Sixteen Years to Understand a Wish

« Travel the world and the seven seas. » I ended my last article saying that the magic of a true wish, one that carries the seed of a deep shift, is that it comes through you.

Jun 04, 2026

1. The Wish

« Travel the world and the seven seas. »

These words arrived one evening in August 2009, in Saint-Tropez, while visiting my mother. At a party on a yacht, my friend Hope handed me a candle, asking me to make a wish. I closed my eyes, and I heard. Not a thought. Not a reflection. A clear voice, from somewhere else, or perhaps from deep within me, a place I had never visited.

For sixteen years, I believed this wish was about traveling. About seeing the world. About filling a sabbatical year with discoveries, landscapes, encounters.

But the wish already knew what I had yet to understand.

It didn’t say “go see the world.”
It said journey: cross, explore, discover.
But not continents. Yourself.

I obeyed without knowing it. The very next day, everything fell into place. My Amsterdam apartment found tenants for a year. I suddenly had an entire year to fill. Then a friend told me: “You have to come to Israel. You have Jewish roots, you need to see this country.” Honestly, my first reaction was: “What the hell would I do in Israel?”

But I started with a trip to Morocco and Tunisia with my mother, a return to roots, to origins. Then I went anyway. December 9, 2009.

And everything changed.

2. The Surface Intention

Israel. The unexpected.

From the plane, around noon, I saw Tel Aviv for the first time. I had done no research. No guidebooks. No Lonely Planet. I arrived completely blank.

I fell in love with this city by the water. Even in the middle of winter, the climate filled me, the streets charmed me. And above all, I recognized my family in the faces around me. My father, and my grandfather in particular. For the first time, I let that Jewish part of my identity exist in the open. Then the welcome stunned me.

A deep feeling of being home.

I found an apartment in five days. I learned Hebrew, a language “backwards.” I left Holland. At the end of 2010, I met the man who would become the father of my children. Thirteen months later, we married. A year after that, my daughter was born. Two years later, my son.

From the outside, they said: “Finally, she’s settled down.” New country. Marriage. Children. Stability.

The surface intention was fulfilled: I had found my place.
Inside, it was more complicated.

3. What the Wish Knew That I Didn’t

« Travel the world and the seven seas. »

For five years, I believed I had fulfilled this wish to the letter. I had traveled. I had found a country. A language. A husband. Children. A larger family.

But strangely, I felt an inner emptiness, as if there was still something left to journey through. Yet I had traveled the world, taken planes, crossed borders. What could possibly still be missing?

Today, I believe I hadn’t understood the wish in its full depth. « Travel the world and the seven seas. » Yes, it was literal. The world, the continents, the oceans. But what I hadn’t seen is that the world to journey through wasn’t only the one on geographical maps. There was another world inside me waiting to be explored, and that one had no visible borders.

Because the truth is that even in the life I had built, and perhaps especially in that life, I didn’t feel at home. Not really. Not in my husband’s family, of Iraqi Jewish culture, a world so different from mine. Not in the role of wife I tried so hard to inhabit. My children: I wanted them. Every day, I loved them. It wasn’t them I wanted to leave. It was the suffocation of a relationship going nowhere.

I married for love, yes. But also out of fear: fear of being alone, fear of being betrayed again. This man would never let me down, I was sure. What I hadn’t anticipated was that he would never let me go either.

As early as 2013, the signs were there. And by 2015, it was already clear: I was unhappy in my marriage and it would only get worse. It’s not that I didn’t try. I did everything to save it. But every response I got boiled down to: “Yes, okay, I heard you.” Nothing changed. I felt increasingly alone, in distress, abandoned, lost, and finally, imprisoned.

But how do you leave a life that looked so much like what was expected of me? How do you admit that you built, piece by piece, a golden prison? With your children inside?

So I stayed. Trying to leave “well.” Without destroying my children. Without destroying my ex. Without destroying the image of myself I had spent ten years building.

In September 2018, I started psychotherapy. To find the courage to know what I already knew. And perhaps also to find the courage to leave, because I didn’t have it yet.

The wish, meanwhile, was waiting. It knew I hadn’t finished journeying that inner path. It knew that the greatest voyages don’t happen by changing countries, but by crossing your own shadow.

4. The First Collapse

In January 2020, my lawyer told me: if you stay, your husband can legally keep you here until your son turns twenty-one. He was four and a half. My daughter was seven.

I left overnight.

Not by choice. By survival. Because staying meant never being able to rebuild. Never finding my children elsewhere. Never being free.

I left them. Not out of abandonment. Because the only way to keep a chance of getting them back was to leave.

Arriving in France, at my mother’s house, I rebuilt myself at a speed I had forgotten I possessed. In six weeks, I had three dream job offers, a small house near a school in Gassin. Hope was being reborn: to rebuild and offer my children a framework where I was the example I wanted to be for them. My children were coming. I was going to get them back.

Gassin was not an escape. It was a reconstruction plan. Proof that I wasn’t giving up, proof that I was fighting to start being myself again.

