It's for healing - Thailand's storied retreats offer an emotional reset

SUNSHINE WOULD HAVE been too much after three years that felt like one long dark tunnel. I arrive, exhausted, on Koh Samui during a monsoon, the wet jungle swaying with the energy of renewal. That night, a lullaby of raindrops helps me drift off to sleep. The far-off storm flashing on the horizon expels my subliminal rage. I awaken, refreshed, to birdsong.

- CHLOE BOTTERO

Rage is one of many emotions that have compacted inside me like coal. For years I have suppressed feeling, lived day to day, hour to hour firefighting, awaiting a break in the clouds. The pandemic had promised to be a productive time for redrafting my novel, but nothing could have prepared me for what was to come. It transpired that my octogenarian father, who suffered from Parkinson's, had been tricked out of his longtime home and wine estate in Piedmont by the very family he had bankrolled and employed all his life. Due to loopholes, destroyed documents, and the painfully slow Italian legal system, we were told the situation was hopeless.

I moved into my father's house to defend his rights. I taught myself Italian law, investigated, tracked down documents and witnesses. Weeks turned into months, then years. Both of my parents became fully dependent on me. There is no way to explain the trauma, isolation, and loss of identity that can come from being a caregiver. Simple tasks become monumental feats. Complex logistics, emergency room visits, medications, incontinence, repetition, and aggression became my life. I mined every inch of my being for patience, annihilating myself and my needs until I was numb.

But my suppressed side, anesthetized every night by red wine, always woke me at 3 a.m. The next day I would jack myself up on caffeine and nicotine, ignoring my back problems, chronic allergies, and migraines. I buried my grief: over losing a father figure, my childhood home, my book, the baby I had planned (now impractical), and the brutal three-year-wide bite that had been taken out of life. While packing up my father's estate, I was overcome with an urgent desire to flush the poison of the previous three years from my cells.