#186 The Year is 2016...
And your favorite hashtag is #kuwaitforit
The year is 2016.
I’m a third‑grade teacher at a private school in Kuwait, in the Middle East.
I’m living a life that looks stable from the outside. A good job. A salary. An apartment. Routine. Predictability. I’ve just come off a few years of teaching yoga part‑time in Canada (2014–2015), quietly holding a dream of teaching yoga full‑time… and just as quietly deciding to let that dream go.
Teaching yoga feels unrealistic. Financially risky. Impractical.
So I choose the job that makes sense.
I accept a position overseas because it offers something I desperately want at that point in my life: financial security.
And in many ways, it works.
I move to Mahboula (which means crazy lady in Arabic).
This becomes my neighborhood.
High‑rise towers. Dust. Construction everywhere. Migrant workers. Starbucks cups in hand. Long school days. Even longer evenings wondering what I’m doing with my life.
I buy my first car, a Jeep Liberty, and proudly name her The Desert Girl Cruiser.
I feel independent.
I feel grown up.
I feel far away from the girl who once thought yoga might be her life.
And then something unexpected happens.
Because when you move halfway across the world, something inside you loosens.
I start doing things I never would have imagined before.
Weekend trips.
Flying to Egypt just because I can.
Riding camels in front of the pyramids.
Standing in places I once thought were once‑in‑a‑lifetime experiences — and somehow living them casually, in between lesson planning and grading math worksheets.
At the time, I think this is the peak.
I can’t imagine that ten years later I’ll return to these same places, not as a tourist, but as a yoga teacher, leading sold‑out yoga retreats.
That possibility doesn’t exist in my mind yet.
Back in Kuwait, yoga quietly finds me again.
I get a part‑time job teaching yoga at the Hilton Resort.
It becomes the most beautiful way to meet people.
People who, without knowing it, begin changing the trajectory of my life.
It becomes a remembering.
At the same time, something else is happening.
It doesn’t even occur to me that I might be addicted to alcohol.
Every time I leave the country, every single trip, the photos look the same.
Drinks in hand.
Selfies.
Champagne.
Beer bottles.
Celebration without pause.
I don’t question it.
I don’t see it.
I just think I’m living.
Back at work, I start teaching yoga to my colleagues in our apartment tower.
I convince my boss to let me hang curtains in the “Singles Lounge” so women don’t feel uncomfortable practicing yoga while men stare in through the windows from across the street.
At the time, getting those curtains approved feels like one of my greatest accomplishments of 2016.
And in its own way… it is.
Because I advocate for space, for safety, for women, for yoga.
Then it happens.
I get hired at the biggest yoga studio in Kuwait.
Eventually, they offer me a full‑time, salaried position.
The job of my dreams.
The thing I once gave up on.
Suddenly, impossibly, it’s right in front of me.
I think this is the moment everything clicks into place.
But life isn’t that linear.
A lot of wild stuff happens after this.
(If you want the full version, you’ll have to read Sober Yoga Girl.)
I end up canceling the contract before it even begins.
A decision I will go on to regret for years.
A decision I don’t fully understand at the time.
A decision that doesn’t make sense, until much later.
Looking back now, I see 2016 differently.
Not as a year of mistakes.
Not as a year of wrong turns.
But as a year where everything was quietly lining up.
The travel.
The teaching.
The yoga.
The alcohol.
The longing.
The almosts.
The doors that opened.
The doors I closed.
It was all part of the same initiation.
I just didn’t know it yet.
It’s 2016, and I feel stuck.
There are days I am convinced this is it.
That I will be a school teacher in the Middle East forever.
That this life, while interesting, while expansive, while full of travel photos and stories, is also a quiet kind of ending.
I walk through my days doing what I’m good at, not what my soul is quietly asking for.
I don’t yet have language for intuition.
I just know there is an ache consistently beneath everything.
If you had told me then that ten years later I would have already:
• quit my teaching job • built a successful yoga business • moved to Bali • built a yoga shala on the roof of my villa • teach women from all over the world • run sober retreats • write books • sing mantras at kirtans • and help other women leave lives that feel too small
I wouldn’t have believed you.
Not because I lacked ambition.
But because in 2016, I couldn’t yet imagine a life that didn’t require me to abandon myself in order to survive.
I look back on the 2016 version of me with so much love.
She thought it was over.
She thought she was stuck.
She thought yoga would always be something she did on the side.
She thought safety meant staying.
She didn’t yet know that staying was slowly costing her everything.
And yet…
2016 was only the beginning.
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