My Space to Breathe: How a Small Patch of Green Saved My Soul
Where to find total certainty and beauty when everything else is completely out of control.
I have a confession to make: I am, like maybe many other people, a recovering workaholic.
There is some heavy, invisible weight that comes with pushing yourself past your limits. When the daily noise becomes too loud and the stress takes over, your whole body feels the pressure. You teach your body that's normal and even that it's how happy feels like. It's not true but it's true for you.
Every day round and round again like a spinner on a wheel. And this feels like a “good” life that you cling on trying to stretch yourself to the expectations of people who are either too busy using you, too busy to care or too busy being stretched too thin themselves.
So if you let your guard or anyone else down it's feeling like a reflection of your value and effort and you're left picking up the pieces of yourself and looking for anything to make sense or make it back to being on the wheel. Back to where even being too stretched and stressed felt like you had value and purpose and validation and before you lost your smile and peace.
Like a loud, cold, dreaded, slow grown and postponed summer storm, this broken feeling comes with some rocks of guilt and absurd shame and sadness like you let everyone down instead of the reality that you are burnt out and it's not about you kneeling to other people's priorities but about honoring yourself your boundaries and your mental health.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the noise of life right now, I want you to know you aren’t alone. This is exactly where my journey back to myself started.
It didn’t start with a big plan. It started on a quiet evening when I finally shut my computer, sat down on the floor, and buried my hands in cool, damp dirt. In that exact moment, the noise stopped, and I finally took a real breath.
Learning to See and Feel Again
Healing doesn’t mean forcing yourself to fix the big things right away. There's no fix and flip of the button to put you and everything back in place. It simply means stepping out of the inner noise and sadness and following your bliss with baby steps.
It's about pausing the churn and choosing, for just a few minutes, to not think about the overwhelm. Instead, you look for the small things and give your attention to small things that bring you small joy.
The small things that you can notice around you take you on a magic and inconspicuous journey: look at a single flower, a new green leaf unfurling on a plant, a busy bumblebee, or a bird landing nearby.
Or close your eyes and breathe gently and open them, look up and just focus on the slow passage of white clouds moving across a clear blue sky, or listen to the soft rustling of the tree leaves swaying in the wind.
Sometimes, it is as simple as noticing how a familiar corner of your garden, or even just a patch of the concrete sidewalk, still looks so completely different and alive when the sun hits it.
Savoring the Senses
When you stop rushing, fixing or reanalyzing the same past and responsibilities, the world opens up through your senses. You begin to catch the rich smell of fresh soil, the crispness of the air right after a heavy rain, or the scent of your favorite blooming flower. You notice the sharp, sweet fragrance of a squashed strawberry or the clean aroma of freshly cut grass.
In these tiny details, you relax. You learn how to breathe again, enjoying one single moment at a time, moving gently from one micro-moment to another.
Once you find your breath, you can begin to quietly interact with the moment. You press your hands into the cool soil, sit still to watch and feed the birds, or stand completely frozen in admiration of a seated butterfly resting on a petal.
You crush a few leaves of lavender or rosemary between your fingers just to enjoy the clean scent as it drifts up.
Step by step, this is how you slip out of survival mode.
By finding these small, honest things to appreciate, you quietly enjoy yourself back into happiness, rebuild your confidence, and gently take back your life and your mental health.
The Certainty of Care
There is an absolute, grounding honesty in working with nature, the plants and animals. In a world where so many things feel unpredictable, confusing, or entirely out of your control, the soil always tells the truth.
If you plant a rose in a pot and water it with care and love, or even if you do it in a moment of total loneliness, or just as a quiet experiment to see if it actually work: it will reward you.
The plant will respond with fresh green growth and stunning blooms. Not immediately but it's an implicit promise: you promise to water it and care for it and in return it will grow and bloom for you.
If you're not in an “act of God” type of scenario it's not going to let you down. Plus in case you're not satisfied you can change your approach or just learn something and do better next time.
When you put out food for the birds, they will come to eat and find joyful comfort in your space.
If you choose to place a bowl of bright pansies on your balcony instead of leaving it empty, a butterfly or a bumblebee will eventually come to visit and fool around it.
Breathe gently and remember: you created that future moment, and its beauty belongs entirely to you.
Embracing Your Inner Hope Again
This is how you learn to trust yourself again. It is how you build a steady inner confidence that what you do actually matters, and that the beauty you create is real and undeniable.
There is so much beauty and love and loveliness in this world hiding in the small things in your garden and in nature in general.
Gardening is simply you relearning how to look into the future with positive expectations. Learning to see, appreciate and interact with the joy of life.
You begin to imagine and expect the future moments when you will sit back and enjoy the results of your own hands: the potting, the planting, the weeding.
Soon you quickly realize and relearn that you can change your space and create something you genuinely love, easily and consistently. No pressure. No guilt or justifying your value. No overwhelm or survival mode. New life. Just you and beauty.
While you can always postpone tasks in the garden, you cannot give it up entirely without consequences. It offers a gentle, daily accountability that keeps you moving forward.
It is a slow, beautiful way of growing that deep inner connection with yourself, reclaiming your confidence, and quietly reconnecting with your happiness again.
🌿 Join the Oasis
My Expat Garden is a safe and independent sanctuary dedicated to everyone trying to make their beautiful adoptive place their home focusing on beauty, mental health and happiness. Whether you are here for a season, a lifetime, or no longer even consider yourself an “expat”, this is an invitation to slow down, practice mindfulness, and discover the joy of growing your own living beauty.
This is a welcoming space if you are looking to build a deeper connection with yourself, with nature, and with a gentle community sharing this same love. Together, we are learning to create our own little-big sanctuaries on balconies, terraces, gardens and courtyards.
If you have questions, need my help with confidently designing your own personal green oasis of peace, beauty and mental health, subscribe to my page and reach out to me directly.