Becoming Nobody

Essay 1/12 - On flying too close to the sun

This archetype in Tarot represents the life that has run its course, the self left behind at the threshold, the strange mercy of being emptied, and the grief that comes with loss.

At the end of 2020, I was boarding a plane to go somewhere — I can’t recall where — when I received a very unexpected phone call from D, a trickster I had met a couple of years back during an event I had co-designed and produced in Oaxaca, Mexico.

By the time the call ended, my heart was racing. There was something in his invitation, that without knowing exactly why, felt true.

He asked me to attend a virtual presentation of the project and to take some days to decide if I wanted to join him. Before the call even finished, I went to the room where my boyfriend was making music and I told him without hesitation: we are moving to Costa Rica. Between excited and clueless, he followed my enthusiasm. We had recently moved to Tulum with many expectations, but some decisions do not pass through thought, sometimes you just know with a rare clarity.

We packed our lives again and weeks later, we had landed in the jungle of Costa Rica to start life anew.

…

D’s project was called Zunya. It was everything I wanted: community, nature, a kind of natural luxury, a food garden, people building something together. I became a co-creator, designing experiences, shaping gatherings, building community, curating the artist residency.

I lived fifty meters from the beach. I had a pool, a loving partner. I learned to surf. I wore the same three clothes. I woke up to howling monkeys throwing mangos onto my roof.

I was barefoot, tanned, connected, alive.

The team had arrived from different walks of life, and it seemed that we were all dreaming the same dream. For a long year we created at a pace we thought unstoppable. D’s leadership was charming, seducing. He invited us to dream beyond time and space, to have our gaze pointing toward infinite. He made us feel we were redefining the rules of the game.

Our team was set on track to conquer the hospitality world. We were making it happen.

I was feeling on top of the world, intoxicated by ambition.

And then, Icarus.

Too close to the sun, we burned. Oh gosh, did we burn.

The team started to fracture. Fights and disagreements ensued everywhere. Everyone pointing fingers, fault-finding, mistrusting. It became a toxic environment, a slow erosion. There are certain dynamics that bring out parts of me I don’t like — and I had found one. It wasn’t just an external situation, that same charming archetype I was seduced by before, now held up a mirror and what I saw was not poetry. Shadows, ego, attachments, desires, arrogance, pride. It was my close encounter with the Tarot’s devil archetype.

I remember one moment so vividly. I walked into Zunya and saw that the hotel manager had used some of the decorations I used for my events for something I had nothing to do with. By then, everything felt charged, territorial. I told her she had no right to use my things. That she needed to return everything, intact, and ask me first. How could she take credit for her event with a set up I had designed for my own?

As I spoke, something in me stepped aside and watched. I could hear myself, but I didn’t recognize who was speaking. It’s embarrassing to remember. I really disliked who I had become.

I was floating in my pool one day, looking at the palm trees upside down, when I surprised myself with the question: I have everything I dreamed, then why do I feel so miserable?

On paper, my life was perfect. In reality, I was in hell.

It took me months to see this. To accept that perhaps it was the end. That the dream was over or maybe not over but no longer true.

Leaving was an act of necessity. Like stepping out of a room where the air had become too dense to breathe.

…

That last plane out of Costa Rica took off with a quiet sorrow. My heart was broken. I was burnt out. Angry, even. How could something I had dreamed so vividly — something that had felt so aligned — dissolve like that?

This was the beginning of 2022. After leaving Zunya (which no longer exists), I had no direction, no clear place to go. I decided to gift myself a 3-month sabbatical, which turned into a year and a half. I spent the time visiting friends, trying to find a spark of excitement or a full yes on where to go next. My relationship had also ended.

I had a white canvas and no desire to paint.

By mid-2023, I landed in Medellín, still burnt out, still upset, but I thought I was ready for a new beginning. Of course, life, with its dark sense of humor, had other plans. Everything I tried wouldn’t stick. Projects, places to live, ideas, lovers… everything arose and fell without trying too much.

I felt turning in a spiral, but I now see it was going inwards. Every time closer and closer to my inner self, and further and further away from the world. Even the things that once felt meaningful and honorable, like organizing climate retreats around the world with Plum Village and Christiana Figures, felt empty.

At the end of 2024, another trickster lover came into my life to deliver the final blow. I disengaged after that. Any attempts to show up to the world were short-lived. The only constant in my life was my practice, which I went all in on: reading, writing, journaling, meditating, sitting in my garden contemplating the clouds, and making tea.

I left everything and went inward. Santa Elena, my beloved mountain home, swallowed me. The cold colded me. I snuggled in blankets by the fire. I withdrew from romantic relationships. I entered a year of celibacy, intentionally. I disappeared from social channels, every now and then posting something as an attempt to show I was still there but without the performance.

Some mornings, I would sit with my tea until it went cold, with nowhere to go and no one to be. I couldn’t tell if I was resting or disappearing.

I became nothing and nobody.

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This is the first essay of the series The Undoing. For the next three months, I’ll be relating the story of the past six years of my life as an attempt to make sense of the process I’ve been in, and that somehow I feel is coming to an end.

Nothing spectacular, just my honest truth.

Grab some tea, stay a while.
I’m happy you are there.