I Put the Backpack Down

On recovery, letting go, and finding myself at a petrol station in Da Lat

May 10, 2026

I was almost gone before I caught myself.

Backpack on my shoulder. Laptop inside. The gate just ahead. The sun already burning down, the air thick and heavy the way it only gets in coastal Vietnam in the middle of the day. My body felt it before my mind did — a low pull of resistance, a heaviness in my limbs, a tiredness that had nothing to do with the steps between our room and the street.

I stopped.

Stood there for a moment, just inside the gate.

And I asked myself — actually asked, the way you ask when you finally get quiet enough to hear the answer — do I want to do this right now?

The answer came quickly. No.

My body already knew. I had been carrying my laptop to that café out of habit, out of a sense of have to so deeply grooved it had started to feel like wanting. That day, walking in the heat towards the gate, I could finally feel the difference.

I turned around, walked back through the door. Christian and the girls looked up. I’m not going, I said. I want to spend the day with you.

Christian’s face opened up. The girls were already moving towards their shoes.

We went to the beach. We met friends. The day was simple and full and completely unplanned.

And something in me — slowly, incrementally — began to exhale.

For those of you who have been here for a while, you’ll know that a few weeks ago I wrote about catching myself on the path to burnout. Again. You can read that letter here. What I want to share today is what happened in the weeks that followed, the in-between. The recovery. Or at least, my version of it.

I want to be honest with you about what rest looks like when you are someone who does not easily rest.

It does not look like lying on a couch in a dim room.

It does not look like clearing your calendar entirely, or switching off, or whatever the wellness industry tends to suggest when it talks about burnout recovery.

For me, these last weeks still included Taiji QiGong sessions with my master teacher online. Mastermind calls with other worldschooling moms. A gathering I organized for local mompreneurs, because creating experiences for others is something that genuinely fills me. An AI vibe coding coworking meetup. Learning to lose at chess against small children. And eventually, packing up our entire life and boarding a twelve-hour night sleeper bus through the mountains with two little girls and every bag we own in the world.

If you looked at the list, you might think — that is not rest.

And you would be right, in the conventional sense.

But that’s not where the rest lived. The rest lived in one decision I made, and remade, every single day: I released myself from the responsibility of being productive.

No pressure to generate income. No guilt about the unfinished project. No quiet background hum of I should be working. For four weeks, I let my mind go on a little holiday — and in doing so, I discovered that this was the thing I had actually been starving for. Not stillness. Not an empty schedule. Just the removal of the weight.

There were still low moments.

I want to name this, because I think it matters. Rest does not mean the difficult feelings go away. They moved through me on their own schedule, these weeks. A heaviness that would settle without warning — right there in the solar plexus, pressing down. It did not matter where we were. At home or out in the world, it would arrive regardless. On those days, I would lie back down. Let it be there.

Lua would notice. She always notices.

She is two years old and she would come close, look at my face with that small, serious expression, and ask: What happened, mama?

And I would say: I don’t know. I just feel a bit sad.

She would look at me for a moment. Then: Aww. It’s ok, mama. And she would kiss me.

Those moments undid me a little. In the best possible way.

What I could do, these weeks, that I hadn’t been able to before — was move through the low moments without drowning in them. I could feel the sadness, name it out loud to my husband and my girls, and trust that it would pass. Christian, without needing to be asked, would take the girls away to play. Not because he understood fully what I was going through. But because he showed up anyway, in the way he always does.

The low would lift. And then there would be joy. It ebbed and flowed, and I let it.

I want to tell you about a dinner.

One evening, I went out for dinner with another mom. Just the two of us. No husbands, no children. A French restaurant near the beach, with the soft sound of conversation in French all around us, a glass of wine, food that was still warm when I ate it.

I sat down at that table and I felt something I had not felt in a long time.

I felt like myself. Not mama. Not the breadwinner. Not the one managing the bedtime routine. Just… me. A woman, sitting across from another woman, talking about our businesses and our dreams and our desires, with nowhere else to be.

Eventually my husband called. The girls were asking for me. I went home. But I carried something back with me from that table, a reminder that she is still there, the person I am when I am not holding everyone else up. She had just been waiting, patiently, for me to give her a seat.

The other thing that marked these weeks was the move.

As a nomad family, we have packed up and started over many times over the past three and a half years. You would think it gets easier. In some ways it does. In other ways, each transition still carries its own emotional weight. The goodbyes, the letting go, the sifting through your possessions and asking, again, what do we actually need?

We left Hoi An on a twelve-hour sleeper bus, night departure, the four of us in flat beds across the aisle from each other. I had been nervous. The stories about mountain roads and drivers who navigate them with impatience. My longstanding dread of nausea. Lua and Lilly in a moving vehicle through the dark for twelve hours.

In the end, it was fine. More than fine. Lilly slept almost the whole way, waking only once for a stop. Lua was delighted, announcing several times throughout the journey how much she was enjoying herself. I didn’t sleep much but I was comfortable, and the nausea never came.

We pulled into Da Lat around seven in the morning.

The bus dropped us at a petrol station. Not a scenic overlook. Not a postcard arrival point. A petrol station, with its smell of fuel and the sound of honking cars. And yet — the air was different. Cool and crisp after months of coastal heat. I put my sweater on and helped the girls into theirs. We all stood there and breathed.

There were flowers everywhere.

Something turned on in me. I can only describe it as a light switch. The kind you don’t realize has been off until suddenly the room is illuminated. Christian felt it too — I could see it in his face. Some places simply suit your energy, and some don’t. Hoi An was wonderful but it was never quite ours. Da Lat, from the first breath of cold mountain air, felt like it had been waiting for us.

Another beginning. Another exhale.

Cool mountain air, sunflowers and a new beginning. Da Lat, Vietnam. May 2026

I’ve been thinking about why rest is so hard, especially for mothers, especially for those of us who have woven our identity into what we create and contribute.

I remember hearing an interview with Will Ahmed, the founder of WHOOP, who talked about building a company focused on recovery at a time when the entire industry was fixated on performance. The bold idea was simply this: rest is not the opposite of productivity. It is what makes it possible.

I think about that when I notice how difficult it is for me — for so many of us — to actually stop. We have been taught, through years of conditioning, that our worth is tied to our output. That stillness is laziness. That the moment we are not producing, we are falling behind.

And so even when we are depleted, we pack our backpacks and walk toward the gate.

Until the body finally says: no. Not today.

My rest and recovery does not look like doing nothing. It looks like sitting in a beautiful café with my journal and a good cup of coffee, pen moving across paper, nothing to optimize or deliver. It looks like going to bed with my girls without the guilt of planning to wake back up and work after they fall asleep. It looks like dancing to music in the morning to slowly wake up together. A dinner where my food is still warm. Practicing Taiji QiGong not because it was something to do, but because it simply brings joy to my body.

It looks like putting the backpack down.

When I do — when we do — something shifts. We empty the cup first before we fill it up. We remember who we are when we are not performing.

And from that place, we have so much more to give.

How about you?

What does rest look like in your life — the version that actually fits you, not the version you think it should look like?

I would love to hear from you.

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The Flow Journey publishes every Sunday. If this letter found you at the right moment — if you too have stood at a gate, backpack on, not quite sure why you feel so heavy — consider passing it on to someone who might need permission to put it down.