LA: Oh my god, I’m so impressed by spreadsheeters.
Stephanie: [laughs]
LA: I am not… I’m an inspiring spreadsheeter, but it all gets channeled into my job and I… never in my own personal trips.
Stephanie: You gotta try it. It, it brings me so much calm. Um, I will be honest, that I usually do the spreadsheet thing when I’m going with other people. But when I’m by myself, like I was for this trip, the spreadsheet is, like, in my head.
LA: Okay. So I really want to get into this trip because you went to Oaxaca, which is a place that I am desperate to get to.
Stephanie: Yeah.
LA: But before you take me there, I’m interested to know kind of, like, what sort of place were you in before you took the trip? Because often that can really inform both the reasons you’re going, but also what the experience is like.
Stephanie: I actually knew I was going to Oaxaca last year, and that was because I had signed up for a program in Oaxaca. And a lot happened earlier this year. I just was so busy. And there was just a lot of chaotic moments in my personal life and in my professional life. In the last couple years, I’ve been working in the media industry, and while I love what I do, it has become really tumultuous, frankly. And so this to me was a… in a lot of ways, a crossroads. It, for me, was a chance to kind of reframe and reset what I actually wanted to do.
LA: You know, I love that because I travel a lot, obviously, and someone kind of made a slightly, like, flippant comment to me that then I got, like, really hung up on, which was that… which suggested that traveling all the time is often because you’re just trying to, like, run away from real life.
Stephanie: Mm.
LA: But it sounds to… I know. I was like, “That’s deep.”
Stephanie: Harsh. [laughs]
LA: I quite like my life. I just also really like traveling. But it sounds like to me it really was the opposite. You were traveling to Oaxaca in search of something and in search of the next phase of your career and of life, in some ways.
Stephanie: Exactly. Yeah. I think for the last 10 years I have built a life that I’m actually very happy with that, you know, I do not identify that I’m trying to run away from it. But I can feel it in my bones that I need a shift. And so Oaxaca in a lotta ways for me felt like an opportunity to just start a new chapter, you know?
LA: So you get there.
Stephanie: Yeah.
LA: Tell me about it. Where were you staying?
Stephanie: So I got there very late on a Wednesday. And the place that I was staying was essentially an Airbnb. It was huge. I walk in the doors and there’s this huge open space. It almost feels like a courtyard within the house. And a woman greets me. She is one of the program directors. She takes me to my room and opens the doors. And I’m instantly in love. It’s this huge room the size of my bedroom, bathroom, and hallway combined [laughs] in New York. Uh, the ceilings are 10 foot, maybe 15 foot ceilings. And there’s a kitchen attached to the bathroom, so it’s just… it’s massive.
