Aligned & Awake: The Women I Became Along the Way
What happens when your life collapses and you take it on the road — city by city, version by version.
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
I have become different women in different cities.
Not in an Eat, Pray, Love way. Nobody handed me enlightenment in linen trousers while I journaled beside a waterfall, looking moisturized and spiritually together.
Most of it looked considerably less glamorous: crying alone in rooms with questionable lighting, dragging a suitcase over cobblestones like a Victorian ghost, Googling eSIM cards while emotionally unravelling, trying to heal and also find decent WiFi.
Still, certain cities pulled certain versions of me to the surface.
And somewhere over the last twenty-two months, while my life was falling apart and rebuilding itself in strange corners of the world, I realized the woman I became in one place was never the same woman I became somewhere else.
Miraflores, Lima was where the grieving woman arrived.
That version of me walked along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean with a heartbreak so heavy it felt stitched directly under my ribs. The marriage was over. The old life was gone. The paperwork had started. The future looked like static.
I spent a lot of time alone there, staring dramatically out windows like I was auditioning for an Irish independent film called Woman Processing Near Ocean.
And that woman, shattered as she was, still chose somewhere beautiful to begin.
There’s strength in that, even when you’re running on fumes and sheer Irish stubbornness.
Thailand took me all the way down.
I got so sick there that my body essentially called an emergency meeting and decided we would now be communicating exclusively through exhaustion, fever, and what I can only describe as a full system shutdown. Very spiritual. There’s nothing quite like attempting a profound awakening while simultaneously wondering if your stomach lining is dissolving.
Weeks of staring at the ceiling questioning the entire architecture of my existence alone.
Rock bottom gets romanticized sometimes; people talk about it like it’s a breakthrough moment with good lighting and a cinematic soundtrack. Rock bottom is ugly crying in humidity so intense your grief develops condensation.
But something happened there. I stopped performing strength and finally allowed myself to fully fall apart.
The woman who came out of Thailand was harder to rattle than the one who arrived.
Madeira was where colour returned.
Madeira grabbed me gently by the shoulders and said, enough now, pet. Put on something sparkly and go outside.
So I did. I danced at Carnival beneath confetti-filled skies with strangers who felt like old friends. I hiked cliffs that looked photoshopped by God himself. I watched sunsets from my room that made me question whether the universe was trying to flirt with me.
And the rainbows. Jesus Christ, the rainbows. Everywhere. Like the island was trying to remind me that magic still existed and hope wasn’t as far away as it had felt.
It genuinely felt like my life had switched from psychological thriller to hopeful indie film. Madeira held the version of me learning how to play again.
Ireland was nostalgia wrapped in solitude.
I arrived after selling the house, putting my life into storage, signing divorce papers, and feeling like someone had picked me up by the ankles and shaken me like loose change.
And yet Ireland felt like coming home to something essential. It was my birthday while I was there. There’s something deeply humbling about wandering around your home country in the middle of reinvention, realizing you don’t know your arse from your elbow anymore.
Ireland has this way of holding all your versions at once: the little girl, the woman before heartbreak, the woman standing in the rubble of what came after. It remembers you even while you’re changing.
France was where the writer emerged.
Bordeaux. Normandy. Nachamps. A château that felt like it had been waiting for someone to arrive and write in it. A farmhouse over a hundred years old, where the walls held more history than I could properly absorb. Cafés where I sat pretending to be mysterious when, really, I was aggressively eavesdropping on nearby conversations and ordering pastries with the commitment of a woman rebuilding her identity through butter.
France reminded me I was still capable of making something beautiful from the mess.
Very annoying news for my inner critic, honestly.
Canada became the emotional Costco of the journey.
I’d return to regroup. Catch up on life admin. Hug friends. Spend time with family. Buy practical footwear and protein powder like some deeply spiritual raccoon preparing for migration season.
Canada was where I rested. Where things I’d been carrying finally got a chance to settle somewhere quiet long enough to be looked at properly.
London.
The city that puts a trench coat on your trauma and tells it to network.
Every time I land there, something switches back on. I suddenly believe I should probably write three books, host intimate literary salons, and become the kind of woman who says things like, “I have a guy for that."
London feels like possibility. And after everything that happened, possibility is no small thing.
People assume all this travel healed me.
It didn’t work like that. Travel isn’t a magical personality transplant. You still bring your grief with you; it follows you through airports and checkout lines and tiny apartments with decorative cushions nobody actually wants to sit on.
What travel did was give different versions of me room to emerge. Some cities introduced me to women inside myself I hadn’t met yet. And it’s still doing that. Every new place still asks something of me I didn’t know I had to give. I’m still mid-sentence, really.
And now, nearly two years after my life fell apart, I’m excited again.
Financial spreadsheets continue to humble me spiritually. But underneath all of it, there’s movement again. A current running through things that wasn’t there before.
Two years ago, my world collapsed.
Now I’m sitting here meeting a version of myself I actually can’t wait to know.
Tell me…
Has a city changed you, or shown you a version of yourself you didn't expect?
Lovely.