Inside Heilsche

My mornings don’t look like those typical “doom scroll in bed” stories. 
I wake up, make coffee, help with school things, open my laptop, and drop my kids to school.

Later, I go to a café for a proper cappuccino. I’m not glued to my phone the moment my eyes open. The real noise starts later, when I sit alone with my coffee, open my journal, and let my mind wander.

That’s when my inner world becomes loud. 
Not Instagram. Not news. 
My own thoughts.

I write. I observe. I let my brain walk in circles around the same questions:

How did I end up in this island, in this structure, with these eyes in my head?

I once read a book that talked about people waking up inside a script of notifications, news, social media. That image stayed with me. When I look at my own life, my script feels different. It’s quieter, more observational. I’m not drowning in TikTok sounds, I’m drowning in small talk and cultural habits.

I watch the island around me like a long movie.

My neighbor in front asks the same thing almost every time she sees me: 
“Where are you going?” 

The café staff ask: 
“How’s your day?” 
“Busy today?” 
“Hot, ya?”

These sentences float around Bali all day long. They are like background music.
“How are you?”
“Where you go?”
“Traffic crazy.”
“Busy, ya?”
They repeat and repeat while the real problems stay the same. The streets are burned in places, the trash is everywhere, the government sucks, and somehow the script never changes.

From the outside, it’s nothing. Just politeness. Social lubricant.

The normal way humans say “I see you, I respect you.”
Inside my system, there is friction. 
I almost never start these conversations. 
I rarely ask “where are you going?” if I don’t truly care. 

For me, small talk feels like moving air with no real transfer. Just proof that we are both still here and still capable of basic human protocol. It doesn’t feed me. It drains me slowly.

But hey,, I still answer. 
I still smile. 
I still say “I’m going to the café” or “Yeah, hot today.”

So even when I think I am outside the script, I am still in it. I play my role: the quiet woman who doesn’t initiate, but responds enough to stay polite. My “distance” becomes part of the same theater. I’m not above it, I’m just a more silent character wearing a black dress under black umbrella.

How much of what I call “ME” is actually borrowed?

There is a part of me that loves order and logic. I like when things make sense, when rules are clear, when systems actually work. That’s real. That is not borrowed.

Then I entered a relationship with someone from a very orderly culture. Clean streets, punctual buses, rules that matter, people who follow systems. His way of seeing the world fit my own preferences like a glove. So his lens slid into my lens very smoothly.

Now when I sit in a Bali café, something strange happens.

I don’t just see Bali through my own eyes. 
I see Bali with a Swiss eye inside my head.

The trash, the random honking, the slow service, the loud neighbors, the messy roads, the endless “where you go?” ~ all of it is judged not only by my nervous system, but also by this imported standard of how things “should” be.

So my inner voice is not just

“ME vs the environment.” 
It is “ME + HIS culture vs Bali.”

It’s like I walk around carrying an invisible measuring tape from another country, comparing everything without even wanting to.

Loving structure actually shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not wrong to want clean streets, working systems, people who respect time and space. The problem starts when that standard becomes the only lens.

When the only setting in my head is “high order,” then a place like Bali will feel wrong almost every day, even when nothing actually bad is happening.

People start to feel “less” because they don’t match my efficiency. 
Service feels “stupid” because it’s not quick or logical enough. 
Small talk feels “fake” because it doesn’t go deep. 
The whole environment feels like it is personally attacking my nervous system, when actually it is just being itself.

The result is not power. It’s exhaustion.

I get tired, irritated, lonely. I walk around like a queen in the wrong country, always slightly insulted by what I see. It doesn’t make me more sovereign. It makes me more bitter.

And if I’m honest, it is not only my standard. It is ours. Mine plus his. My nervous system, plus an European operating system sitting on top.

It’s easy to tell myself I am more awake than others. 
That I see the manipulation, the social script, the fake politeness.

I look at people talking about the weather, the traffic, the heat, smiling with strangers, and I think, “This is all just programming. Nobody is really here.”

But this chapter forces me to turn the camera back on myself.

