I have a confession to make.
On the Adventure to Awaken homepage is a picture of me. I am beaming. I am glowing. I am joyous. I am healed. I am alive.
I'm also a liar.
This picture sends a clear message, one that I reinforced with the original homepage copy: that I had found myself, and reclaimed my joy – and you can too.
I took that picture on my first trip to Bali in 2023. And then I spent two years lying to myself that I didn't know what direction to go in with my life. I left Bali, rounded out my transformative journey with time in France and Switzerland, returned to the U.S. and wrote my memoir, and then came back to Bali to figure out "what's next". I tried and failed at some things in Bali, like growing this newsletter, and growing on Threads. I got trained as a meditation teacher only to find some closed doors in Bali there too (due to Indonesia's working visa sponsorship costs and restrictions, which I shared more about behind the paywall in this post).
In September 2025, with a few weeks of newsletter posts prepped and scheduled to send, I decided to get out of Bali for a minute to take a break, clear my head, and get some perspective on what to do. I headed off to Lombok and the Gili Islands, where I slowed down, and returned to the routine I had found while backpacking Africa: a slow start to the morning, an intuitive yoga flow, breakfast and coffee with the companion of my journal, and afternoons walking, exploring, musing, meditating.
When I feel lost, unsure of which direction to go, it's because I haven't let my life get quiet enough to hear the voice that's guiding me.
Clara Ritger
Related Read: If you are feeling lost and unsure which direction to take, here are my tips.
In the late afternoon I walked down the street from my bungalow to the white sandy beach, set on finding a place with good music, not too loud, to watch the sunset. I wandered along the shoreline and waded my feet in the water, and I saw a rainbow over Lombok Island. I took a few pictures. And then I kept walking. I passed all of the shacks along the beach until I got to a little nest of trees, and I walked a well-trodden path through the brush, until I emerged onto a little beach front with locals, and some other curious tourists like me, just in time for sunset. I stared into the orange orb that flooded its color into the sky and I was overwhelmed by memories, and emotions, and the direction they were all pointing toward.
That's when it hit me, and I started crying.
When I was looking in my camera roll for the particular sunset photo, I saw the rainbow photo I had taken only an hour earlier. I had forgotten I had seen one. But it is fitting. Rainbows are symbolic of transformation and new beginnings. And then I saw the sun, like a lighthouse, pointing me in the direction I was meant to go.
I have always known exactly what I was meant to do. It first came to me in a vision as a child. And it is written all over my journals from the last ten years. I saw it when I was pouring over them to write my memoir, selectively writing around it, because I decided it wasn't relevant to the story.
What is one truth about your own life that you know, but you are avoiding – and why?
I've spent my whole entire life running from my truth, rejecting this voice inside me that has been whispering in the moments when I get quiet, "Is it time yet for me?"
I've been talking a lot about the journey to come home to myself in this newsletter, but until that moment on the beach, I hadn't fully arrived.
It was as if I had journeyed around the world only to stand at the front door, hand outstretched, with this little voice inside me on the other side wondering, "Are you going to come in?"
That moment on the beach I cried because it was the first time I made the commitment that come hell or high water, I was going to do it.
After college, I went into journalism. I had always been a good writer, and I enjoyed writing, but I quickly learned that as a young journalist, no one really cared to give me the opportunity to use that skill. I had to pay my dues churning out what essentially amounted to wire stories. Think: "Florida man apprehended for starting a dumpster fire; claims it was 'the only way to cook rogue gator'" (yes, that headline is way more fun than what I was actually assigned, which was who-what-where stories that today could be regurgitated by AI).
I got hired by a publication in Washington, D.C., reporting from the office of every journalist's wet dream: the Watergate. I was paid in adrenaline, self-importance, and the promise of stardom. But everyone around me and above me seemed kind of miserable.
If this was a dream, why was I waking up every day feeling like it was a nightmare?
I moved into documentary film, which allowed me to travel the country, talk to real people, and be creative again, which is why I stayed in the profession for almost a decade. I relocated to New York City for a job, then found fulfillment and success in freelancing. The work I did actually mattered in the lives of real people; a documentary I made for the Wall Street Journal helped a family in need recover from a hurricane. I gave all of myself to the work; I lost myself along the way. All the while I'd been struggling with health issues that started in D.C., until one day I was forced to reckon with whether my career was meant to kill me.
