I lived in a bikini for two months. What now?

Island life experiment is over: time to make a decision

I’ve arrived at the end of an unfinished road. Two months ago, I left my life in London and I made my way to the opposite side of the globe — small tropical island in the Philippines called Siargao. Having fallen out of love with life in the big city, I wanted to know what living in a bikini would feel like. Was it for me? I’m now back in Europe, where I returned to attend my cousin’s wedding, to see my family and friends and to think. Think about everything. Do I want to live in the coconut jungle or is it too much of a mindfuck for someone like me — a girl raised in urban environment? There’s certainly a lot of stuff that left me perplexed in the Philippines. That’s for sure. But how does coping with that perplexity compare to the anxiety I feel when I envision returning to London? The decision needs to be made one way or another. I lived in a bikini for two months. What now?

I’m not gonna hit around the bush too much — I decided to return to Siargao. I’ll be coming back later this month. It wasn’t a clear cut but it also kind of was. I went through a lot of transformation between Heathrow airport and the reef breaks I surfed in Siargao. This transformation left a permanent mark on my life. I hear you say “No one turns their entire life around in only two months”; however, I do believe that one attracts (and finds!) what one seeks. I made a deliberate choice of going somewhere because I felt, that it was exactly what I needed. I was looking for a specific experience and I found it. That short new life pilot taught me more than a year of university studies. Even though I am where I was hoping to be, a great deal of my current life is far outside of my initial expectations. And that’s exactly it. Getting better at navigating my own expectations might have as well been my first lesson. I can assure you that I didn’t learn it the way you’d expect me to

Landing in paradise with a list of expectations

They say travelling allows us to both discover new destinations and open up new paths inside ourselves. Boy, did I expect a lot of these discoveries and openings to occur! Whoever says they don’t have any expectations they’re lying. You always expect at least something to happen. So did I. I was going to test a whole new way of living in a place that was radically different from anywhere I lived before. OMG, of course I really wanted to validate this experiment despite promising myself to take things easy at the beginning. Here’s what my absolutely minimum, stripped down expectations looked like.

1) being able to surf, practice yoga and do outdoor activities every day
2) test viability of working remotely
3) survive

(Following are all of my additional expectations which, I wanted believe, were nice to have’s in the first two months, but I secretly really wanted them fulfil asap, too.)

4) begin working remotely as a freelancer
5) start setting up a business
6) find friends
7) find a place to live
8) buy a surfboard
9) buy a motorbike
10) keep writing my diary/blog

Into the reality

Moving to a place that either works as a home for local islanders or as a fun tourist destination for surfers and expecting to live there as a hip digital nomad can turn into a bit of a clusterfuck. You come with your cute little intentions to quickly discover that half of them are incompatible with resources available to you and that the other half is going to take you a good while to execute. Now, what do you do? You fight or you let go. I decided to do both. I fought patiently and let go gracefully.

The ultimate goal of my journey was changing my lifestyle. In London I was frustrated with how little time and place I had to do fun, outdoor stuff and how much effort it took. From day one in Siargao, I practiced yoga, went surfing, SUPed, rowed or swam, and sticked to it every day. That was great! First success achieved. Tick. At the end of the day, this was why I traveled those crazy 40-something hours to Siargao hence it shouldn’t be such a big deal. Still, I gave myself a pat on the back for taking advantage of the opportunity I created for myself. Getting up at 5am with roosters calling your name only to get wiped out does require some commitment.

Here comes the tricky part. Once I had my outdoor activities ticked off the list every day, I thought that I could use the rest of my time to do some work. However, as it turned out I overlooked some of Siargao’s reality. Bizzarely, that prevented me from realising my worklife endeavours in the way I’d expect them to happen in London. Here are the main obstacles. First of all, it takes way more time to get food in Siargao because the food ripens and goes off faster (it’s hot and the there are rarely any preservatives used), plus service in restaurants is slower. I’d go shopping every day for fresh food and cook it, which is a lovely thing to do but it takes time. So that’s kind of an extra task to think about and deal with on a daily. Next, I knew that the internet wasn’t great. So, especially in the first month, I’d be going around holiday resorts testing their internet speed while trying to get some stuff done. It’s not just the internet speed though. The connection is unstable and I often found myself spending up to one hour trying to buy load (top-up credit) for my pocket wifi, getting it work and finding the right spot for it on the coast, where it had the highest speed. For this I was rewarded with a maximum of 20Mbps download speed. Another thing that’s needless to point out is the ubiquitous heat. Siesta wasn’t invented because people in hot countries are lazy but because working in heat hurts. It slows you down, you’re likely to get headaches, it’s harder to focus and you need to regularly cool your body down by drinking lots of liquids or taking dips in the water. Being utterly unused to working in the heat and humid environment, I went with what my body was telling me. Sometimes, I’d easily sit on a beach under a palm tree typing away or I’d spend a few hours going around the island surveying lands for business whilst other times I just felt like staying inside an airconned room drinking cold water. Last, but not an insignificant disruption to work were parties. Naturally, a place that serves as a holiday destination likes to ensure that there’s tons of fun stuff on cards each night. If you haven’t realised that you lived in a holiday destination, I can bet you feel it now. Not that there weren’t parties in London but having beach parties two minutes away from your house that only require you to turn up in flip flops and sell cheap beer present themselves with way lower barriers to entry than clubbing in London does. What do my productive evening sessions do now? Well, they drink beer on the beach while contemplating whether the bonfire or the full moon light is more magical. I’m pretty much screwed.

Alright, I’m screwed. What now?

Because I’m a hopeless idealist I decided that I was gonna see those hurdles as opportunities. I convinced myself that the shit I was in wasn’t as deep as I initially thought it was. Cheesy? I know. But when you’re walking an unbeaten path you need to play with your mind a lot to keep your determination on point. I realised how ignorant it was from me to walk into a sanctuary and expect it to accommodate to my dirty western soul. I eased my pace and and I thought “Sod it if I don’t get my first freelancing job this week or even this month. But wait, do I actually want to be freelancing at all right now?” I then went one level up and asked “What am I trying to solve in the following months”? I wanted to change my lifestyle, slow down and find a way to sustain myself. That sounded a lot more sensible and less pressurising. Suddenly, the list of priorities did not matter so much.

The parties and casual afternoon coffees or drinks served as places to connect with people, to make friends, to find collaboration opportunities and to find help when I needed it. As soon as I started treating it this way it worked. Yoga and surfing opened up new dimensions of physical practice for me but they also helped me stretch my mental strength. I understood how important it was for me to keep the body-mind-spirit balance. This was a dealbreaker because as a largely rational person I tend to overthink everything. Even love. I quickly understood that my number one lesson was to allow more heart energy and more intuition to come into play. Yoga helped me a lot with this — through movement and meditation. I then used surfing as a practice area for patience. Not only I raised my yoga and surfing games but I converted that energy and learning into building new mental strength.

Navigating uncertainty

I still don’t have answers to many questions. There’s an enormous amount of uncertainty in my near future. However, the feeling that I’m understanding myself better, I mean really taking time to listen to myself and acting on all of it, that’s strangely comforting. Life isn’t a race to some enlightened finish line as well as it’s not about ticking off the ‘to do’ list. It’s great (and important!) setting objectives for ourselves. However, failing to achieve them or achieving them partially, as long as we’re learning and keeping our eyes, minds and hearts open to the unforeseen is a definition of success for sure. At least, for me it is.

This article originally appeared on my blog intothereality.com.