Believe what they tell you about Italian men in Bali. Consider this your warning. Or maybe your push....

Back in 2021, after what felt like an endless, fever-dream year in lockdown, I became completely fixated on getting back to Bali. At the time my life felt like some kind of offbeat indie film with bad lighting, unemployed, broke, living with a couple in the middle of a messy breakup, riding a bicycle to a part-time retail job, and yet somehow, despite the bizarre backdrop, I had this one glowing thread running through it all. A man. An Italian man. The exact type i had been warned about... (not so subtle foreshadowing)

I’d met him in 2020 while I was in Bali doing my YTT, right before everything shut down. What started as a fling turned into the kind of long-distance romance that quietly starts building its own scaffolding in your mind. Looking back now I can see the red flags like bright flashing neon signs (truly… so, so many), but at the time it felt like love. And love, if nothing else, is a powerful catalyst.

There were a ridiculous number of roadblocks standing in my way. Visa applications that kept being denied, border closures, lockdown after lockdown, not to mention the small detail of having almost no money. But I’m nothing if not persistent, and I had this vision in my head, of Bali, of the life I could build there, and yes, of him. I told myself I wasn’t moving back for him (and technically I wasn’t), but his existence there created an urgency that nothing else could have. What’s more motivating than love?

After a year of failed attempts, selling nearly everything I owned, and navigating what felt like an obstacle course designed by someone with a cruel sense of humor, I finally got approved. I had 30 days to enter Bali. I sold my car, packed what little I had left, and booked my flight. In the weeks leading up to my departure my intuition started whispering (and then SCREAMING) that something was off. Big red flags. But when you’ve sacrificed that much and invested that deeply it’s almost impossible to pull the brakes, and I convinced myself to see it through (because once I’ve committed to a mission, I’ll even crawl across broken glass if I have to.) *Cries in Capricorn*

The journey itself was layered with its own tension. I had to quarantine on another island first, sitting in that liminal space between what I thought my future would be and what was actually waiting for me. We were still in touch during that time, talking each day... anticipating seeing each other again. And while something in me was uneasy, I didn’t let it take up too much space in my head. I mean, I was moving across the world for this person... what could go wrong?

And then finally, I landed in Bali. (picture me with literally all I have to my name at the ripe age of 32 dragging my suitcases across the concrete, about to choke on my own nerves.)

I texted. I texted again. Again. I called.... Nothing.

No message. No explanation. No airport pick up. Just nothing.

Thank god I wasn’t alone. I’d flown with a friend who was also trying to get back in to Bali over that year. What a thing to witness (truly God bless her).  That moment, standing at the arrivals area, scanning the crowd, waiting for someone who wasn’t coming, is burned into my memory. Ghosted. At the airport. After a year of sacrifice, a global pandemic, and selling off almost everything I owned. I can laugh about it now (kind of), but at the time the mix of heartbreak and humiliation was excruciating.

Being a Capricorn definitely was a silver lining in that moment as my Type A tendencies had led me to book a backup accommodation “just in case.” I never actually thought I’d need it, but it ended up becoming my home for the next nine months. The irony was almost poetic. It was the exact same place I’d stayed the very last night before I left Bali the year prior, the night I sobbed myself to sleep, heartbroken at the thought of leaving him behind, terrified of what was unfolding globally, and completely unsure of what was to come. And here I was again, one year later, in the same room, sobbing again. But this time it wasn’t about uncertainty. It was heartbreak. Humiliation. The weight of realizing my “grand romantic return” had imploded on the runway.

That night, somewhere between the crying and the jet lag and the surreal disorientation, I realized I had two choices. I could cling to whatever excuse he might eventually serve me and abandon myself in the process. Or I could plant both feet on the ground, acknowledge exactly what had happened, and choose not to look back. (For the record, I chose the latter. There’s no coming back from being ghosted at the airport. Not for me.)

And beneath all of it, the heartbreak, the absurdity, the exhaustion, was this tiny flicker of something else. A blank slate. I had the opportunity to create whatever the hell I wanted of this, completely Carte Blanche.

I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a community. I couldn’t even drive a scooter yet. But I was there. I had gotten myself there. And I started to believe that maybe this whole saga wasn’t actually about him at all. Maybe he was just the catalyst. Maybe there was something waiting for me that I couldn’t yet see.

Maybe sometimes the universe breaks your heart because something is dying to be set free and escape from it. Or maybe in the end, ghosting is just the universe’s way of giving you no one to pay attention to but yourself.

Both were true for me. This was a defining moment in my life and one that has led to some of the most beautiful moments I've ever experienced, and some of the most beautiful things I've ever created. I didn’t know it then, standing in that arrivals hall with puffy eyes and a pit in my stomach, but that night cracked something open in me that needed to be broken. It rerouted my life entirely, setting me on a path I couldn’t have planned if I tried.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you ever find yourself standing in the rubble of something you thought was certain, heart racing and mind spinning, wondering how it all managed to fall apart so quickly, know this: the story isn’t over there. That moment might be the exact point where everything begins to shift toward something bigger, clearer, truer.

You might not see it right away. You might cry through it (I did). You might have to pick glass out of your knees for a while. But you will find your way, and if you let it, the unraveling will give you something even better than what you were grasping for.

XO

Janelle