What Does It Mean to Be Well?
What is the meaning of true wellbeing? What does it actually mean to be well?
Seventeen days ago, I quit my job. Shortly after, I found myself in Bali. It sounds stereotypical—and maybe it is—but the trip came together almost by accident. It began with time spent with my in-laws in Japan and will end at a wedding in India. In between, there has been space. Space to notice what changes when my environment changes—and what doesn’t.
When I travel, my body often feels better. My chronic pain softens. I wake up with more energy. I think novelty plays a role: new sights, new routines, constant stimulation. But there are parts of me that follow no matter where I go. The part that is relentlessly self-critical. The part that struggles to relax. The part of me sitting in a coffee shop in Uluwatu, clinging to this moment and wondering how I could rearrange my entire life to make it permanent—because escape always feels deceptively simple.
This time, instead of chasing the relief, I’ve been asking a different question: what does it actually mean to be well?
Lately, I think wellbeing has less to do with eliminating discomfort and more to do with learning how to sit with it. Emotional discomfort. Physical pain. The parts of myself that feel inconvenient or unsatisfiable. I live with chronic TMJ and migraines, and there’s a version of me that always wants more—more certainty, more ease, more answers. What if, instead of rejecting that part, I stayed with her for a while?
I’ve spent much of my life running—from pain, from my psyche, from old trauma. But on my sixth solo trip, the lesson feels unavoidable: nothing disappears just because you board a plane. The body remembers. The mind follows. To live well, I’m learning, requires being present with all of it.
In Buddhist philosophy, there’s an emphasis on bringing gentle awareness to unpleasant experience. Not fixing it. Not judging it. Simply noticing. Where does it live in the body? For me, insecurity settles in my chest—a tightening, a quiet constriction. When I observe it without trying to push it away, something softens.
For most of my life, I’ve white-knuckled my way through—pushing forward, pushing down, pushing past. Now, I’m practicing something different: allowing. Feeling. Trusting that no emotion is too big or too dangerous to experience fully. Because what we resist tends to persist.
I don’t yet know what my life will look like when I return to New York. When I think about it, anxiety rises. And that’s there, too. But so is longing—for my partner, my cat, my home, my friends. These feelings coexist. They always have.
To be well, in my eyes, is not to curate a life free of discomfort. It’s to refuse to exile any part of myself. Every emotion, every sensation, every contradiction belongs. And wellbeing begins the moment I stop rejecting my own experience.
