Fake it Till You Make it...??

…or feel the pain…& find healing

Hola, amigos 🤗

I’m late in getting this post out, mostly because we got our first Airbnb renters for the beach house we’ve been helping with, so Tom and I have been scurrying around, getting things ready for them.

I’d like to say a huge gracias to all my readers for your continued support and encouragement. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be writing, and it’s helping me—not just track our journey, but become a better person, so muchísima gracias to each of you!! 🙏

El Salvador mountains—photo credit: Isaiah Berstad

This is going to be a different sort of post…I don’t often write vulnerable stories (other than my miscarriage post last year). When I started writing in March, 2022, my goal was to be more honest (not sugar-coating things). I’ve been pondering my journey over the last couple years since coming to El Salvador to live permanently. It hasn’t always been easy. In fact, it’s been a LOT of uphill, and I wanted to share some of that with you. I know some of our friends here have had similar struggles after leaving their friends, family, jobs, and all that’s familiar behind. It’s a huge change to abandon it all and face so many new challenges. And those kinds of changes can be BEYOND hard. I get that!

I was in a season of major change 2 years ago when we came back to El Salvador to live permanently. We’d spent 2 months here in May and June, just checking things out. Coming back and knowing we’d be staying put was hard, especially since we’d just spent the past year in “adventure mode” exploring Mexico and El Salvador.

After we came back in mid-September, I experienced some major anxiety due to feeling isolated, and trying to settle into our new life. I couldn’t write about the pain I was in at the time—it was a bit too much for me to talk about, so I only mentioned feeling stretched and challenged. I was focused on trying to stay afloat, and was hoping that by doing all the normal things, I could somehow feel normal. Besides, I didn’t realize fully where my anxiety was coming from. I was just trying to get through each day, each week—trying to be strong, even when I knew I was weak and frail. Hoping “fake it till you make it” would work for me. I know a lot of you who’ve struggled with anxiety can relate to what I’m talking about, and you have also suffered in silence.

I’ve always been what some would call a people person or an extrovert. So whenever I feel too isolated, it takes a toll on my mental health. When we arrived back here to live and settled into a little gated community in Zaragoza, near the capital, we were quite a distance from anyone we knew.

Las Pergolas, Zaragoza

We had to drive at least 20 minutes to visit any of our friends. And for the first several weeks, we didn’t even have a car, so, as you can imagine, we didn’t go down to the beach much.

I set about homeschooling our 3 kids, and I pressed through each day, trying to be happy for my sweet little girls. They always seemed to have so much zest for life, even though they’d also faced lots of changes—they’d left all their friends, and hadn’t made new ones here yet. But fortunately they had each other. They were always full of wonder—exploring, discovering, and inventing new things. During that time, it felt like they kept me going.

As I was going through this, one day I read this:

Jesus said those words to his followers before he was about to be brutally killed. Of course they’d be troubled and afraid—who wouldn’t be?!

When I read that verse, I realized something, so I asked, “Wait, how is your peace different from the world’s..?”I didn’t expect an answer…

Immediately a quiet voice inside me said,

“MY peace brings HEALING.”

Woah. I knew THAT healing and that PEACE were what I needed. I realized in that moment that the world has a false sense of peace, like it’s the feeling of being relaxed, or that someone can just chill-out and feel good—sometimes with the help of alcohol, or pot, or whatever else. But that’s superficial. I realized God’s peace, aka REAL peace, is different. I wanted that healing in my life. I knew I’d struggled with anxiety on and off for far too long…and he wanted to help me. But I felt isolated and stuck in a rut.

I didn’t even realize how much of a toll the isolation was taking on me—until the anxiety was at the point where I could barely sleep. I’d go to bed and lay there feeling my heart race until midnight or later. Then, I’d wake up at 4 or 5, feeling the unrest that had become my normal. I knew I needed help.

Thankfully, Tom’s sister and her husband came to visit right after this started. When she commented that first day about how she couldn’t live so far from family and friends, I broke down…right there in the kitchen.

“I can’t either…I’m having such a hard time…”

I told her how I’d been struggling in recent weeks. And now hardly sleeping. She teared up, hugged me, and told me she loved me. Having them here was an indescribable gift I needed so badly at that time.

On the third day of their visit, Tom and the girls took them exploring, and I took a me-day. I got our driver to take me to a private clinic. I spoke (in my basic Spanish) with a woman doctor about what I was going through. She was incredibly empathetic, and told me she’d been through a bad accident earlier that year, and had struggled with trauma-induced anxiety afterwards. She’d taken some meds to help her through that rough patch. She prescribed me a mild antidepressant. I was hesitant to take it, not wanting to become dependent on something. (I’m not saying meds are by any means the answer…and I seriously debated sharing this part of my story, because I generally don’t think these sorts of meds are that good for us, and I’ve always tried to avoid them). But, I felt I needed something to help me relax and sleep again. Not wanting to become addicted to them, I quickly went down to half a pill a day, and within a couple weeks, stopped completely.

Side note: I now rely heavily on prayer, meditation, deep breathing, journaling, exercise, sunshine, and a few herbal supplements.

Around that time, in early 2023, my mom sent me an e-book called To Heaven and Back about a woman who’d died in a kayaking accident, gone to Heaven, and then been sent back. I know that this probably sounds crazy, because most of us haven’t experienced anything like that!

She was told while in Heaven that her mission wasn’t finished on Earth. When her spirit returned to her body—after several minutes out—her physical healing journey was almost too much to bear, as her legs had been all but ruined in the accident, and after tasting the bliss of Heaven, it was incredibly difficult to be back on Earth. But she knew she’d been sent back for specific reasons (mostly to help her family), and she trusted God..and found joy in believing he had a plan for her life. That book was exactly what I needed at the time. Here’s a quote from it:

“JOY is clearly different than happiness. It is not based on circumstances, but on the presence, hope, and promises of God. Even when it feels as if we’re being crushed by earthly troubles, we can remain joyful. If we keep our focus on God, our spirit cannot be trampled. Joy is a state of mind and a state of being. It reflects a conscious choice to believe in the promises of the Bible.

