What I Learned in 2023: The Source of My Happiness Is Inside Myself

Atlanta, GA
12/31/23

At first, I wasn’t going to write this. Or at least I wasn’t going to publish it. It felt tone deaf, insensitive or maybe even obnoxious to write about the great year I’ve had when, globally, it’s been a pretty shitty one. As I write this, wars in Gaza and Ukraine rage on, and that’s hardly an exhaustive list of the human suffering happening right now. While life is so difficult for so many, it felt wrong to share how good it’s been for me.

But then I read the following in a blog post written by someone I had recently interviewed for a story in my ongoing coverage of psychedelic medicine: “Joy is an emotion we suppress far too often.” I knew that by avoiding writing about what this year has been like for me, I was suppressing joy. And, true to my usual form, I wanted to sweep my joy under the rug because I felt guilty about it.

But now I’ll come out and say it, 2023 was the best year of my entire life.

First, I realized a dream that I’d had and been deferring for 30 years. I was 17 years old the first time I started dreaming of a trip to Japan. I was 47 when I got there – the last leg of a 10-week journey through Asia. Of course, that trip took up less than 20% of the year that I’m calling the best one of my entire life, but what a weight to take something off of your to-do list that has been languishing there for so long mostly because you were afraid to do it.

And fear wasn’t the only thing holding me back, which is another reason that blog post about suppressing joy spoke to me. He wrote, “Why do you withhold joy from yourself? …Why do we deny ourselves some of the most beautiful emotions and experiences provided to us in this beautiful Universe?”

I can tell you why I do it: Again, it's guilt. Every time I deferred that Asia trip over the last 30 years was because of guilt. Sometimes it was towards my family who might need me. Other times, it was towards a boyfriend at the time, who’d be left behind.

So I started 2023 with a resolution, “No boyfriends till you go to SE Asia.” The short version of the story is that I managed to keep that resolution. You can read the longer version here.

How I started 2023 without a boyfriend was because of a fantasy I’d had and deferred for 30 years. From September 2021 to August 2022, I was in a relationship with a man I had idealized since I was 16. He had been my boyfriend in high school, and we just never quite moved on. Through marriages (both of ours), children (his), and multiple moves to different cities and countries, we never forgot about each other and both, each in our own way, harbored a fantasy of ending up back together one day. In 2021, we finally did, and 11 months later, it ended in colossal heartbreak for me.

But again, what a joy (an eventual joy, haha) to release the weight of something you’ve wanted for 30 years. And, my god, what an invaluable life lesson it taught me. (But MY GOD was I really not smart enough to have known this already?! Geez!) The lesson: When you idealize a human being, you won’t see any of their flaws, and we are all flawed. None of us is ideal.

Nothing about this man looked good on paper. Literally everything was a red flag. When I say everything, I mean everything. Had I met him online or in a social setting as a perfect stranger and learned the things I learned about him, I never would have pursued a relationship with him. There was nothing about him or his current situation that made him an eligible candidate to be a boyfriend. And, to his credit, he told me this on many occasions (while sometimes simultaneously plowing ahead with our relationship, occasionally at lightspeed). When you idealize a person, you can find an explanation for everything. That part wasn’t his fault. It was mine.

I hope that 2022 was the last time I had to learn the lesson I first heard from Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” Ignoring that advice has been my entree into far too many relationships.

Instead, I was living the lines from Fleishman Is In Trouble, a book and later a mini-series about, in part, a sad-sack divorced dad who finds acceptance among his old friends from high school.

“It had been so long since he felt accepted, like he didn’t have to justify his existence, that people just took him on his own terms. Maybe this was the key – to spend time with people who knew you when you were all potential. Maybe, in some way, you remained all potential to them. Your mistakes were anomalies to them.”

Yes, all I saw when I looked at this man was potential. All his mistakes were anomalies to me.

It took getting over that first 30-year-old fantasy in 2022 to realize my 30-year-old dream in 2023.

I spent the first quarter of 2023 planning that trip – an exercise in courage. Hitting “submit,” “send,” “purchase,” “book” on piece after piece of that journey, feeling my belly go cold every time I booked another flight, another boat, another room, and then doing it again and again until there was no turning back. But I was scared until I got on the plane, all nerves and jitters, which only escalated as my departure drew nearer.

