I do feel the changes and the awareness that I’ve been waiting years for. I can recognize how much I have changed and grown in comparison to my previous Brazilian era. My arms, back, shoulders, abs are strong. I’m tan and my hair is light. My Portuguese is decent. I get to feel the magic of living by the moon and the sea. The swells feel just like powder days at home. I’ve finally had a breakthrough, a transformation in my surfing – and it feels so incredible. I’m having surf sessions with friends that I’ve always dreamed of. I’m riding waves like I never knew I could. I’m reading waves before they come and as I’m on them. It’s been the most magical metamorphosis.

Physiological needs: Water, sleep, food, shelter

These needs have not been met inconsistently. Being in a different country means all food tastes different, all ingredients are harder to find, drinkable water isn’t a given, your digestive system is fragile and gets hijacked quite frequently. Moving houses so often makes it difficult to check the shelter box with confidence. One of the most common withdrawal symptoms from SSRIs is insomnia. Yep, my most basic and core needs are a bit all over the place.

Love and belonging: friendship, intimacy, family, community, sense of connection

You’ve got the gist here already. I feel the love from my amazing community back in Colorado and I am connecting with some precious souls while I’m here, but true belonging, community, and connection are lacking, and it has not been easy. Romance and intimacy? Basically out the window – look at my menagerie of everything else!

But this has been a bit of an emotional reality check – transforming a vacation to a routine. This time around in Brazil, I’ve been feeling stressed about work, money, the bus coming on time, ensuring I don’t eat food or drink water that could make me sick, wanting to allow the gentle unraveling of “making plans” in Brazil, but having time-sensitive obligations, and acting on a more typical USA-based routine. It’s been tough to take off the rose-colored glasses, but it also provides crucial clarity. I wrote recently, “No matter where you are, there are always going to be dishes in the sink.” Life is lifeing no matter where I am. Would I be able to make a sustainable, balanced life here? I’m honestly not sure. And that’s an important (and potentially sad) realization.

For those pursuing a non-traditional life path, the number-one question is often “how can you afford to do this?” And that’s a good question! I spent the last 3 years building up my savings, but given my past 9 months, I’ve eviscerated my savings, which has been pretty damn stressful. Yes, the cost of living is cheaper in Mexico and Brazil, but things add up really quickly when you don’t have stable income.

When I left for Brazil, I had put most of the pieces together to launch my freelance marketing business. While it’s still not necessarily official, so far I’ve set up a pretty badass Upwork profile and have been hired by my first clients to do website development, graphic design, marketing strategy, and copywriting. Telling people “I have my own business” still doesn’t sound real. But it’s real! It’s called Ricki’s Rants Creative Collective (you’re actually currently browsing the Collective!!!). It is so exciting that I finally have the experience and the confidence to help small businesses and individual brands find their own magic words. It is so liberating (and to be honest, destabilizing and terrifying) to be my own boss, choose my own clients, create my own agenda, and achieve my own dreams – not someone else’s.

Unfortunately, I’m also a bit behind the ball – I let myself almost run out of money before I started my business and learned how to acquire consistent work and clients. I’ve honestly been pinching pennies down here, and it is not fun. Living in constant financial duress is pretty agonizing. I think about every expense, I make faulty calculations in my head, I dread when I actually type in the numbers on my computer, I dream about it, I bite my nails over it. Plus, I want to enjoy Pipa! I want to say yes to the rare adventures that, in the big picture, are cheap.

In addition to being strapped for cash, I’ve also been working to develop a real routine. When do I want to work? When do I work for my current clients versus apply for new jobs to ensure future income? No matter what I decide to work on, there also comes the mental weight of actually doing it. My badass-boss-lady-freelance-mami self does require a lot of confidence, preparedness, and organization. It’s a lot of pressure, and you all know how hard I am on myself. I want to deliver a high-quality product; I want to be efficient in my work. It’s a different level of nerve-wracking when my livelihood relies solely on my ability, not on an employer. And that’s the other thing – to get more clients, I am continually submitting proposals, applying for projects, promoting myself. It’s an exhausting and vulnerable place to be!

And here comes the other major project I’m working on: my poetry book (it’s called the Hallows of Home, it’s almost done, and I’m terrified of the next steps). When do I work on my book? Andddd how/when will my book be lucrative? What about Ricki’s Rants in general? But the same question – when will that be lucrative? Working on my book is an emotional rollercoaster, and figuring out how to make my book and Ricki’s Rants successful seems like starting a whole new business all over again (and making money from writing is a world I know nothing about, unlike marketing).

I know that I’m learning SO MUCH from this experience. It kind of feels like I can’t catch up. I want more time to process all this learning, less pressure to make ends meet, more strength to dive into the emotions behind the labor. I also know, as I’m leaning into my trust with all the manifestations I can muster, that not only is it all going to work out, but that the courage and vulnerability I’m embodying is the catalyst for even more growth and opportunity and abundance and prosperity. I know that I am planting seeds that will bloom so beautifully! Right?! I feel like in order to lean in, I had to take the big risks, I had to put myself in a tricky situation. My only way is through, and so that’s where I am. Eeeeeeek!

Let’s also talk a bit about loss. Right before I left, I lost my grandmother and a co-worker from my last job. Less than a month after arriving, I lost a childhood friend. Processing these losses has been intense, but I think I’ve handled my grief decently well so far. At first, I let myself feel, I let myself rest, I didn’t push myself to overcome.

