The Business of Being Free — Post 3 - The System Doesn't Want You Free. It Especially Doesn't Want Women to be Free
He exists in every country I have ever set foot in. Turkey just happened to be where I met four of them in a span of three months (not counting the numerous other interactions)
Istanbul, Türkiye. May 2026. The city where the packages stayed and I kept moving anyway.
I Did Not Plan To Write This From Istanbul
I planned to write it from the road — somewhere past the Georgian border, dog in the back seat, the work done and the passport stamps fresh. That was the plan. Turkey had other ideas. Or rather, a particular kind of man did, and he exists in every country I have ever set foot in. Turkey just happened to be where I met four of them in a matter of months.
This is the post about him. About the type. And about what it actually costs a free woman to move through a world still run, in its small daily mechanics, by men who quietly believe she shouldn't be.
I'll give you every logistical detail too — the customs trap, the shipping mistakes, the holiday week that swallowed everything — because I promised you the good, the bad and the ugly- which I’ll refer to sometimes as “the frequency.” But understand from the first line: this was never really about packages.
The Setup
Two DHL shipments, both stuck. One from our veterinarian in Athens — titer test results, the documents that determine whether our dog can legally board a flight or cross a border. One from San Francisco — a checkbook, debit cards, and my son's apostilled school records, and his apostiled original birth certifiate required for his university enrollment abroad.
I shipped them to my Airbnb host's name at his building, because I'm a foreigner without a registered Turkish address. Standard practice. I'd researched it. What I hadn't accounted for: the building name read as a business to Turkish customs, which triggered a corporate tax ID requirement no one could satisfy. One package cleared. One was flagged. And the national holiday week — when the entire country closes for days — had already begun.
I didn't know about the holiday. My host did. He didn't mention it. Had he CHOSEN to help me, he would have been able to impart that knowledge to me, even if just because he was translating DHL Express Turkiye instructions on how to gain access to my packages.
The Disappearance
Monday night I sent him everything- the Monday the packages were supposed to be delivered to his address that day and weren’t. The urgency, the contents, what was at stake for my son and our dog and our legal exit before our visas expired.
His reply: "I will now read everything you have written and get back to you."
He didn't.
Not until Airbnb contacted him days later. By then the facilities had closed for the week. No deliveries, hardly any restaurants opened, nothing to do but sit there and wonder how the hell I’m going to exit the country with my son and 35 kg dog without the titer test; with a schedduled check out on Saturday before the holiday ends. Nothing was going to be fully functional until the next Monday. Following the failed delivery on Tuesday alone I was in five taxis across Istanbul, calling every DHL number that existed — Turkiye doesn't answer — until I reached DHL Russia, then DHL Netherlands, because that is what it took to find one live human being who was actually doing their job and answering the damn phone. After so many rides in the taxi which amounted to $200 and trying to reach the customer service since the night before via chat and phone calls, I finally reached the right facility for ONE of the two packages, one hour after it closed early for the holiday. Normal closing: 6:00pm (18:00). That day: 4:30pm (16:30). I cannot put into words the emotions that ran through my body and mind. Thanks to my belief system and my refusal to ever give up I knew I’d have to go into beast mode.
Let's Talk About the Emojis
Here is a small thing that was not small.
Every message from the host team arrived wrapped in emojis. Little sprouting branches. Hearts. Four-leaf clovers. Tangerines. Hands forming a heart. "Dear Yaritza" and a wilting flower of false sympathy. I even told them, at one point, that I liked the emojis.
I lied. They unsettled me from the first day. I don’t know why I told a white lie like that. I despise lying. I think it was my way of pointing them out.
I understand now why. The emojis were doing a job. They were there to soften refusal into warmth, to make silence look like care, to coat "we will not actually help you" in enough sugar that protesting it would make me look like the unreasonable one. It is the digital-age version of a smile that does not reach the eyes. The words said whatever you need, we are here for you. The actions said you are on your own, and if you name that, we will be hurt by you.
Vadim Zeland, in Reality Transurfing, calls these structures pendulums — energy-informational systems that survive by feeding on your emotional reaction. The pendulum does not care whether you agree or rage; it only needs you to engage, to pour your energy in. And the way you defeat a pendulum is not by winning the argument. It is by refusing to feed it. By documenting, moving, and acting while declining to hand over your fury as fuel.
So I stopped arguing. I documented. I moved. I acted.
As I have done too many times to count I took the rest next 6 days of their holiday and went to work on booking my son’s flight with the dog, finding a crate, and finding a boarding place in Busan for Midnight. My son has recently started helping me with the logistics because I finally let him. I couldn’t do this huge task of leaving Turkiye who was gripping me with its mightiest patriarchal and religious force and reaching our favorite and much anticipated destination of Busan, South Korea. He and I split our tasks to pivot from road trip to Batumi, Georgia to flight to ROK. Simply because I felt like we needed to stop postponing the destination. Especially since we had just moved my son’s University enrollment in Busan from June to September while we were in Kalkan.