5. The Second Collapse

And then the world stopped.

In March 2020, COVID hit. And with it, everything I had barely begun to rebuild collapsed almost overnight. Given the tourist nature of the opportunities I had found, none of the jobs started. The house in Gassin became an empty dream. Schools closed. Borders too. My children were stranded in Israel.

Was this one of those “providences of life,” as they say? Those invisible forces that push in a direction, even when you think you’ve finally found the right path.

In the moment, I experienced it as yet another betrayal. After everything I had been through, despite my ability to create a stable situation at breakneck speed, despite betting everything on Gassin... the world was saying no.

I could stay in France. At my mother’s. Without a job. Without a project. Crying for my children.

Or I could choose not to collapse.

I left for Slovenia, to join my new partner. There was one last plane: a direct flight from Nice to Ljubljana, an hour and a half. That route never reopened after COVID. As if it had only existed to allow me this passage. Not a great journey. Not a grand adventure. Just a door opening in a wall that was growing.

Was it running away? Maybe. But it was also surviving. Once again.

I didn’t yet know this country. I didn’t learn Slovenian, or rather, I had no will to. At forty-five, everything is harder, especially a language that has nothing in common with the ones I had learned. To keep from sinking, and above all to keep from losing my mind facing the hatred, aggression, and harassment I endured daily from my ex, I found work. I looked for something to do with myself to distract from my tears, my pain.

And yet, it was here, in this in-between, in this country I hadn’t chosen, that something began to grow. Because when you stop chasing a perfect life that doesn’t come, what remains is life as it is. And sometimes, that’s enough to start again.

6. The Six Years

All in all, it took me six years to recover. I lost my legal battle, and my children never came back to me. Today, they come during holidays, but their lives are being built there, with their father. These are the hardest words I will ever write.

For six years, I held on. Not always well. Not always straight. But I held on.

There were days when the only victory was getting out of bed or not crying. Work kept my hands busy and distracted my mind. Nights spent replaying every decision, wondering if I could have done things differently, if I was simply someone who gives up.

My relationship took me four months on a boat in Fiji. I discovered AI, an infinite new playground. I tried to launch RedPill, I’m still trying. I explore, test, fail, start over.

In 2017, I had posted my very last word on a Facebook page opened for my coaching profile. Then silence. For nine years, I had no desire to share anymore. Because deep down, I was so unhappy that I couldn’t anymore. How can you share positive things when you’re not positive yourself?

During those six years, I was forced to look inside myself, to be face to face with myself. To continue and deepen the reconstruction. And above all, perhaps, to project an image of myself to myself that felt right, before it could be projected outward. When a lighthouse light doesn’t work, it cannot guide any ship.

Today, it’s done. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough. I find myself in a psychological place where I am well. And I want to share again.

A Dutch friend had described me at the end of my studies as “a bridge.” I think she was right. What I’m building today is not just for me. The Aligned Shift is a bilingual magazine with multiple authors, conversations, interviews. Maybe an app one day. It’s not my voice. It’s a space, a link, a passage for others.

Six years later, I can say it: I didn’t flee. I crossed. I didn’t hide. I rebuilt myself, slowly, from the inside. Not by changing countries, but by crossing my own shadow.

7. The Shift

So, what is the shift?

Years earlier, a friend had told me: « Tu n’as rien à faire, Audrey. Tu as juste à être. » — “You have nothing to do, Audrey. You just have to be.”

(I tell this story in my welcome message on Substack.)

At the time, I didn’t understand. I was too busy doing. Building, traveling, achieving, proving. A life of doing, doing, doing. And through all that doing, I believed I would eventually arrive at being. Being happy, being free, being myself.

On one side, my friend’s wisdom. On the other, the wish pushing me to travel the world. Two messages that seemed to contradict each other: one said “stop doing,” the other said “travel, explore, journey.”

For sixteen years, I lived in this contradiction without seeing it. Until the day I understood they were saying the same thing.

The wish wasn’t asking me to travel around the world. It was asking me to journey through my own inner territory. And for that, I first had to be. To be present to myself. To be solid enough to cross my own shadow. Before I could guide anyone, the lighthouse light had to work.

Doing Beingly.

It’s not about accomplishment. It’s not a checklist. It’s not a life you build piece by piece, hoping that one day it will look like what you wanted.

It’s the opposite. It’s inhabiting each stage fully. It’s crossing your own shadow without bypassing it. It’s letting the wish journey through us, rather than believing we have to journey through it ourselves.

Today, I live in Slovenia. I still don’t speak the language. I don’t know exactly where my life is going. But for the first time, I’m not trying to know.

I’m not building The Aligned Shift to become someone. I’m building it because it’s what I am. Not a voice, but a bridge. A passage between worlds, between languages, between beings.

Doing Beingly.

The wish knew it all along. It knew that the seven seas weren’t those of the oceans. It knew that the real journey is the one we take inside ourselves. It also knew that this journey never truly ends.

It was simply waiting for me to be ready to understand. Ready to live beingly.

And you, have you ever made a wish that you only understood much later?

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