow chipping away at my autonomy.
Something had to change. Previous trips to Mexico showed that being here always brought my creativity to life and the low cost of living for someone emigrating from the United States granted me some space to breathe through the arduous unraveling of self-discovery, without the pressure to be productive breathing down my neck.
I chose Oaxaca as the site of my own excavation and a starting point to learn what freedom really means to me. I soon understood that liberation and freedom are not the same. As the womanist theologian and social ethicist Dr Emilie Townes says, “Liberation is a process. Freedom is a temporary state of being. Liberation is dynamic. It never ends.”