My body knew before my mind caught up. When I started traveling in the summer of 2022 and people asked me what I did, from the very beginning I said, "I used to be a documentary filmmaker." I don't know how I knew, or even why I was so certain in saying it. I just knew. I knew I wasn't going back to it, at least not full-time, but I didn't know what I was going to do instead.
Finding yourself is going to cost you your old life. But you were already paying the price for renting an identity that wasn't yours to own.
I was no longer a caterpillar but not yet a butterfly. After four years in the cocoon, I'm finally ready to admit it.
I am moving to Chicago to pursue acting.
And I don't care how many of you think that's a terrible idea. "You'll be poor." I'm rich in experiences, and turns out, that's what matters to me. "You're too smart for that." The greatest artists in history are geniuses. "You're not pretty enough." Luckily it's 2026 and that's not a requirement anymore.
How you define your dream changes what counts as failure.
There are as many reasons not to chase your dreams as there are people warning you of the risk of failure. If your dream is to be famous, yes, you might fail. If your dream is to act, well, it's pretty hard to fail isn't it? There's plenty of acting opportunities, through classes, improv groups, community theatre.
But even if your dream is to be famous, you know the guaranteed way to fail? Not trying. So why not risk trying?
Shame. We don't want to be seen trying and failing. But shame is an emotion that arises to protect us from doing things that will lead us to rejection. Being rejected had real consequences for survival in our tribal days as humans.
Our fear of rejection is our nervous systems trying to protect us from isolation and death.
When I was younger, I desperately wanted to be accepted and loved. I did what my parents said because I wanted their approval and support. I believed all of those reasons that they and other people gave me when I was graduating college and deciding not to pursue acting. Perhaps most importantly, I sensed that I didn't have the mental wellbeing to withstand the pressures of the industry, and that I had no more left to give.
Life has a funny way of giving you exactly what you need to go do the thing you came here to do. After living a life worthy of a memoir and in all likelihood a movie or show by my early 30s, I have a lot now to give. And I have toolbox to handle just about anything that comes my way. Not to mention that no matter what is left to come – I'm pretty sure I've already been through worse.
On that beach in the Gili Islands, I reflected on all of the life that I have lived. I asked myself, if I were to die tomorrow, would I have any regrets? And I did, in fact, have one: it was that I never really gave myself a shot at acting.
I didn't want to die knowing that I never believed in myself enough to truly be me.
If life is about choosing which mountains to climb, acting is the mountain that I want to climb for the rest of my life. With journalism, I was looking up a ladder I didn't want to climb. With acting, I'm not looking up a ladder at all. There's no destination, only a beautiful trail where every stop along the way is something wondrous to look at and explore.
Acting is the embodiment of everything I've spent my whole life circling around: the study of what it means to be human, to be alive.
That photo you see on the homepage of this newsletter? The one that makes me a liar? I took it three years ago after an audition I taped in Bali. My expression is a reflection of me, in that moment, living in my fullness. I don't want who I am to be a person I only let come out to play every once in awhile.
This is what makes me feel alive, and I'm no longer going to pretend to be anything less than alive.
In the year since I made that decision on the beach, I've taken intentional steps toward this path, and doors have been swinging open left and right.
Last November, I applied for the Jack Straw residency to do an audio-video performance of my memoir, submitting an audition tape with it, and found out by February that I was selected. In February, someone heard I was doing this and invited me to try improv for the first time in my life. In March, I did a 300-hour yin yoga and somatic movement teacher training, to deepen my toolkit both as an embodied actor, but also to broaden what I can teach, both meditation and movement classes. In May, someone at improv invited me to try standup comedy – the same week another person saw me perform a piece from my newsletter and told me I'd be great at standup. In July, I met a woman through standup who had her own one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – the next day, I had a call with an acting coach from Jack Straw who suggested I might turn the memoir into a one-woman show... and take it to Edinburgh.
The underground comedy scene in Bali.
People keep coming to my comedy shows and reflecting back to me how alive, radiant and magnetic I am on stage. They tell me my comedy makes them see their own lives in a new light. They ask me how I seem so confident and grounded on stage.
I'm not performing. I'm not faking it til I make it. And in a shock even to myself, I'm not nervous. My nervous system has nothing to be nervous about, because I'm finally living my truth.
When I step on that stage and take the mic, I feel home. I am doing the thing that I was born to do.
And my body knows it. ✨
Clara Ritger
UPDATE: I added pictures and videos to this post from my time in the Amazon. Click to check out my purse made from leaves, and float along the river with me and the tribe.