But within about 24 hours of landing in Chiang Mai, where I stayed for the first month of my trip, all that fear was replaced by bliss. I was safe, I was fine, and goddammit I had done the thing.

Over the course of those 10 weeks, I came to realize, and eventually started saying out loud, “I have never been happier in all my life.”

That bliss came first from being in true alignment with what I have long felt to be my highest calling: to see as much of this world as I can while I’m in it. It was a bliss that I feel every time I get back out there. I felt it when I moved to Brazil and on every subsequent visit, and I’ve felt it on solo trips to Malta, Sicily, Mexico, New Mexico and so on.

But on this last trip, the bliss was so much bigger. I mean, I felt like I was on something (and I was, but more on that later**). Part of the outsized bliss was the dopamine cascade I felt every time I packed my little carry-on for the next destination: an island in the southern gulf of Thailand, Bangkok, Singapore, Cambodia, numerous stops in Vietnam, and that many more in Japan. What a rush it was every few days to few weeks when I said, “Tomorrow I’m going somewhere new!” I confess, I was afraid I’d gotten addicted to this feeling and that I’d surely broken my brain’s internal reward system to a point that once I got back to Atlanta, I might never feel joy again. And, boy, doesn’t this speak volumes about our tendency to suppress or deny ourselves joy. I literally thought that if I kept getting so much of it, I might break my brain. I think some religions may say something similar about sex or masturbation, too, but I digress.

That bliss was also so all-encompassing, I was certain, because it was the first time I’d had the chance to learn that I could be completely happy all by myself. All the happiness I needed was waiting inside of me and I didn’t need a man to unlock it.

That awareness has brought me an enduring joy (that I refuse to suppress!) that far outlasted the trip. It has lasted me the whole year. And I made a bet that it would.

**During the colossal heartbreak of 2022, I started taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin. It worked wonders for me. I will be happy to elaborate on that with anyone who asks. There is no shame in needing that kind of help. When I started the medicine, in August 2022, I told my doctor I didn’t want to be on this for the rest of my life and that I didn’t think I’d need to be either. He agreed and promised to help me and support me in going off of it whenever I was ready.

Taking that pill every morning in Thailand and Vietnam eventually started to feel silly. Come on, I was on top of the world! So I wondered if it might be time to taper off. But I’m no dummy. I had to ask myself, is it this trip that’s got you feeling so great or is it these pills? Will you still be the happiest you’ve ever been in your whole life when you stop taking the pills? And if it’s the travel that’s got you so high, won’t you crash as soon as you get home?

As unlikely as it might have seemed, I decided that I really was just this happy and that I was going to stay this way. Halfway through my 10-week trip, at the bathroom sink of my hotel room in Central Vietnam, I decided to skip my pill that day. As my doctor directed, I dropped down to a pill every other day, then every third day, then every fourth, then once a week, until I took my last pill in Japan, the last week of my trip.

I still felt great, but the true test would be when I was both back to my old mundane life in Atlanta and also no longer taking happy pills.

When I first got home, in July, every time I reunited with people I hadn’t seen in 2.5 months – my family, my girlfriends, my running group, work colleagues – they all said the same thing. “You look different.” “You’re glowing.” “I’ve never seen you so happy.” And I’d respond honestly, “I am different.” “Yes, I think you’re right.” “I’ve never been so happy.”

Now, six months later, on the last day of 2023, the tan from Vietnam’s perpetual June sun has worn off, but, whether or not others can still see it, I do still feel the glow. That somehow didn’t fade. Nor did the newfound certainty that I am courageous and capable and that the source of my happiness was always inside me.

The Ritual of the Monks

Chiang Mai, Thailand
06/02/23

Though the monks are beyond plentiful here in Chiang Mai, every time I see one, walking barefoot and gazing forward in a meditative state, I behave as if it’s a rare animal sighting. Like when you see a deer in your backyard in the city. You’re standing at the sink, washing the dishes after dinner like normal, and then you see something move, or you see the shine of his eyes. And you freeze. Maybe you whisper to your partner, “Honey! There’s a deer,” and you both creep closer to the window, like burglars in a movie, to get a closer look.

That's me every single time I see a monk here in Thailand.