And when I didn’t feel so close to death, and was ready to return to the vibrancy of the living, I cried at the Samba – at the three generations of women singing and dancing, at the dozens of people chanting the words at the top of their lungs, at the rain mixing with the sweat on the frizz of people’s hair, at the goosebumps that erupted across my skin from the beat hammering its power into my soul.

I planned rituals, I called friends from back home, I cried, I talked about what I was going through (even if it was with people I didn’t know well or I felt uncomfortable). I rationalized the grief and vowed to practice what these people taught me while they lived. It’s not like the grief has ended – not at all. I’m still figuring out what I need to continue healing, I’m still scrambling around in the dark. It just feels like the sky is finally starting to get lighter from the morning’s first light.

I also want to note that I’ve tapered off my anti-depressants, which I’ve been on since 2022. Although I tapered with my psychiatrist’s support and had been wanting to do this for a while in a place where I felt safe, happy, and less stressed, my withdrawal symptoms have been pretty rough, and I know that this is just substantially heightening everything I’ve been going through. Maybe it wasn’t the best time to go off of them (actually definitely wasn’t), but I want to sit in my mood swings and my insomnia and my crazy dreams and my anxiety and nausea. And then I want to sit in the other side, where my emotions aren’t muted/regulated, where I can more easily access my soul, where there is no veil between reality and intuition.

I feel like so often my writing can just be a gross litany of complaints. That maybe I am just miserable. And letting others consume and digest and wriggle their way into my intimate thoughts and experiences is terrifying. I can feel your eyes wrinkle with potential judgments, conclusions, diagnoses as you read my innermost dialogues. I can feel you Venmoing me $20 so I can go on the boat party next week. 😉

I think looking back at all this, I’m struck by the ever-present, demanding pattern of being so damn hard on myself. When it rains, it pours, and I threw myself off the deep end (life might have given me a little push), and expected to land gracefully and swim without a problem. Life is not just the smooth, grounded strokes – it’s the thrashing while you have to convince yourself you won’t drown, the gasping for air, the shivering in the water, the doggy paddle when you get tired, your ass smacking the water and the impact leaving a stinging red mark.

Goddammit, Ericka! It’s also only been two months! I started my own freelance marketing business, I experienced loss, I went off my anti-depressants, I don’t have as much time to stabilize and ground myself as I was expecting, I’ve been eviscerating my savings since I quit my job, I’ve only had snippets of feeling grounded and stable for the past 10 months. I’ve also moved houses 6 here different times and it turns out the community I was so excited to be with - my close friends that live here… Well, they all happen to be traveling at the exact same time I’m here. I have not been in a headspace or had the bandwidth to make new friends, and I’ve had heavy feelings that aren’t easy to discuss with travelers cruising through or easy-going Brazilians where the language barrier is legitimate. Yeah, have I mentioned that Portuguese is really hard? And that I am experiencing all of this in a foreign country?

I’ve been feeling pretty isolated here, and only recently have had enough energy to really connect with people and venture outside of my own inner world. The people that I have met, for the most part, have been just as warm and kind and inviting as the Brazil I remember, but I also feel a disconnect between the type of community I’m seeking and the type of community that exists here. I’ll have more on this later, but it hasn’t been as organic or fulfilling as I was hoping.

Alright, wow. This ended up being much lengthier and heftier than I expected. Do you understand now what I mean when I say the last two months have been a lot?!?! To conclude, I’ll provide you with a simple diagram from our old friend Abraham Maslow to summarize my current wellbeing and how life has been for me in Brazil so far. And that maybe, people are right when they say it’s a big deal to move (even for a brief moment) to a different country. Maybe I bit off a bit more than I can chew. I’m chewing quickly, though!!! Not sure if I’ll have as much access to the zen headspace I was hoping for in terms of self-actualization, but I am learning patience and self-kindness as I retrace the foundation for meeting my basic needs.

Safety needs: stable environment, financial security, health, personal security, safety nets

Again – moving, counting every penny, traveling alone as a woman, my nervous system getting hijacked from withdrawal symptoms, being away from my typical support system, not having the support I was planning on. In addition, my climate anxiety and overall societal anxiety is at an all-time high, as the state of the world is severely discouraging and alarming. Not much is fostering a feeling of security, safety, and stability.

If you read this far, thanks. Thanks for learning about the realities of my life lately here in Brazil. Not all rainbows and butterflies and cutesy little Instagram stories, hmm? It’s funny because I’m realizing that so many of these topics that I’ve sandwiched into one post could be their own blogs themselves – solo “traveling” as a woman, starting a freelance marketing business, processing grief while away from home, the realities of living in financial duress, the process of tapering off anti-depressants, adapting to a different culture…

BUT, I also know that these feelings of overwhelm (that I’ve been reallllly trying to reframe as abundance) are only temporary, that these investments into the unknown and into my growth will pay off in immense ways, that I will look back on this time of my life with gratitude and awe, and that I actually am meeting my goals, growing my business, agonizingly slowly working on my book, and enjoying a tropical country. I’m doing all of this even with my basic needs being met inconsistently.

This is just a brief period of my life – and I’m so grateful you have been witness to it.