Buying Back Time
Adeja Allen | Photo Credit: Adeja Allen/Instagram
If you want to get closer to yourself, move far away. Distance has a way of stripping off everything that isn’t you
I have found that when you take yourself out of the noise, out of the routine, out of the expectations other people have placed on you, you finally start hearing your own frequency again. You start noticing how time actually feels when you’re not rushing through it. You start realizing how much of your life was lived on autopilot.
When you step outside the container you were raised in, time stops behaving the way you’re used to. In the States, everything is scheduled, rushed, squeezed, optimized. You measure your days by productivity and your worth by output. You don’t realize how tense your spirit is until you finally leave.
But when you move abroad, time becomes something you can feel again. It slows down. It expands. It bends. You can stretch a morning into a whole experience. You can collapse years of healing into one season. You can hear yourself think without the static. You can make decisions without survival breathing down your neck. You start to sense your own rhythm instead of trying to keep up with everyone else’s.
That’s what happened to me. I didn’t just travel. I softened. I listened. I rebuilt. I gave my inner child space to take the wheel again. That sense of curiosity and imagination, the parts of myself adulthood had pushed aside, came back the moment I stepped out of the matrix.
And with that space, something else opened. I finally had the clarity and emotional bandwidth to bring the most important work of my life into the world. While wandering through Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, India, Switzerland and all the places in between, I wrote a book called Soul Custody. I wrote it in borrowed sunlight, in quiet cafés, in hotel lobbies, in beach towns and airports and Airbnb kitchens. I wrote it with my inner child sitting right beside me, guiding me, reminding me who I was before the world told me who to be.
That book became proof of what time can do when it’s yours again. I poured my clinical knowledge, my case studies, my own healing and the stories of the women I’ve held into those pages. I wrote the manual I needed growing up, the one no one gave me. And the wildest part is that traveling didn’t just inspire the book. Traveling is what made it possible. Being abroad gave me the space to reflect, to observe myself, to reconnect with my soul in real time. I wasn’t just writing about healing. I was living it.
That’s the real power of leaving home. You don’t just see the world. You see yourself. You see what you’ve survived. You see what you actually want. You meet versions of yourself you didn’t know were waiting. You remember your softness, your intuition, your courage. You learn that you can build a life that fits the woman you’re becoming, not the one you were expected to be.
Soul Custody was born from that realization. It’s the story of choosing yourself. Of reclaiming your time. Of giving your inner child a world, she feels safe inside. And if my journey says anything, it’s that your life can change the second you give yourself permission to step outside the script you were handed.
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