Next Stop: Mexico City
I get asked often why I moved to Mexico City. There are many reasons, but ultimately it came down to one thing - I felt it.
An innate feeling eluding casual self-awareness and percolating for longer than I was aware.
I’ve been in strategy consulting my entire professional life. That training, from business school to small boutique shops to a large corporate consulting firm, has always taught me to sharpen my analytical skills. Always weighing scenarios and calculating the trajectory to an ideal future state. It’s a skillset that’s served me and clients well, and has helped fuel experiences and impact I’m immensely proud of.
But with most good things, there are trade-offs. This analytical approach often leads to overthinking, which can foster inhibition and result in lower risk tolerance. And, if I’m being totally honest, it becomes a crutch, or safety valve, I use to avoid perceived risk. I have always had a strong aversion to giving myself over (or being vulnerable to) things or processes that I cannot control. That tendency or pattern well precedes my consulting career.
It wasn’t until I started writing fiction that I realized how much this approach was causing me to neglect, undersell, and block my creative impulses. As I began any story, my own internal clash came to the forefront. Intuition needs room to breathe, but with each story my analytical brain would swoop in and quickly override and prevent me from exploring the greater depths of my subconscious and stirring up emotions that lay just below the surface of uninterrupted creativity.
And so it came out in my writing, or rather prevented me from pursuing writing the way it deserved to be pursued – with my full self. Both in terms of putting in the work, but also in terms of putting myself into the work.
Perhaps I chose fiction in part because of its dissociative abilities. I could write emotion-tinged scenes and characters without directly reflecting myself, or so I believed. But regardless of that desire to protect myself, one cannot write good fiction without placing themselves and their emotions out on the page in some form. And the more I wrote, the more I realized that was happening regardless of what I thought I was controlling.
And that’s when I started to loosen the reins. Let whatever was coming up as I explored a setting or character, come forward. Quiet the analytical brain and allow the space for something new to take on its own life.
In that way, writing has helped me listen more acutely to my intuition. It’s also been my first endeavor in life that’s really felt like my own. It made apparent that there was something else inside of me raising its hand to speak. It’s allowed me to access myself in ways that I hadn’t fully been able to in the past, and at my own pace. That last part was critical. I needed that patience so that I could find it for myself.
And so when I zoom out a little bit, I start to ask the inevitable question: if this is true for writing, where else in my life might this conflict arise?
That’s when I started to see Mexico City and my recent move here through a clearer lens.
Sometime in the spring of 2021, I had an inkling of an idea to move to Mexico City so I could write more and get a change of scenery. Something resonated enough that I began to speak it aloud with friends and family. But…I didn’t make the move until February 2022.
Because even as I spoke it aloud and started to formulate some plans, in came the inevitable swoop. The analytical brain joined the fray again. What are the pros and cons of this decision? Costs and benefits? Why now? Why not wait a little longer until things smooth out in the world? Are you running from something?
As usual, it gave me a lot to ponder. None of them unreasonable questions either.
But then I began to ask how this is serving me.
For the first time, I recognized that those questions and that voice rang too loud. I realized it was stamping out something I felt but struggled to explain; asphyxiating another impulse.
So I did the only thing I knew to break free from that internal debate - I bought a one-way ticket. I canceled my storage facility and proceeded instead to sell my stuff or give it away to friends. It’s just stuff after all. Even my analytical brain could appreciate that.
I’m not sure where this leads me, and I think that’s the point. Are these things intertwined - the writing, Mexico City, listening to my intuition? I don’t know. I just know that they feel like they are converging in some way that I need to listen to. Mexico City is a tipping point.
