Bali was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the sweetest fairytale I have ever lived, and also the sharpest awakening.

I came in my thirties, worn out and brittle, and the island let me unclench. It slowed me down. It let me breathe again. I drank kopi to the sound of impossibly green rice fields swaying in the distance. I scribbled clumsy poetry, walked barefoot with frangipani in my hair. I loved all the wellness practices Bali had to offer – the rewilding, the womb connection, the breathing and the authentic relating classes. I began to speak in that language of serendipity, synchronicity and manifestation. Everything Bali offered arrived like long-awaited rain on cracked earth, and I drank it all in, thirsty as I was. 

When the sweetness turned, I felt almost betrayed. Perhaps it sounds silly, but I was so shocked when the cracks started to show. I began to see the trash scattered in streams, grew tired of the food that once tasted like revelation. I started to notice the weight of the tourist economy, heavy on Bali’s shoulders. I felt a loneliness that no amount of sunshine could cure. People came and settled, but most were gone within a few years. The ones who had stayed longer always warned me: you can’t last here without leaving every few months. To survive, you must step away, reset your nerves, and let perspective return. Yet I still don’t quite understand how a place that once cradled every cell in my body and made me exhale so deeply could later become a source of irritation, each rooster’s call and scooter’s buzz grating against the skin.

What I miss is silence. And efficiency. I miss the deep quiet of forests. Miss my son being able to run free through fields. Here he is tied to the bike, fenced in, and I cannot help but wonder, how is this different from the American suburbia I so proudly escaped? 

When I voice this ache, some call me entitled. That I treat Bali like a spa, rather than home. And I see why. Indeed, I had the privilege to come here; I, theoretically, can scramble for a new place to live. Maybe my longing for real purity is not as innocent as it seems; perhaps it is a romantic fantasy that ignores the complexity of human presence, the roads, the hotels, the noise that comes with all of us. 

And yet the ache remains, whether or not it is justified.

Some days I wish I could say I took the lesson, packed my bags, and turned the page, but life is rarely that neat. My son’s school is here. I don’t have another home or money to relocate. And my Balinese husband has no desire to start over elsewhere. So I stay. I have moments where I regret coming altogether, yet “life after Bali” doesn’t mean living somewhere else – it means living here, after the honeymoon phase is over in this ordinary, complicated, and unvarnishe world.

There is grief in this, and also a sobering clarity: paradise is fleeting, it’s a moment to be grateful for. Staying long after the miracle became ordinary has forced me to find ground that doesn’t depend on the island or anyone else to enchant me. Growth, I see now, lives in tension and complexity; it asks me to notice my expectations, to grow roots in myself, so shifting landscapes don’t uproot me. Life after Bali is this—staying when the dream has ended, finding joy inside the ache, watching my son root himself in soil I resist, carrying gratitude and bitterness together. And in that tension, I soften, a little more Balinese in my capacity to hold dualities, still bowing to life as it is.