The first few days here, I got a kick out of seeing them doing everyday things that we all do. The stuff that you could caption “Monks – They’re just like us!”

I saw a monk riding on the back of a motor scooter, his bare feet on the foot rests, his burgundy robe tucked up under him, his hands gripping the seat behind him.

I saw one paying for a basket full of toiletries at the cosmetics store where I, too, was filling a basket with toiletries.

Walking back to my place a few weeks ago, I managed to steal a few shots of these novice monks (pictured right), four boys who’d just gotten out of school, ordering cold drinks at the coffee shop next door.

One afternoon, while exploring a temple I especially like, I saw several teenage monks pruning and watering the shrubs when a garden hose fight broke out. One sprayed another relentlessly until finally, the victim’s robe was soaked from the waste down. He hiked it up almost to his hips and carried the wet drape as he walked back towards the living quarters with his legs a couple extra feet apart.

After having seen all of this "normal human behavior," a week or so into my time in Thailand, I saw monks engaged in a ritual that was not at all “just like us.” It was 6:30 a.m., and I was on the little dead-end street of food stalls where I get my coffee every morning. I was a little later than usual (yes, thanks to the rooster outside my window, who starts up at 4:30am, and the lingering jet lag, I am a very early riser here in Thailand – early even for me!), which may explain why I hadn’t witnessed this ritual before.

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Two young monks, probably teenagers, came down the street towards the food stalls, each carrying a large empty silver bowl. Like the other monks I'd seen, they looked forward intently and not all around them as they walked. They went stall to stall and waited until someone emerged with food and placed it in one of the bowls. When those were full, the food went into the cloth bags they carried on their shoulders. At some of the stalls, the food vendor knelt at the feet of the monks, who chanted over the food for a moment and then moved on to the next stall. I stood and watched for a few minutes as they repeated this process.

Heading back to my place, I turned back onto the main road, where I saw several pairs of young monks making rounds with empty silver bowls.

When I got back inside, I Googled and found that Buddhist monks in Thailand and much of Southeast Asia only eat what is given to them. They can’t engage in the labor of growing or preparing food. Alms gathering allows for this. It also aligns with their practice of not having any possessions. And it allows laypeople the opportunity to improve their karma – a practice called “making merit.”

Now, nearly four weeks into my stint here, the alms-gathering monks are a part of the landscape on my morning walk, and I am a little less prone to act like I’ve seen a unicorn when I pass one. I’ve also come to see that not all the monks are stoics who stare straight ahead when they pass another person on the street.

Some break the fourth wall and let me in – the thing that I relish the most about foreign travel. When I nod at them with a small smile, they nod back. They respond sawasdee khap (how a man say’s hello) to my sawasdee kha. And one morning, during his alms gathering with a much older monk, a little boy monk – he couldn’t have been more than 8 years old – caught my eye and grinned at me all the way down the block. He turned his head as far as he could to keep me in his sight. And I held his gaze with my own smiling eyes for as long as we were able.

Why I Slow Travel

Chiang Mai, Thailand
05/29/23

On my long solo trips abroad, I pick a base in one spot and take side trips from there. I leave my stuff behind and go back after every trip. I did it this way in Catania (Sicily), Mexico City, and now in Chiang Mai, a medium-sized city of about 1.2 million people in the northern mountains of Thailand.

I stay at a “coliving” (pictured right) – a dwelling that includes living and working spaces for solo travelers doing their jobs remotely (aka “digital nomads"). Colivings have not only everything you need to live and work comfortably but they also come with an instant community (See below).

Since I’ve been here, I’ve done side trips to Mae Kampong, a small village about a 2-hour drive north of here; to Koh Samui, an island in the southern Gulf of Thailand about a 2-hour flight from here; and to Singapore, a 3-hour flight. After each trip, I’ve come back to Chiang Mai. This weekend, I’ll leave for the last time and head to Bangkok.

Some people ask, "Why would you go all the way to Thailand to spend so much time in that one place? Why wouldn’t you see everything you possibly can?"

I do it for practical reasons and also for some more abstract ones that explain why I love this style of travel so much.

Packing up and moving every single week for several months; carrying all of my things with me; getting settled into a new place and getting the lay of the land; finding a suitable place to work that is comfortable, quiet, has reliable wifi and is not a stuffy hotel room – all of that is a total time suck and will completely burn you out.