My dislike of small talk is also a pattern. 
My judgment of Bali is also a script. 
My “deep thoughts” at the café are also influenced by the worlds I’ve entered, the men I’ve loved, the cultures I’ve absorbed.

Nothing inside me is 100% pure “me.” 
It’s all a mix: childhood, trauma, books, lovers, countries, memes, everything.

That doesn’t make it fake. 
But it does make it less holy than my ego wants to believe.

Sometimes I like to imagine I’m separate from all this. Like I’m sitting in the audience watching a play called

BALI LIFE

Criticizing the script, picking apart the acting.
Look at them, all saying the same sentences. 
Look at this system, so messy, so slow. 
Look at this island, so beautiful and so careless at the same time.

In that fantasy, I am the queen who sees the truth while everyone else just follows.

But my reality is less glamorous.

I am still on the same stage. 
I still wear the costume of politeness. 
I still answer the same questions. 
I still judge things using standards I partly borrowed.

I haven’t written my own script yet. I just edited someone else’s and added my flavor of sarcasm.

When I walk through the streets and my inner voice says, “This place is so backward, so unstructured, so childish,” that thought doesn’t just disappear. It stays in my body.

It tightens my jaw. 
It hardens my eyes. 
It closes my heart a little more each day.

• I start to see people less as humans and more as “examples” of why this system is broken.
• I see staff not as individuals but as symbols of incompetence.
• I hear a simple “How’s your day?” and instead of letting it pass, my mind turns it into proof that nobody knows how to have a real conversation.

This is a kind of inner violence. It doesn’t hit anyone outside. It hits me. It poisons my own experience of where I live.

If I keep it long enough, I will end up living in permanent contempt. Always slightly superior, always slightly disgusted, always slightly exhausted.

That is not sovereignty. That is self‑torture with a smart explanation.

What is actually mine?
So I sit with this question: what part of my standard is truly mine, and what part is imported?

What would I still want, even if I had never dated a man from a very structured country, never left my original culture, never read any book about power?

I know some things are real for me:

• I like depth more than chit‑chat. Studies even hint that people who have more substantive conversations feel more alive, so that part of me is not crazy.
• I need a certain level of peace and order to feel safe in my body. 
• I get easily overloaded by noise, chaos, fake friendliness.

These are genuine needs.

But I also see where I exaggerate. Where I use the “Swiss eye” to judge instead of simply to observe. Where I let irritation become my personality, instead of just information.

So the question is shifting now. 
It’s no longer “Am I above this pattern?” 

It’s becoming: 
How do I live inside this pattern without abandoning myself or poisoning my own mind?
Maybe that looks like:

• Answering small talk with kindness, but not forcing myself to initiate it if my body hates it. 
• Accepting that this island runs on “Balinese time” and messy logistics, and choosing where I want to participate and where I don’t.
• Letting myself prefer structure without turning that preference into a weapon against everyone who doesn’t match it. 
• Seeing my judgments as signals: this environment might not fit me long term, instead of proof that I am better than it.

I can keep my standards without needing to crush everything that doesn’t reach them. I can also admit, with some humility, that my standards are not purely mine. They are also a love story, a cultural influence, a borrowed lens.

There is something useful in all this. 
The “Swiss eye” inside me is not only a critic. It’s also a designer.

It can see where systems don’t work. 
It can imagine cleaner spaces, better flows, more honest conversations. 
It can help me build routines and structures that actually support my nervous system, whether I stay in Bali or not.

The risk is when I let that eye just judge instead of design. When I let it make me feel like a queen trapped in a cheap circus, instead of a woman with choices.

The more honest sentence is maybe this:

I am not stuck here forever. 
I am just not fully using my power yet.
I am still standing in the middle of someone else’s script, half‑playing along, half‑complaining, carrying a foreign standard in my chest, and calling that “awareness.”

Averraheilsche

Real awareness would be using what I see to:

• adjust my daily life, 
• Or change my environment, 
• Or both.

Until then, I’m just another actress on this island stage. 
Maybe with sharper lines, maybe with a better inner monologue, but still very much part of the same play.

And that is humbling. 
Annoying, but humbling.