Lisbon

By the time I booked this trip, I had spent over a decade inside human services, mostly in roles where I was holding other people's crises before I ever got around to my own. Program Manager, Program Director, the person who writes the grant, builds the safety plan, and then still shows up to make sure the doors open on time. I am good at that work. I also know what it costs to stay in "on" mode for years at a stretch without ever fully stepping out of it.

I did not book Lisbon because I had a plan for what it would fix. I booked it because I needed distance, actual distance, from the version of my life where I am always the one holding it together for someone else. Peer support taught me that you cannot pour from an empty cup, but knowing that and living it are two different things. Lisbon was the first time in a long while I let myself just be a person on a walk, not a program to run.

What surprised me was how ordinary the healing looked. It was not a single dramatic moment. It was sitting on a bench in Alfama with nowhere to be. It was a slow meal at a tasca where nobody needed anything from me. It was hearing fado for the first time and recognizing something in it, that particular ache of longing that I had never had language for until someone else was singing it back to me. Rest, real rest, showed up in small, quiet pieces the whole trip.

I came home and could not stop thinking about how much of my healing had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with distance and permission. That is the whole reason Window Seat Collective exists. Not because everyone needs to fly to Portugal, but because everyone deserves to know that healing does not require the budget of a luxury vacation, it requires the willingness to actually step away, wherever "away" is for you.