The Friday unwind 008: Notes from an introvert on tending to yourself abroad

Location: my top three introvert destinations so far

Fridays are for unwinding. Inward journeys, outward wanderings, departing flights to nowhere but good memories — all are welcome here. Take all the space you need. In this series, unwind and unravel with me into a daydream, into a place that feels like a Friday spent elsewhere.

---

Welcome to Life Is In Love With Me if you’re new. If you’re a regular recipient of this newsletter sweetness, welcome back! 🌹🥭🌹🥭🌹🥭

Let’s tea prep — Firstly, sending love to wherever you are. This newsletter relentlessly embraces love, light, ease and other such shaped things and yet we live in a world where things (corporations, governments, greed, news cycles) threaten or interrupt that. I know that you will still stand in love (solidarity, hope, intuition) with me while confronting this and being honest about how your heart feels. I’m thankful for that.

This week I feel as though a lot of people in my community have been in need of support, prayer or just some respite. If that is also you I am sending it your way. A friend of mine shared this link recently. It is an offering of free therapy sessions for those with family ties to Palestine, Congo or Sudan. There is also this BIPOC Therapy fund for free mental health support for those similarly affected by ‘the genocides in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia’. There is a waitlist until April 2024 with this one. Please share and take from these if they will serve you or your community.

As a secondary offering, I want to give you this song and mantra:

Please let me feel/ Inner Peace/ From my center at the center of me - Beautiful Chorus

However you receive this, I hope you know that this space is a community commitment to love. You are in good company. So come, remind yourself of ease and carry it with you beyond this collective loving space.

---

I’d like to thank you for the recent love and comments on the last Friday unwind on wealth, ease, and mosquito bites. It’s been a delight to see how we all daydream in similar hues. Additional thanks for the love and excitement about the updates and my changes with subscriptions. I mentioned that paid readers will now receive a gift - a resource of 111 daily affirmations on Love - and a personal backstory that will only live in their inboxes. I’m sharing my two newest paid readers and phenomenal writers whose works I admire:

Robert

and

Ayanna Nicole

. Thank you both, I value you deeply. I invite you to get into their work below:

creating pathways to rest

in preparation for a new life

Also thankful for

Victoria

’s post (another incredible writer I’m excited to discover) where she references my About page and continues the cycle of giving herself and readers permission to exchange in new ways for her newsletter. I invite you to go read, support and help create space for rest in this writer's life.

Speaking of newness, last week I shared a song to match the vibe of the letter. I want to do the same thing this week to set the mood. Today I’m writing to you about being an introvert, a socialite & a lone wolf, a woman who is a lonely boy (circa Gossip Girl season 1 and 2) and who likes it! This is the mood we’re going for:

Now for today’s letter.

Enjoy x

---

I’ll open this letter with a story. It’s March and I had just journeyed on from Costa Rica’s Caribbean portal that is Puerto Viejo on a shuttle bus and a 45-minute boat across to Bocas del Toro, a collection of islands in Panama. After getting a feel of the islands for a week or so, I decided that what I truly wanted was to be away, since the real beauty of this place is the lush unbound land. By divine timing I stumble across a cute cafe and after eyeballing everything, notice it is attached to an unassuming guest house. How perfect would it be if they had availability for my dates? I thought manifested. I’d wake up by the ocean and come down for dark chocolate treats and oaty hot drinks everyday.

I inquire and book the next 5 days as a personal retreat. Since I don’t (can’t xx) drive and at the time wasn’t confident enough to rent a bike to cycle along the winding paths, I decided to buy everything I would need so I didn’t have to go to the town centre during my proclaimed retreat. I took a taxi to the town, searched the aisles for my favourite fruits, coconut oil and plantain chips, gathered my many shopping bags and settled into my temporary home.

The guest house was on the beach, had green green gardens, strong enough WiFi to work, a deck for my yoga sessions and a hammock for my rest breaks, and was surrounded by a handful of other beach houses, all quiet and lined with old and newly planted coconut trees. I barely left the compound for those 5 days. I was already logged out of social media and so I left my mat rolled out on the ground to dip into sessions at any given point in the day. I slept to the sound of waves gently crashing.

It was the hardest I’ve ever introverted in my entire life.

In this language, an introvert is defined as someone who is positioned on the introverted side of the introversion-extraversion spectrum. Introverted individuals are typically inward, preferring to be charged from their own energies rather than from external sources. One way to distinguish an introvert is to notice how comfortable they are in their aloneness and in their being distant without being detached or compromising peace. Researcher Arnold Henjum, Ph.D held a study separating introverts into Type A and Type B. In this study, he outlines Type A introverts as self-sufficient and noticeably confident. In comparison, Type B introverts appear shy, reserved, and withdrawn.

By this definition, I’d say that I am a Type A introvert but am happy to withdraw. When I tell people that I’m an introvert they typically say “How? You travel the world alone and are constantly meeting new people, constantly not in your ‘own’ space”. This is interesting to me because I am always at home. I call myself home. I have always seen travel as away to go deeper into the home, finding new rooms and opening the windows wide. Despite being an introvert, I am always eager to speak to new people and attracting, yes, some magical experiences, but mostly they are quiet things. Human miracles. Mostly I am invited in, or based on my intuition, invite people in so I can live deeper, not necessarily louder. I come alive with new information and new exchanges with people who show me their world and all of its hidden, non-touristic beauty. I can traipse around after hours with a select group of new friends and I can be unavailable to the world while I float alone in someone’s ocean. It makes me question if ever we override extroversion or introversion for the sake of what we love.

