I keep going back to Chile. I go to see my family and good friends I hadn’t seen for too long and who never change anyway. Every time, the place changes me.

The landscape is bare. The wind that moves across it has no name. In Europe, meteorologists name storms before they arrive, so the wind already has a name before it even touches you. In Chile, nobody names the wind, because nobody expects anything from it. I noticed, this time, that I don’t expect anything from it either. Nobody there needs me to perform a name for myself.

That’s the point of these trips, on some level I hadn’t put into words before. With my family and these friends, I don’t have to function. I only have to be there, at whatever baseline that takes.

For years I fought against myself. Against my own resistance, against the pull towards quiet, against my body that pushes back even though I know what would do it good. I judged myself for the resistance and tried to fix it with discipline, then more discipline, until the willpower ran out. That wasn’t my fault or anyone else’s. It was what happens when a person spends years like that.

The message is everywhere: you are not good enough as you are. It comes from books, podcasts, coaching programmes, gyms, LinkedIn, Instagram. Self-optimisation is sold as the one legitimate task of a life, not up for debate, with no accepted alternative.

Self-optimisation can be a quiet form of violence against yourself. It passes for discipline and rarely provokes outrage. It surfaces in the small moment each evening when you ask yourself, with a disappointed undertone, why you still haven’t done what you set out to do, and answer with the sharp logic of the self-help books that treat your own resistance as a defect. It is a signal. A body that pushes back after years of functioning inside a system that never once asked whether things were actually fine is responding to the strain.

I’ve met people who claim they haven’t caught this particular madness. They say they do things completely differently and call themselves simply smarter about it. Looking at one of them closely, I recognised something else: he is more self-optimised than would be optimal for me. My reaction to that recognition is retreat, and retreat is a protective reflex of someone who looks too closely and makes himself available to everyone and everything. That reflex would be no problem at all if I let it stand as a serious answer, once I’m actually ready to give it.

Chile is where I retreat to when it gets to be too much again and I’ve genuinely had enough. This time, arriving, I was already past the point of enough.

And arriving is when I understood the fight had never been real. It was a large misunderstanding. I had believed I needed to be someone I am not: a second version of myself that always functions, or at least always looks like it functions. I already knew that version existed. What I hadn’t understood was that it isn’t the only one.

There is another version of me, and it works from a distinction I’d never drawn clearly before. Giving up would mean I cannot do it. Letting go is something else: I no longer have to. What I had spent years fighting was the part of me that finally wanted to be heard again.

Chile did what it always does. The landscape is empty, but it’s stronger than the wind. That is character without expectation: it leaves nothing but room. Room enough for the quiet version of me, the one that doesn’t want to perform. That’s why Chile is a beginning for me, with no programme and no guarantee that anything will work, certainly not optimally. This version of me works well for me, though not always for the people around me.

The question I haven’t answered yet is what happens when I fly home. How do I get rid of the other version of myself, the one that’s waiting at the arrivals gate on the other end.