Who are you?

There’s a cliché that’s been floating around forever about “finding yourself” when travelling.

People travel for different reasons. Overworked parents with stressful jobs look for an all-inclusive holiday to relax by the pool.

Youngsters hit the backpacking routes to see the world.

Instagrammers search for more exotic content to stay relevant and exciting to their followers, scrolling and hungrily consuming it from the comfort of their beds.

At their core, travellers all do what they do to experience “something different.”

San Antonio on Lake Atitlan

“I thought I signed up for a mailing list for Culture Chalk events.. this is a blog? What is this?”

I’m writing about this because YOU matter, and it matters that YOU find your true purpose and role in YOUR community.

Generally speaking, bosses and life circumstances delegate titles to fill a role—all too often, with nothing more than a paycheck as the bottom line. People work, define themselves by what they do at work, and then get lost in many busy extracurriculars after work, rendering our “leisure time” leisure-less).

Edit: Admittedly, there are a few lucky people out there who love their jobs, feel fulfilled and satisfied after a hard day's work, and can come home to a family that loves them, appreciates them, and engages at a sustainable pace. This does exist and is possible with a lot of healthy work!

While hosting seven retreats back to back over three months, I decided to pause and reflect on the impact we’ve seen these trips have. We never set out to host “healing retreats,” yet we see something happening here when we introduce guests to an entirely new community and environment—and I want to try to capture it in words. We see moulds broken, transformation and rapid growth. We see shy teenagers come alive begging their parents not to leave. We see parents start sharing as much as they tell their kids to, looking outwardly and shifting towards a community based mindset.

‘Widows in the Wild’ family trip, 2025

The content we consume feeds us. Our hometowns shape us. Our families mould us. Then, our friends and acquaintances put us into boxes. Suppose those boxes aren’t stepped out of for a stretch. In that case, they can leave us box-shaped, neutrally coloured on the outside, and easily stacked into a pile of other boxes, indistinguishable from the others.

It happens. And then we feel stuck.

Getting back to basics

Travel offers us a window out of those boxes and gives us the change of scenery needed to break old habits, re-examine who we want to be, and make a plan for how we’ll become that person. Getting away from box-shaped personalities that have traditionally kept you in your (box) is a brilliant way to catch enough of a tailwind to help you start flapping your little box flaps a bit!

Leaving home provides humans with an opportunity to rediscover their nature. What happens when nobody around you knows about your country’s domestic politics? When nobody cares if you’re a Montessori/Waldorf family? What happens when you realize no one cares about whether or not your kids are wearing organic cotton? The Netflix series you watch, the music you listen to, or whether or not you’re vegan.

The trends your daily thoughts follow are in fact, irrelevant.

When stripping yourself down, figuratively buck naked, away from the possessions, materials you’ve built up around yourself, exterior façades, and subscriptions, WHO ARE YOU? It is then and only then that you will find that your daily actions of kindness, gratitude, love, hate, stress, aggression, etc., are, in fact, the actual things that define you.

This is an invitation to go anywhere new, break out of your structured routine, and allow yourself the space and time to find out!

Owen Dargatz is a father of 5, husband of 1. He runs Culture Chalk cultural retreats with his wife Christina and is writing a small paragraph about himself in third person because he thinks it might somehow make his blog sound more official.

Please do comment, share, and help us out by telling others about what our family is doing here in Guatemala. Culturechalk.org