We Were Born to Wake Up

I did not know I had to die to finish healing.

Dear Readers,

When I was younger, I lived in Argentina. Every Friday, as I walked through Buenos Aires, I passed the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. White scarves circled their heads like halos of grief, photographs of their disappeared children hanging from their necks on cardboard squares. They stood there, week after week, mourning, protesting, searching for their relatives who had been swept off the streets during the guerra sucia—the dirty war.

I was usually carrying a massage table when I saw them. An impossibly heavy one I’d commissioned from a local ironworker because such things didn’t yet exist in Argentina. It weighed nearly as much as I did, and I’d haul it onto leaded-gas buses like some kind of wellness Sherpa, determined to bring California bodywork techniques to wealthy Porteños who had never heard of alternative healing before.

Looking back, I must have been quite a sight: a twenty-something American woman wrestling a table the size of a small car through one of the world’s most sophisticated cities.

Thirty thousand souls are still missing from those years. People who spoke their truth and vanished without trial, without process, without goodbye. I didn’t understand loss yet. I was too young, too unacquainted with real grief. I just walked past the mothers on my way to somewhere else, carrying my absurdly heavy table, thinking I was going to change the world one healing at a time.

I didn’t understand the scars on my boyfriend’s back either, though I traced them with my fingers as we lay together on our futon bed. Thin raised lines ran from his neck to his sacrum, souvenirs from a teenage protest when military police had taught him the price of speaking up.

There’s a vast distance between seventh-grade bullying and eleventh-grade beatings from military police. He carried Big T Trauma. I carried anxiety about whether my Spanish was good enough to order lunch.

Marcelo was more than a boyfriend. He was my first real teacher. We met when I was nineteen, during that year when everything happens to you all at once and you think you’re so cosmopolitan and wise when really you’re just barely formed. He introduced me to ayahuasca, spirituality, shadow work, bodywork, empanadas, and la ciudad de la furia. He completely altered the trajectory of my life.

Those first years abroad were not easy. I felt lifetimes away from everyone I knew, fumbling through a language learned not from textbooks but from street corners. Once I accidentally asked a market vendor for “the lettuce woman” when I meant to order “the best lettuce.” The words are so close in Spanish—la mujer lechuga, la mejor lechuga—and my gringa tongue couldn’t find the difference.

I knew Marcelo wasn’t my forever person, but I also knew I couldn’t leave yet. When a friend visited and asked why I would stay in that hyper-polluted, politically unstable city with a man more than a decade older, I told her those years felt like grit I needed to endure to become whoever I was supposed to become. I needed honing.

The truth is, I was being honed. After nearly a decade, the business we’d built by improvisation and sheer audacity had become real. And perhaps I had become real too, honed by the sharp edges of that intense city.

But knowing it was time to leave proved harder than staying. I’ve written elsewhere about impossible decisions, those moments when the choice is so difficult you simply can’t make it, and the discomfort stretches you for months beyond your normal frame of self. The decision to leave Marcelo, our business, the country itself, stretched me for months—all the way to Patagonia and back, into the arms of another man and back, to India and back, until finally I knew.

Sometimes the only way to make an impossible decision is to exhaust every alternative first.

Saying goodbye was hard because my adult identity had been forged in Argentina. I was a teacher there, part of a vibrant community, fluent in a language I’d learned by making a thousand embarrassing mistakes. I had no idea who I’d be on the other side.

America astonished me when I returned. I stood in Target, bewildered by seventeen varieties of shampoo, by the sheer breathing room of democracy and capitalism, by how easy everything was. I felt mostly un-American, like I’d been gone long enough to become a stranger in my own country.

I left Argentina to breathe and to become. Marcelo stayed to die.

I didn’t know he was already harboring lung cancer when I said goodbye. A year later, he had a terminal diagnosis and I had a new partner. When I learned the news, I wanted to fly back to see him immediately. But my new boyfriend forbade it. “The past is over,” he said, and I didn’t want to risk losing him by returning to a man I’d once loved.

The beautiful irony, of course, is that both men are long gone now. But the love I felt for Marcelo remains like the tattoo it always was—a tattoo of truth.

When Marcelo died, finally succumbing to the cancer that demanded his urgent exit, his last words were: “I did not know I had to die to finish healing.”

Those words have haunted me ever since. A teaching that changed everything. I have sat with them for years, turned them over like a stone that catches light differently depending on how you hold it.

I write this from India, a place I loved when I was young, visiting often during those same years I lived in Argentina. I loved this place for the profound transmission of truth I received here while meditating at the sacred hill of Arunachala. That still and magnificent mountain presence taught me that awakening is our human birthright and that death is just a chapter in the evolution of our souls.

This current trip to India is different. I’m getting to experience the other side of the culture: politics, bureaucrats, business. I’m sitting in a fancy perfumed hotel in a cold, smog-filled city—quite a delta from the simple ashram life I knew before.

I can’t tell if I’m simply in a different dimension of India, or if the country itself has changed, hurtling toward modernity. Maybe both. Maybe neither. What I do know for certain is that the invitation remains the same, whether I’m in that peaceful ashram or this congested metropolis, whether I’m twenty or fifty, whether I’m hauling a massage table through Buenos Aires or sitting in a hotel room in Delhi.

The invitation of your lifetime. The invitation of mine.

To wake up.

Marcelo’s teaching is more haunting and important than ever. I leave it with you now, nothing added and nothing taken away, just as his words should be. They were passed to me that way, the final gift from the beloved soul who brought me to Argentina, to the mothers in their white scarves, to touch grief- and then released me.

As we enter the New Year and remember what we came here to become, may Marcelo’s reminder be part of all our 2026 prayers: We came here to wake up. And sometimes, we don’t fully become what we were always meant to be until we’re willing to let everything else die.

Even if it takes us a lifetime—and several continents to figure that out.

I am leaving Delhi now, on my way to Jaisalmer, to experience a new facet of this multi dimensional country.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia