I used to live somewhere where you had to prove your status every single day. What position you held, what car you drove, how much you earned, what your house looked like — all of it got read, compared, judged. You were always a little bit on stage, even just going out for bread. There's none of that on Bali. Here, nobody cares who you were before you moved or what your job title used to be. What matters is what kind of person you are right now, in this moment. That turned out to be unexpectedly freeing — and, as it turned out, essential for me to even begin writing honestly about myself.
Because writing autofiction means stripping bare in front of the reader. And you can't strip bare in front of someone who's simultaneously assessing your status. You either dress things up, or you stay silent about what actually matters. On Bali, I stopped thinking about how I'd be perceived by 'people who need something proven to them.' There's simply no stage for that here. And the writing got more honest — I could write about burnout, about doubt, about stupid mistakes, without fearing someone would think: 'She had such a successful business, and here she is whining.'
There's also the Balinese philosophy of living here and now — it's practically in the air, in the rhythm of life, in how the locals relate to time. At first it irritated me: how can you not plan ahead, not think about tomorrow? But gradually I understood that this philosophy is exactly the essence of the genre I write in. Memoir, the search for yourself — that's not about 'what will happen,' it's about what's happening to you right now, in the moment, while you're living through it. Bali didn't teach me to write memoir in theory. It gave me permission to live so fully in the present moment that there was finally something to write from.
Maybe that's why there are so many creative people here. The island seems to strip off the armor you'd been wearing for years — not because you needed it, but because everyone around you wore one too. And without the armor, it's so much easier to sit down and write: here's who I am, here's what I feel, here's what I've been through. Not to prove anything to the reader — but simply because, at last, there's someone who's genuinely interested, and you don't have to perform anything to earn that.