I can I know

Coming Home:

I got back to Ubud today after a week away in Canggu, which is just about an hour and twenty minutes by car. I love Canggu. The beaches, the food, time spent with my friend there. And it’s Bali, so for me, what’s not to love?

But today, I came back home to Ubud.

There is something special about Ubud, and there is something special about coming home.

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I arrived in Bali for the very first time on January 12, 2023, after having spent four months in Thailand between Chiang Mai, Pai, and Koh Samui. I was excited, scared, hopeful, unsure. And I was 10,000 miles away from anywhere I had previously called home.

The plan, or as much of it as I was able to process at the time, was to stay for 30 days, as my visa on arrival allowed, and then “take it from there”. Two weeks in, and I knew there was literally nowhere else I wanted to be. It was time to take it.

I arranged for a visa extension that allowed me to remain in Indonesia for an additional 30 days, and then flew out of the country and back in to activate my new six-month visa.

It was on that late-night drive from Ngurah Rai International Airport back to my second-story room in a little Balinese bungalow in Ubud, as the taxi pulled onto my now familiar street, that I first had the absolutely beautiful and breath-catching feeling of coming home.

There was joy, happiness, peace, calm. It felt familiar. Comforting. Good to be back.

I’d never felt any of these things when returning home before.

As a child, I remember leaving our apartment in Brooklyn to spend weekends or holidays at my grandparents’ house. I loved going. I hated coming back. I always cried when it was nearing time to pack up and go home. Not a loud or disruptive crying, not a crying to get something. Just the kind of crying where the complete sadness bubbled up inside me and I couldn’t help the tears while I did my best to try and hide them from my family as I packed up my stuff. I did not want to go home.

As an older teenager, I absolutely loved my summers working in an overnight camp with my friends in Upstate New York. Speaking for myself, I was a bit emotionally disturbed at the time, and we all certainly got into our fair share of interesting situations together. But we had the best time in the world. It was like a little vacation from everything real-life that was waiting for me back in Brooklyn. When summer was nearly over, the dread would set in. I did not want to go home.

Home for me was not a place I wished for.

There was sadness, anxiety, panic. It was familiar. Distressing. It hurt to come back.

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When I left New York two years ago, I was leaving behind everything familiar. In the technical sense of the word, I was leaving home.

And when I arrived in Bali four months later, nothing was familiar.

But slowly, it became.

Slowly, Bali became a place I will always want to come back to. A place of joy and calm and growth and change.

And Ubud became a place of familiarity, in all of the best of ways.

When I re-entered Bali a second time two months after the first, I was coming home. And every single time since, whether I’ve left Ubud for a day or a week, or left Bali entirely for an eight month visit to the US, when I return, the minute I feel the Ubud air hit my face and my chest and my soul, my heart expands just the tiniest bit.

I’ve found my home.

It’s good to be back.