It may sound more efficient to just move from point A to Z in a linear fashion across all the ground you want to cover, but when you consider the lost productivity on the days you need to work, it’s much less efficient.

With a home base, I take only the things I need on my side trips. I enjoy seeing the new place without any need to scout out a cafe to work from that week or the need to do any other chores related to my weekly routine. Back at my base, I already have a reliable place to work; I know which coffee shops open early enough for me to get some fuel before I start my day; and I know just where to grab lunch.

I can take trips to new and exciting places every weekend and enjoy a slower pace in an increasingly familiar place during the week.

But there’s so much more to it than this.

Today, I came back to Chiang Mai after a 3-night trip to Singapore. It was mid-afternoon and the co-working space, which you have to walk through to get to the bedrooms upstairs, was at peak capacity. As soon as I dragged my carry-on through the door, AP (below) – a cool, young Thai woman who works at the front desk – jumped out of her seat and rushed over to hug me.

“You’re back!” she said. “I missed you!”

What a gift to be “all by myself” nearly halfway around the globe and to have just one person to welcome me back when I walk through the front door; just one person to notice I’m gone, miss me and care that I'm back. That wouldn’t happen if I just kept traveling from A to B to C. Every departure would be a goodbye.

And it’s not just one person – There's the lady I buy my coffee from every morning (below with her husband). When I showed back up at her shop after 4 days away earlier this month, she clapped her hands together in front of her face and said, “Susan! I thought you left!” (Sure, that’s not my name, but for a welcome like that, I'll lean in.)

When you have a base, you can have a routine, and through routine, people know your face and notice when they haven’t seen it.

One part of my routine has been daily tai chi and qigong classes at a studio about a 10-minute walk from where I’m staying. On the way to class one day, I stopped into a pharmacy for sunscreen and shampoo. The pharmacist has greeted me every time I've passed since then.

In the second week of class, I met Neta, a solo traveler from Israel. We hit it off as soon as we started chatting that first day. Sure, we might have had a nice conversation if I had just seen her once and then never again. But we ended up having lunch together every day after class. She had just come from Vietnam, where I am headed next. She gave me all kinds of intel that prompted me to make major changes to my itinerary. And she’s joining me on a 3-day trip to Cambodia early next month!

I connected with Priya, a solo traveler from India, through a Facebook group for female digital nomads where we learned we’d be in Chiang Mai at the same time. She was diligent about meeting up once we got here. Together, we agreed the nearby jazz club was going to be our spot during our time here. For the two weeks that we overlapped, she was the friend that I could text to say, “Want to get dinner tomorrow?” – the kind of friend you really miss having when you’re traveling on your own, never stopping for more than a few days in each place.

Claire, an Atlanta native, has taught at an international school here in Chiang Mai for about five years. A mutual friend in Atlanta connected us. I thought she might just get together with me once to be nice, but after that first dinner, she mentioned other places she wanted to show me the next time we got together. She’s been the friend that I can text with questions about Chiang Mai. And, because I also taught abroad for a few years after college and, like her, picked up the language in my chosen country with relative ease, we have so much in common and so much to talk about.

Brayden moved into the coliving about a week after I did. I saw him come in, but he didn’t see me. Later that night, I was sitting by myself at a restaurant nearby and he walked in by himself. I said, “Are you Brayden? I’m staying at the same place as you.” A New Yorker, he reminds me of so many of my friends from college. He feels familiar.

These relationships came from three weeks in Chiang Mai. And none came at the cost of seeing new places or experiencing new things. I’m not experiencing less because I’ve decided to stay longer in one place. Sure, if I were to plan a perfectly linear trip, and spend each week in a different place as I propel myself forward across SE Asia, I would see a greater number of new places. But living in one place in Thailand (and then another next month in Vietnam) for several weeks is pretty new, too. When, on a week’s vacation, do you get the opportunity to learn what it might be like to live there? To learn the rhythms and routines of the place?

I see all the main attractions in every place I visit, but I also get to see the monks in orange robes set out with giant silver bowls every morning to collect food donations from local shops; teenage girls in school uniforms race home on motor scooters every afternoon; the old folks at the bodega next door sit down for dinner together at a table on the sidewalk every night.

And I get to see people who are happy to see me.