Are You Tired of Being Tired Yet?

On escaping the life everyone expected me to live - White Woman in the Jungle Episode 1

I need to ask you something.

Are you tired yet? Not regular tired - the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. The kind that lives in your bones. The kind where you fantasize about some future day when you'll finally have met all your obligations, finished all the performing, and earned the right to just be.

I believed in that day for decades. I was waiting for it when I realized it was never coming.

I was 60 years old. I had a PhD, two postdocs, three clinical practices, and a horse ranch I'd restored with my own hands. I'd raised four kids as a single mother. I'd survived breast cancer. I was dragging myself through 60-hour weeks because I had no retirement fund - my retirement funds were walking around with college degrees.

And what had once been my passion had become my prison.

I didn't want to talk to one more patient. But without the income, I couldn't survive. So I stayed shackled to a life that was sucking my soul dry. That's probably why I was drinking before noon. Why I spent money I didn't have on spas and restaurants and travel - anything to escape. But the escape kept feeding the problem.

Then came the thought that broke me: I'm going to have to work like I did when I was 40 until the day I actually drop dead.

And I knew I couldn't do it.

So I made a decision that everyone thought was crazy.

My friends stepped back. My family thought I was having a midlife crisis, running away like a child, slightly delusional. Or just pathetic - a woman who couldn't hack life anymore.

It felt like those nightmares where you're in danger and need to scream, but no sound comes out. It felt like realizing that no one close to me was actually close enough to see me. Invisible in plain sight. It felt like understanding that if I weren't performing for them, I was dismissible.

A weird mix of abandonment and solitude.

But I did it anyway.

I sold the ranch. Gave away most of my belongings. Sold the status symbols. Loaded three Dobermans, a purse dog, and two cats onto a private jet - because you can't fly commercial with that crew - and I flew to Panama.

I'd only left the country twice in my life - a conference in Belgium six months earlier, and a ten-day visit to scout this place. My passport had sat unused for 30 years. And now I was moving here. Alone. At 60.

A language I didn't speak. I hate heat. I hate humidity. I had no real plan.

But I purposely picked a house that was secluded, surrounded by acres and acres of jungle. I was fed up with people. I wanted solitude - nobody looking at me, nobody contacting me, nobody expecting me to perform.

There are no street addresses in the Panamanian countryside. If you don't know how to get to my place, you can't find me.

I actually liked that thought. I could disappear.

And I did.

But what I knew so well was also what was killing me. And I think maybe it's like what a baby would feel right before birth, if it had thoughts - leaving a place that grounded you but can't sustain you anymore, going through something terrifying and painful because it's the only way to live.

That was almost two years ago.

Now I wake up on a hilltop in the jungle, a thousand feet above the Pacific, and I'm just... free.

I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. If I want to go to the beach, I can. If I want to lie in bed and watch TV, I can. I can walk the dogs, work in the yard, write a book, see the few patients I choose to work with.

Most of all, I can take the time to respect myself. To love myself like no one ever has. To care for myself like no one else ever has.

There is freedom here, on every level, to learn how to be rather than to do.

I'm writing a book about this. It's called White Woman in the Jungle - a title my daughter gave me as a joke when I used to complain about the bugs and the rain and the men who wouldn't listen to a gringa.

But it's not really about Panama. It's about what happens when you finally escape the life everyone expected you to live - and have to figure out who you actually are without the chains.

If you've ever wondered whether there's another chapter waiting for you, follow along.

I'll tell you what I'm learning.