A Year in Lithuania

I did not plan to return to Lithuania.
It was not a pilgrimage, not a homecoming. It was collapse—a nervous system too depleted to keep pretending—and an unexpected tether: my grandmother’s mental health crisis, a thin thread pulling me back across continents. I told myself it was temporary, an act of care. Truthfully, I thought I had come to bury her.

But I was also tired. Tired of drifting, tired of living out of suitcases, tired of “next stops.” Since leaving Boston in 2020, I had pinballed across three continents and four countries, always in borrowed spaces, never rooted. By the time I landed in Vilnius, I no longer wanted adventure. I wanted walls that remembered me, a kitchen that stayed mine, a home.

Instead, I lived an entire miniature lifetime here.

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The house of two women

I moved into my grandmother’s house, where the walls smelled faintly of wood smoke and boiled potatoes, where her slippers clicked across old floors and jam jars lined the pantry like soldiers. Our roles inverted: I became her caregiver, her slauga, the one who cooked, reminded her to take pills, battled the bureaucracy of Lithuanian social services.

It was ancestral weight: granddaughter as mother, the woman once tucked into bed now keeping watch over the one who had done the tucking. She resisted help—scolding me for wasting hot water, vacuuming at dawn to prove her body still belonged to the living. But tenderness leaked through. Plates of sliced apples waiting on the table. A quiet shuffle in the kitchen. Afternoons where she softened, offering tea, or dozing in her chair while Zoya curled beside her.

The house was both mausoleum and garden: suffocating some days, improbably intimate on others. And slowly, it became mine too — not by deed, but by repetition. By candles lit in the evenings, meals cooked in its kitchen, Zoya’s paws tapping across its parquet floors. After years of impermanence, even this strange, inherited house became a form of shelter I hadn’t realized I craved.

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The greyhound as anchor

And always, Zoya.
My Italian greyhound, absurd in her elegance, became my muse and anchor, my shadow and mirror. On grey mornings she trotted beside me through Old Town, long legs skittering across cobblestones. In cafés she burrowed under my coat, her narrow head poking out like a bookmark. At night she curled in my lap, proof of loyalty uncomplicated by history or culture.

She was more than a pet; she became co-founder. I began to imagine Zoya Couture: silk scarves that slid through martingale collars, double-leash systems, couture beds. I tested textures with seamstresses, learned which silks slipped, which cuts suited her swanlike neck. On Instagram, @iggyzoya blurred humor with elegance until it became a boutique world. What began as a joke became a blueprint for an empire.

Zoya was not just my muse. She saved me.

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The mushrooms of creation

Projects multiplied like mushrooms after rain.

There was Jamu Juzz, the turmeric-ginger-coconut elixir I had birthed in Thailand, recalibrated for Lithuanian stomachs still loyal to beer and bread. I ran shelf-life trials, mapped EU regulations, built cost breakdowns. The spreadsheets fizzed with possibility, even if the bottles never reached shelves.

There was Ramybės Stotelė, my massage ritual carried from humid Thai apartments into Lithuanian homes. Not Thai massage, not face sculpting, but a Buddhist-inspired pause. I transformed my carpet into a temple with blankets and candles. One woman left softened, teary-eyed, weightless. That memory stayed with me. Now, a year later, I’m reviving it properly—this time not as an experiment but as an offering.

There was also Hey, Brother, the YouTube channel I started with just two videos. A place to tell my childhood story, to name the bruises my brother and I carried, to turn pain into narrative. Small, but alive, and still important.

Each project was both salvation and sass—a way of whispering: I am still here, and I refuse to be boring about it.

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Therapy, Vipassana, and the nervous system reset

Two years of therapy had already excavated my past. In January, my therapist “retired” me, declaring me ready. Ready—as if readiness could be assigned like homework. Without that scaffolding, my nervous system collapsed. I drifted, unable to move a finger, as if survival mode had drained out of me.

Then came Vipassana in August. Ten days of silence, ten days of body and mind stripped bare. My knees ached, my spine throbbed, my mind rebelled. And then something unlocked. The freeze cracked. For the first time, I wasn’t bracing against life. The fear of success—too sharp, too real—began to loosen its grip.

When I returned to Vilnius, the city was the same, but I wasn’t. My nervous system had been rewired toward trust. I began to believe again in momentum, in the possibility that I could create without breaking.

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The quiet salvations

What healed me was ordinary.

Cooking lentil stews and chickpea curries that smelled of ginger and earth.
Gym sessions that kept blood moving through varicose veins.
Lighting candles after days of avoidance, feeling order return with each folded blanket.
Zoya’s head poking from under my coat as I wrote in my diary at Café Montmartre.
My grandmother’s laughter at a television joke, rare and sudden.
Market stalls fragrant with dill, roots still attached.
Church bells colliding with techno on summer nights.
The silvered sky after rain, theatrical, almost too much.

What broke me was ordinary too:
Neighbors who never smiled.
Women who froze me out.
Projects that fizzled.
The fear of being trapped here forever.

But in between, life kept sneaking in with a wink. The stranger in Užupis who tucked Zoya into his scarf. The post office clerk who complimented her coat. The absurdity of dog couture sketches spread out next to utility bills. Even grief sometimes came dressed in punchlines.

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Bloom

I did not come back to Lithuania to belong. I came because of crisis, because my grandmother survived her own attempt not to. What I found was not belonging but something subtler: the capacity to live inside contradiction.

Vilnius was cold, and yet it gave me time.
My grandmother was fragile, and yet she resurrected herself.
Projects faltered, and yet they seeded the blueprint for my future.
I came for a funeral. I stayed for the garden, the dog, the silence, the projects, the chance to begin again.

One year later, I do not have triumph to show. I have something quieter, maybe stronger.

I’ve built capacity for life.