—Mary C. Neal

I knew I could find joy, even in my struggle. I was able to sleep again, and was slowly making deeper connections here. But the upward climb wasn’t over yet. For about six more months, even though I felt mostly happy, I often had panic attacks, and lived under a shadow of anxiety.

Finally, I said, “ENOUGH!”

I was ready to wage war on those negative thoughts. And so, every morning for about a week, as I swam my laps in Paradise—we’d moved down to the beach—I’d pray, thanking God for ALL the blessings in my life. And I’d calm my mind with TRUTH. I was done with having my joy robbed by anxious thoughts.

I was taking my life back.

My feelings of being out of control had morphed into a fairly steady state of anxiety, and I knew I needed to tell them who was boss. And so I finally did. I made huge strides in that week or 2, and I’m so thankful I took the time and effort to retrain my mind. Since then, I’ve found that I can think an anxious thought, let it go, and think a calming thought instead. My self-talk has changed significantly. The truth was setting me free!

Letting go is so KEY to living a joyful life.

…and so is being THANKFUL. Ok, that sounds cliché! But I had to learn to consciously say “thank you” each morning…and throughout the day, for all my gifts. I came to realize I don’t deserve any of them. And this offering of thanks was so key in my healing journey.

I want to encourage my readers who are in this transition phase, and those debating coming here…or any of you just struggling with something in your life right now…

Going through changes and loss can be SO hard, to say the least. And you will probably feel stressed or maybe even anxious and depressed sometimes. That’s normal when there’s losses to grieve and changes to adjust to. And you’ll NEED to grieve all that you’ve lost.

I still grieve a bit sometimes. But for the most part, I think it’s a stage we have to go through, in the first year or 2, while adjusting to a new life. Reflecting on all that was…while embracing all that now is.✨

When I look back, I was in a stage of grieving for quite awhile when we first came here.

“What were you grieving?” you might ask. “Wasn’t your life a huge adventure…?! How amazing that your family could go and live in a tropical paradise!”

Yes, it sure was amazing, and an adventure. But I felt out of control in many ways. EVERYTHING had changed.

We’d had a great life in Canada. We’d had so many comforts—many that we didn’t even realize we had till they were gone:

• Tom and I both had good jobs.

• Our girls went to a great school and had good friends.

• We had an amazing social network.

• We had lots of family nearby who we could visit regularly.

• We had 2 reliable vehicles.

• We knew where we could buy all the things we needed and liked, including our favourite treats and organic options.

• We had a 4-bedroom house that we owned.

• I could text a good friend or a family member and have a visit and a hug if I ever needed to chat or vent.

• We could understand everyone around us, without any language barrier.

• We were familiar and comfortable in our setting, and we lived in a beautiful part of British Columbia.

Fall colours—photo credit: Sarah Apperson

So, why did we leave? If you’ve been following our story, you already know. But just to paraphrase—and I’m not playing the victim here—this is just how it was 3 years ago. A barrage of propaganda from the government and media had made us the outcasts of society in Canada. And because we’d “made the wrong choice” (aka not taken the vax), we were not allowed to bring our kids to any of their classes like skating, swimming or dance. Tom and I had decided that if we couldn’t enter the building, they weren’t going. They were just 3, 6, and 8 at the time, and we wanted to be there just in case they needed us. We’d been barred from restaurants, theatres, and more. And when they fired all of us non-compliant healthcare workers, what was next…? Well, they told us we’d soon be unable to leave the country. That was the last straw. We sold our house and most of our stuff, and left right before they locked us into Canada.

When I told my mom our plans in the middle of that crazy whirlwind, just a month before we left, she said,

“You’ll need to grieve all your losses, Em.”

I didn’t think about that statement much at the time. I didn’t have time to grieve—I was in flight mode. And once we got to Mexico, we were on an incredible family adventure. I didn’t need to grieve—I felt happy. Most days. Once in awhile it would hit me—how much our lives had changed…and that things would never be the same. I’d never be as comfortable again. But that was a price worth paying, wasn’t it?!

I’ve written a lot about how changes and challenges are good for us. I firmly believe this…and I don’t ever want to shy away from them. I’m often thankful that I’d had several third-world experiences in my 20’s that helped me feel OK with the rustic side of life in Mexico and El Salvador.

I don’t write about those things much, like how tap water can make you sick, how we can’t flush our toilet paper, how we regularly encounter suffering animals and people here, how millions of Salvadorans live in tin shacks…and are happy. How insane the traffic is here, both in the city and on windy mountain roads. How the majority of people in this country don’t have their own wheels so they rely on public transportation, aka brightly-coloured buses—formerly American school buses—to take them from one place to another…and the list goes on.

One thing that has kept me grateful in the last 2 years is the kindness and random smiles I’ve received daily from the locals. Almost everyone greets us and makes us feel welcome. And lots of people want to chat and find out more about our family.

An even bigger blessing for me has been forming close friendships with a handful of women, also expats, who’ve come here to live. Our conversations are often such a life-line. We’re all in this together—we laugh together, and sometimes we even cry together 💗

Since my breakthrough over a year ago, I’ve come to terms with NOT being in control and I pray,

“I trust you, God. You know the future…I give you control…of my life, of my family…ALL of it…”

💖💖💖

Thanks for reading, friends! 🙏

See you soon…

¡Gracias por leer, amigos! 😊

Nos vemos pronto…