My Favorite Butterfly Effect (and the whole reason La Siesta exists)

What is your favourite butterfly effect?

I'll start.

I spent two years in a depression so deep I genuinely didn't know if I'd ever feel like myself again. The kind where you perform being okay because you don't know how to explain what's wrong. Where you stop recognising yourself in the mirror.

And then I went to Morocco.

Not as a cure. Not with a plan. Just because something in me said: go.

I met someone there. A stranger who, amongst many others, completely changed the path of things. He convinced me to cancel my flight the night before leaving. I don't know how to this day. But thank god he did.

Salah's like a brother to me now.

The return home after that trip was ugly. So many tears. But looking back, I think they were the best kind of tears I've ever cried. Because something had shifted. I had found that happiness again, the happiness of just being myself. (That I genuinely didn't think I'd ever feel again.)

I was a law graduate. I had a master's planned. Everything perfectly mapped out on paper. And yet I always felt like I was drowning. Like something wasn't quite right.

Morocco showed me what right felt like.

I came back after finishing my degree and just never left. I refused to make that feeling an escape from reality. I wanted to make it my entire reality. I built a community there, locals, travellers from all over the world , people who valued me for being exactly who I was. Nothing more, nothing less.

For the first time in years, I felt like myself.

That decision, that one trip, that one person who made me cancel a flight, that's the butterfly effect that changed everything. And it's the whole reason La Siesta Project exists today.

Because if that shift happened to me, it can happen to you too. Whatever that shift looks like for you.

Loads of love, Inés