I just got back to my room.

I’m tired.I didn’t expect to have such a hard time sleeping. I’m known for sleeping everywhere, under every condition. But a mix of 4 kinds of pillows and mattresses, curtains that don’t make it dark even during nighttime, and noisy neighbors are testing my sleep superpower.

I look outside from the window. I’m in Mérida, and the place where I stay seems more a work in progress than a cozy spot. A lot of potential, but just construction and ruins all around at the moment.

A bit like how I feel lately.

After leaving my job in November, I’m in a phase of rebuilding. There’s a lot of potential looking around but, for now, a lot of construction work. Like these missives, the street and travel photographers app I’m working on (also during these days), and the studies in New Documentary Photography. Everything wrapped in a cloud of uncertainty about what the next months will look like. For myself and the world as a whole.

Maybe you feel the same?

Walking around aimlessly with the camera in my hand helps out a lot. It gives me perspective. I walk south of my place and real raw life welcomes me.

And, when I randomly decide to walk up north following the light, a completely different world opens in front of my eyes. A shiny design district and colonial buildings that are a mix between a tourist and a residential rich area.

Just minutes away from the other side.

The same happened yesterday in Campeche, but the other way around.

The place looked like a tourist-made place. Well-maintained, with all the stereotypical things you’d expect here: arches, colorful walls. But, on the contrary of Oaxaca, no local life was happening, just tourists and people working in the tourist industry. That kind of situation that we can easily, and sadly, find in any major city in Europe where locals are pushed on the outskirts to make space to perfect tourist theme parks that picture what the tourists expect to see there.

To my surprise, walking outside the walls of the historic center, I found one of the rawest and funniest markets I’ve been to lately. Lovely people spent time exchanging some words and a lot of surprised looks. I’ve seen no tourist-looking person there.

How lucky I feel! I thought I had waited a stop in my itinerary for a tiny tourist trap.

In both situations, how likely would it have been to miss the “other part” and instead confirm the initial, stereotypical idea? Confirmation bias, they call it. It’s easy to notice and remember things that match what we already think, but sometimes we overlook or brush aside evidence that doesn’t. But it took just 5 minutes’ walk to change perspective.

Just like in life, sometimes what we believe isn’t actually the whole story. You can discover new perspectives just a walk outside your bubble.

And I fell asleep without hitting the send button.

Good morning,

— M

PS. You can tell I love markets. They feel so alive an real.