Mexico Didn’t Go to Plan. I Came Home Better Anyway.
Introduction
I’ll be honest with you — this past winter was rough.
If you read my 2025 Year-End Review, you already know some of it. The stagnation, the losses, the feeling of spinning your wheels while the world keeps moving. Add a career pursuit that fell apart on me, and by the time February rolled around I was quietly losing the plot. Not in a dramatic way. Just that slow, creeping kind of low where you stop feeling like yourself and start going through the motions, almost like a light switch had been flicked off.
So Rachel and I booked a trip to Mexico with some friends. A week in the sun. A reset. Something to look forward to.
It didn’t exactly go to plan.
And somehow, I came home better anyway.
The Trip Itself
Mexico was genuinely cool. A new country, a different culture, food that made me rethink everything I thought I knew about eating well. There were real moments of “okay, this is exactly what I needed.”
But travel has a way of stress-testing everything — your patience, your friendships, your ability to roll with things not going your way.
One of the friends who came with us wasn’t happy for most of the trip. Complained about things that, honestly, weren’t worth the energy. When you’re already running on a low tank emotionally, being around that kind of negativity for seven days is a lot. I tried to let it go and be my usual optimistic self. Some days that was easier than others.
Then on day three, another friend came down with a cold. I’m sort of the unofficial Dad in my friend groups, so I helped him out as best I could. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d be next to catch his plague.
Still — the sun was warm, the water was blue, and for the first time in months I felt something that wasn’t just grey. That counted for something.
The Flight Home From Hell
I want to tell you about the flight home because I think it perfectly summarises the kind of trip it was — funny in retrospect, absolutely brutal in the moment.
Our flight was 10pm to 2:30am. With the timezone change, that meant landing in Halifax at 4:30am, followed by a 2.5 hour drive back to PEI. Rachel and I had been up since 6:30am that morning — we’d gotten up to watch the sunrise on our last day, which was worth it — so by the time we boarded we had already done a full day and desperately hoped to pass out on the plane.
We had left our headphones at home. No eye masks either. Rookie mistakes.
The lights went dark. The cabin settled. And then, two rows in front of me, one single passenger decided this was the perfect moment to turn on his reading light and get through the first two hours of what I can only assume was a very long book. One light. In an otherwise completely dark cabin. Directly in my eyeline.
I stared at the ceiling.
Eventually he turned it off. The cabin went dark again. I closed my eyes.
And then the toddler in front of him got sick.
What followed was a rotating cast of four passengers behind us making their way in and out of the bathroom for the rest of the flight. It was a budget airline. The turbulence was occasional but enough to keep a nervous flyer like me from ever fully relaxing. The seats were not built for comfort. It was, objectively, a lot.
We landed. Cleared customs. And as we were finally making our way out, exhausted beyond words, the complaints started up again from our friend about how long everything was taking.
I made a quiet decision. Instead of riding back with the group, I grabbed Rachel, her brother, and his girlfriend and drove them home myself. Two and a half hours. Tired as I’ve ever been. But peaceful.
We pulled into her mum’s place around 10am. I laid down. Closed my eyes.
Thirty minutes later my phone rang.
It was my new boss. Asking why I wasn’t at work.
There had been a miscommunication — my old boss had left a note that I’d be starting the following day, but somehow the message got lost. So instead of sleeping, I stayed up until 7pm handling it. Over thirty-six hours without sleep, running on fumes, holding it together by sheer willpower.
The second my head hit the pillow that night, I was gone.
A few days later, the cold caught up with me. Then another one after that. I’ve basically been sick since I got home.
Why I Still Came Back Better
Here’s the thing about hitting a wall — sometimes you need to actually feel the impact to remember you can take a hit.
I went to Mexico feeling like a failure and struggling to pull myself out of the funk I was in. A career door had closed on me that I’d been working toward. Things hadn’t gone the way I planned. I was in my own head about all of it, and the longer I sat still the heavier it got.
Getting out — even imperfectly, even with a chaotic trip and a flight from hell and coming home sick — broke the cycle. It reminded me that life keeps moving whether you’re ready or not. That things go wrong and you handle them anyway. That a bad flight doesn’t ruin a good trip. That watching a sunrise in another country at 6:30am with the person you love is worth being tired for.
I came home with something I didn’t have when I left. Not answers — just momentum. A small but real shift from “I’m stuck” to “okay, Alex, it’s time to get up and do this.”
That’s enough to work with.
What’s Next
I’m still sick as I write this, which feels a little on the nose. But the drive is there in a way it wasn’t a few months ago, and I’m not going to waste it. A small ember has been sparked so i’m trying to keep it burning.
The blog is growing. The home buying content cluster is really taking shape — if you’ve been following along, we’ve now got five posts in that series covering everything from the 10-step plan to the hidden costs to how much income you actually need to qualify for a home in Canada. More is coming!
Beyond the blog, I’ve got things I’m working toward that I’ll share more about as they develop like working on my house, exploring new career paths and perhaps returning to school for some more education (who knows). For now I’m just focused on not losing the thread — keeping the momentum going even on the days when it’s hard, even when I’m running on cold medicine and stubbornness.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
If you’re in a similar place — that quiet kind of stuck — go read my 2025 Year-End Review. It’s the most honest thing I’ve written on here and it might help to know someone else has been in the fog too.
Until next time, all the best.
Alex
English