In Panama, I actually opted out of travelling to Panama City because I did not want to unravel into the bustle of cross-country travel. I didn’t want to learn a new city and remember how to be in this new space. I wanted to stay and be slow on the islands rather than be in the thick of one of the most promising cities in Latin America (one that has been on my list for a while), a city where I even had a friend ready to welcome me. I was just deep in my introvert and wanted myself, undivided. I might’ve hesitated once but I was pretty clear on not wanting to share space or to adjust to the energies of a new place.

I’m often happy to sit out the wildly exciting things if it seems logical by my own internal mathematics to retreat. I prefer this. Maybe this is because I have had to perform extrovertedness. Do you know what I mean? I have had to surrender who I am at my core in order to survive, working extroverted jobs (social media manager/full-time TEFL teacher/those 5 trying months in recruitment) or I have been surrounded by those who praise and cherish extroverted individuals more than they do introverted ones. There is a need for us introverts to reverse that behaviour and unlearn it. To go anywhere in the world and put our comfort above how it may be perceived, in love and respect. How else can we better tend to ourselves than by this, this guiltless appetite for listening to our selves?

And so to the sweet introvert friends who have found this, I want to share my love language for solitary bliss. I share it and feel that you probably already know. Still, just like sometimes you’re in a park and feel an unignorable pull to kick off your shoes and place soles on the Earth, or you pass a shop and see some food or some thing from your childhood and you encounter a nostalgia that you must immediately engage with, this is that same thing. Sometimes your soul remembers its default and we as introverts should walk it over there.

Panamanian bliss by introverted rankings

What I do — I practice savouring my elation. I treat her as a star girl, a prize. What excites me? I will do only that then. I won’t try to do all the other things. I’ll plan another trip to stroll the streets of Casco Viejo in Panama City at my own pace. This is also called conserving energy, or self-preservation maybe. I like ‘savouring elation’ because it reminds me that as an introvert, I am allowed to enjoy fun things. I’m not always quietly away, politely declining the invitation. Sometimes I am up all night giddy about what fun I have planned for my solo self or my free afternoon with my friend whose energy I enjoy. I wake up content in all the noticings of yesterday that inspire the noticings of today. What will I listen to? What will I choose to say?

The pleasure of giving myself my time exactly how I want it is what I wish to protect most about my life as an introvert, at ‘home’ or away.

Three places I have loved being an introvert

1. Panama, Bocas del Toro: As told, Panama’s island landscape truly served me as a great place to be an introvert. Not only is the land itself plentiful, offering endless beach options, corners to shade and hide under, wilderness, paths to be at ease in your own lane, but the people gave heavy ‘mind your business and I’ll mind mine’ energy. I appreciated it. The people I connected with were genuinely interested in offering thought or they left me to my own devices. I also have to note that I spent most of my time on Isla Colón, the main island in the archipelagos, but visiting Isla Bastimentos, where most African descent people lived and stayed, offered me restoration and space to do my own thing on treks, isolated beaches that sprang from rainforests, restaurants with the best fried fish etc. In some ways, I was surprised that a land this beautiful didn’t prompt loneliness in me. I really didn’t mind being alone despite how beautiful it would’ve been to share the experience. It could’ve been the headspace I was in though.

2. Mexico, Chiapas: The Southern, densely lush state of Chiapas - mostly referring to my time living in San Cristóbal de las Casas and Palenque - nurtured my inner introvert in ways that felt so healing. Palenque, being a site for ancient Maya temples and San Cris being an international hub for green-fingered backpackers and those who feel the pull of the mountains, offered me permission to indulge in my introvert. I went to the mountains alone to eat lunch, I spent my first Christmas away from family cooking for friends and I made friends with people who respected sacred time alone. I made a stop in Palenque and felt stilled by the humility of the temples and the many who had existed, lived, worshipped their lives away here. I learned from friends how to not take offence or be frightened to cancel plans because of a need to sit with only yourself. I lived alone and left with so many new life lessons and friends. I shifted a lot of my identity here.

3. Hungary, Budapest: My first ever time solo travelling was 48 hours in Budapest. It was freezing cold and the snow in January was lethal but mostly settled on the ground. I add Budapest to the list because this was the genesis of courage for me. Roaming around a country where I definitely didn’t speak Hungarian but managed to receive speckled moments of warmth made me confident to keep travelling where I was curious, where the name alone left me wondering. Like most European cities, there is enough to do and enough solitude to do it in; you can be in the thick of the heavily draped and regal New York Café and toast yourself for your bravery and go unnoticed. Plus, being a woman alone in Europe is not cause for stares/confusion as I have found in Latin America so far. Budapest was ridiculously fun too. I enjoyed a night boat tour on the Danube river, the Szechenyi baths, got lost in the labyrinth of rooms at the Szimpla Kert ruin bar, and their metro system is perfect for romanticising life. Perfect.

Questions

1. Are you more introverted, extroverted or ambivert-leaning? How do you tend to your wellness within these definitions?

2. How often do you feel that you are an introvert living in an extroverted world? How often do you find yourself in introvert-friendly spaces? Why, where?

   Feel free to share your wonderful thoughts in the comment section.

Journal Prompts

1. Write a letter to your future self, giving thanks for your self-listening and self-trusting.

2. In what ways have you had to perform to survive? How can you nurture yourself today and guiltlessly exist?

---

Thank you, so much, for being here.

Below I share some more writings that I hope you will enjoy.

An Origin Story: Food Poisoning In Mexico Turned Me Nomadic

The Friday unwind 006: A Final Pep Talk Before My Year Of Audacity

A story about quitting my job to write

Musings on Black nomadism (pt 1)

The Friday unwind 004: When there is nothing to become

Love,

Amara Amaryah