I was lying in bed watching Grey’s Anatomy. I hadn’t done anything strenuous. And then, for no reason I could explain, I just couldn’t get up.
I’m Charlotte. I’m a Filipina, and right now I’m living in Vietnam, though “right now” is always doing a lot of work in my sentences. My days are full in the way that only unscheduled days can be: morning walks before the heat sets in, mountains when I can find them, anime late at night, books in between, and the kind of long slow conversations with friends and family where you look up and somehow two hours have gone.
When I travel, I don’t mean the version with itineraries and souvenir shops. I mean arriving somewhere and just starting to figure it out. Finding where people actually eat. Learning which streets feel safe at night and which ones hum with something you can’t name yet. I stay in a place until it starts to feel faintly familiar, and then I let the next one pull me forward. There is a particular kind of morning I keep chasing: waking up somewhere new, not quite knowing what the day holds, and feeling, for once, completely awake.
Before the accident, I was focused almost entirely on money. I say that without shame, because it was just true. And then one ordinary afternoon, I was lying in bed, Netflix on, and I couldn’t move. No warning. No buildup. I was hospitalized during COVID19, which meant I was also alone in a way that is hard to describe, surrounded by systems that were overwhelmed, in a body that had decided to stop cooperating without asking me first. I remember thinking: everything I thought I had time for, I might not.
What those days gave me wasn’t a tidy lesson. It was something colder and more specific: I found out who the genuine people in my life were. Who called. Who stayed with me. Who showed up in whatever way they could. And who moved through it like nothing had happened. I carry both of those lists quietly now, and I don’t mix them up.
I won’t pretend I’ve figured out how to help other people through any of this. Honestly, I don’t know yet if my way of living has meant anything to anyone else, not even to me (sometimes lol). But my blog exists, and sometimes strangers find it, and I like to think that somewhere, someone is reading about a slow morning in Vietnam and feeling something loosen in their chest. Some quiet permission they didn’t know they were waiting for.
“I feel most alive when I’m traveling and living in different places, when a place is new enough that I have to actually pay attention to everything around me.”
How about you?
What is something you’ve been quietly waiting to give yourself permission to do?
