notes on place, belonging, and panic attacks
APR 30, 2026
Whenever they get a chance, the mosquitoes swarm, attacking my exposed legs. In the morning I slip out of the air-conditioning in a t-shirt and panties, into the outdoor kitchen to make a matcha or cacao, braving the hungry creatures of the tropics. I stand there in the half-dark, waiting for the water to boil, watching the garden breathe.
It is raining. When the monsoon season ended, weeks of sunshine followed, and I became complacent about sunny days. People think monsoon season means constant rain and dry weather means none, but neither is true. The downpours are sudden and daily during the monsoon, but enough gaps exist to go about everyday life. Now, in the dry season, sunshine is steadier, but the thunderstorms roll in every few days and cover everything in a moist drizzle that smells like soil and something green and alive.
For the last week, it has rained every day.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
I write about the weather because it influences place. I think about place a lot. I think about it the way other people think about money or love, with a low-grade obsession, a need to understand something that keeps slipping out of reach. And when I think about place, I also think about belonging, and home, and whether those two things are the same.
Bali has been home for two months now. A place that acts as a liminal hinge for me. A place that holds multiple futures in suspension.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
The last time I was in Bali I was in a relationship with a man I loved completely. We had been together for three years by then, the kind of shared life mostly on the road that compresses time and manufactures intimacy, makes you believe you know someone because you have navigated bus stations and food poisoning and beautiful sunsets together. I remember the particular quality of the light. The way the rice paddies held the dusk. I remember being in a restaurant with cheap plastic chairs and somewhere in that evening a decision getting made, the way decisions sometimes happen.
We moved to Canada. He had grown up there, in a small town a few hours east of Vancouver, in the beautiful province of British Columbia, where the winters are brutal and the summers short-lived and often filled with smoke from the wildfires. I believed I could make any place work. I had already lived in so many places by then — Salzburg, Florence, Cairns, Barcelona, London, Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, LA, Chiang Mai, Byron Bay, Nelson — and I had found the magic and the beauty of any place so easily. I believed this was a skill I possessed. A kind of portable contentment.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Within weeks of arriving in Canada, I started waking at night with unexplainable panic attacks. I would cry and shake, and my man would patiently hold me until they subsided and we fell back to sleep. I dismissed it. Blamed the transition, the cold, the adjustment. I had the optimistic perspective that all it takes is time and grunt and magical thinking.
Then came headaches. Ever present. Then the exhaustion that was eventually diagnosed as adrenal fatigue. I would spontaneously begin to cry. Unloading the dishwasher. Driving to yoga. Picking flowers in the garden. Ordinary, beautiful moments coloured by what felt like a psychic rejection happening inside my body.
I noted that every time I left this place — a trip to Vancouver, a weekend away, anything — every physical ailment disappeared. And as soon as I returned, they came back with full force.
I gave that place everything in my being for thirteen months.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
I left the place and the relationship and moved to Mexico to counteract the cold and grey. In Mexico I healed, blossomed, thrived. I didn’t fully understand why. I still don’t, entirely. But I knew it in my body the moment I arrived, that particular sensation of a place receiving you, of the air fitting your skin like it was made for it.
In hindsight, the relationship was also not for me. I loved this man deeply, but I was blind to all the ways I twisted and contorted myself to fit what he wanted, completely abandoning myself in the process. In hindsight I wonder: how much of the rejection was the place, and how much of it was my soul saying, quietly and then louder and then in full-body revolt — no. Not this.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Since Canada and then Mexico, I have lived in more places than I can list without boring you. The UK, which I have used as a base for most of my adult life because it is easy — I moved there at nineteen, it is the only place I have ever done any official paperwork, paid tax — despite the endless cold and wet and the culture’s general cheerful pessimism. The UK is a neutral place for me. Neutral places make me soft and lazy and bored. I hold an extra two or three kilograms there, some kind of padding I don’t fully understand, as though my body is insulating itself against something. I don’t thrive there. But I feel safe there, like some comforting ancestral memory knows this island as home.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Mid-pandemic I drove through France and Spain with my cat to Mallorca, which I had heard many nice things about. Mallorca was the second lesson that not every place is for everyone.
Once we got off the ferry and I settled into the hotel I had booked for three weeks while apartment hunting, I walked outside and let the air touch my skin and looked at the hibiscus grazing the sidewalk and felt… nothing. I could cognitively see that I was surrounded by beauty. But instead of feeling moved, all I felt was anxiety.
It was a weird time in the world, we all had a myriad of reasons to feel anxious, a cross-continental trip during a pandemic is no small feat, so I dismissed the feeling and focused on the practical efforts of making a new place home.
I was lucky. I quickly found a beautiful apartment with Mediterranean views at a great price. I made friends. I was generously invited into new circles. On paper everything was perfect.
But inside myself, a war was waging.
No part of my body wanted to be here. Despite the beauty, the perfection, the luck, the friendships, the Mediterranean, the safety, the abundance and goodness. My body could not find peace. I started getting sciatic pains pulsing through my back so debilitating that sometimes I couldn’t move.
No amount of practitioners or exercises or adjusted belief systems improved it. There was an ever-present purring anxiety that made every moment and interaction feel tense and precarious, and I could find no logical reason for it. The beauty was right there. Everything was perfect and I was so lucky: the friendships, the Mediterranean, the abundance and goodness. My body could not find peace.
Again, relief arrived the moment I left the island. Every time. In disbelief I couldn’t accept that this was true. That a place could have such a total, encompassing negative impact on me. That no amount of trying could alter it.
Almost two years later, defeated, I left.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
After that I tried Ericeria in Portugal = neutral. New York City = love, love, love (but couldn’t stay for logistical reasons). Mallorca again = same as before. Paris = neutral. India = for healing. And now, by absolute chance, Bali.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
I had a terrible time in Canada and remember being in Bali, where I decided to move there as a sliding doors moment, where every decision I made contained a multitude of futures. Now, as if time has folded in on itself, I am back a decade later.
Bali is unrecognisable and so am I.
I consult my astrocartography chart, which affirms what I am feeling to a startling degree. It points at this island as a place of deep homecoming. I find this useful as one small piece of the map, not the whole answer. The whole answer, I suspect, does not exist in any single framework. It lives somewhere between the body and the sky, between biology and mystery.
What I know is what I feel.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
This place is far from perfect. Away from the sanctuary of my home it is overstimulating. So much traffic, the beaches sometimes covered in washed-up rubbish, the relentless commercial sprawl of what Bali has become in the decade since I was last here.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
What makes a place right for a body? I have been asking this question for years, have offered myself as both researcher and subject, have moved enough times to start to see patterns, if not yet fully understand them.
Some places I feel the signal clearly: yes. Some I feel it clearly: no. Others are neutral, which is its own information.
What I notice is that the body knows before the mind catches up. In Mallorca I felt the no within hours of arrival and spent almost two years arguing with it. In Canada I felt it too, and spent thirteen months trying to override it through sheer optimism. The body, it turns out, is not interested in optimism. It is interested in truth.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
What I know about place is also what I know about self: that there is very little separation between them. The places I have not been able to stay in are also the times I have not been able to stay in myself. Canada was the first lesson that there are some shapes I will not fit into, no matter how desperately I try. The question I could not ask then, but can ask now, a decade later, is whether the place was wrong, or whether the life I was building inside it was wrong, or whether those two things were always and inevitably the same.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Here, again, at this particular hinge of my life, in this place that holds multiple futures in suspension, I feel the most alive, regulated, supported, safe and happy that I have probably felt since I left it a decade ago.
The mosquitoes still find me every morning. I still stand in the half-dark waiting for the water to boil. It rains, and then it stops, and the air smells like something I cannot name but recognise. Like the inside of a memory. Like somewhere I was always going to come back to.
I don’t fully know why this place and not the others. I’m not sure knowing would add anything. And that is enough. Right now, this place, here and right now, is enough.
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