They questioned his little time left on the passport (expiring September) so we needed to get to Busan to renew it as Turkiye also made it extremely difficult to book an appointment at the US Embassy in Ankara. We finally booked it but there were no decent digital nomad stay in Ankara that wouldn’t cost us a ridiculous amount of money. Side note- I was glad when I experienced yet more chimney smoking. The entire nation is up in smoke and it is not an exxageration. My son Josiah who spent two weeks with us in Kas said the first thing he smelled when he stepped out the airport was cigarrette smoke. That should paint the picture for you.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Once we succumbed to the idea that it was going to be impossible for Midnight to live with him in Busan, we needed to find a farm-like boarding place where he could live with other dogs, have play time, exercise and where Jovan could visit him. This way Jovan could focus on his startup and his schooling. I had thought of this many years back when I had both family dogs and I wanted to take off traveling. I searched for places they could stay. We boarded them before during shorter trips in regular houses and regular dog day care facilities. It was very hard to board Nala because she’s a pitbull and was not spade (which if you research deep enough, past the mainstream programming and bullshit, you’d learn that it is not good for their health to do that. Nala lives in Puerto Rico with my oldest son, Tristan). Anyhow, we needed to do all of this by Saturday when it was our check out. Why hadn’t I done it before? Many different reasons I don’t care to share. No matter how hard I try to be early and proactive with our exiting plans it just always ends up happening during the last week- two if I’m “lucky.”
It’s all part of the adventure. What was bothering me is that now we had to fly, not drive across borders, and the costs were substantially higher. Because those original plans were destroyed for no reason whasoever. Only because the host was a greedy jerk wanting to make money off foreigners without having to help them past a delivery of a gallon of water, some condiments and a few supplies.
The Type
This is not, in the end, about one host. By the time you read this I will have checked out and left my honest review. This is about a type — and I have now met him in Italy, in Greece, in Bali, on California Zoom calls, and four times in Turkey alone, not counting the ones I made contact with just in passing. This behavior disgusts me every time I think of it. Who do they think they are looking at me and treating me like “who do I think I am?”
In 1985, two clinical psychologists, Dr. Connell Cowan and Dr. Melvyn Kinder, published Smart Women, Foolish Choices. It was ahead of its time. They catalogued the men intelligent women keep mistaking for safe, and they gave one of them a name I have never forgotten: the Pseudo-Liberated Male.
He is the man who has learned the vocabulary of equality without absorbing any of its substance. He says the right things. He posts the right things. He surrounds himself with the language of progress and community and “we're here for you.” And then the moment a woman needs something that costs him real discomfort — a phone call, a signature, an inconvenient half hour — the performance drops and the much older instinct underneath it takes over.
That same book has a chapter titled, plainly, “How Men Respond to Power in Women.” (In my case, my power is my freedom. I am a very free person traveling the world running my businesses from my suitcases, my laptop and my phone. It says it in my bio’s). Because the authors understood forty years ago what I was living last week: that a certain kind of man does not experience a self-possessed, free, unaccompanied woman as a peer. He experiences her as a problem. As a thing slightly out of its proper place.
And when I named his silence — calmly, in writing, with timestamps — he did exactly what the type does. He did not apologize. He positioned.
"I'm a lawyer and my team are legal advisors…" "Frankly, I want you to know that it is not appropriate for a kind person like you to evaluate the review…” I had a week left. No one was discussing reviews. Why are you bringing them up? Because that is all he cared about. This was a new Airbnb location in his roster and it only had one review before me. A new AirBnB needs three to be able to “prove themselves” and raise prices to ridiculous, unfair amounts.
My response was “what does being a lawyer have anything to do with it? This is not a legal issue. Unless you want it to be…..this was a simple request and your ignoring it has caused serious delays and complications to my travel plans. I now have to wait until DHL reopens on Monday and I check out Saturday…… ” I said “You’re right, I am a kind person. My honest and transparent review will be just that and it doesn’t change that I am a kind person.”
Don’t f’ing threaten me and gaslight me. If there is one thing about me is that I am NOT afraid one bit of the law. I question and challenge unreasonable authority. Laws are created to maintain a civilized society. It’s not supposed to be the “end all, be all” in a person’s life. It doesn’t encompass morality. It doesn’t even guarantee morality. It’s just there to prevent chaos. The law is dirty but it’s necessary. Once in while it works in our favor- only after much turmoil. It is not “innocent until proven guilty.” In our society it really is “guilty until proven innocent” in and out of the court. I am a moral person NOT because of the law, but because that’s who my Soul is and that is what I choose to be in this lifetime. Not because laws exist. Sadly, that’s not the case for most of the population. They need law and religion to exhibit even a pinch of morality….and I’m being generous. Much evil hides behind religion and law. What’s the proof? History people. HIS-story. Just look at it.
I followed up that message with replying to all my messages that went unaswered. They literally cherry picked which messages to reply to. The cherry picking became less and less as the checkout got closer.
Since the posturing and threat and gaslighting didn’t work, now came the emotional manipulation: “Dear Yaritza, first of all, I wish you a pleasant evening. Frankly, I'm a little upset with you. I want you to know that. It made me sad that you made our communication, which started so sweetly, feel like it was bad. Can you clearly state what you want from me? I’d like to help you."
Mind you, all explanation had been given. I had waited many days already by the time he felt like replying. I dropped the request from requiring a signed note to just a simple email telling DHL I was in fact a guest in that apartment and that it was ok to deliver the packages, or at this point, for me to pick them up at the two locations they were in.
Crickets (No reply)
So then I bluntly asked him after speaking with Airbnb customer reps (who were giving me the runaround too by the way)- are you refusing to receive the packages in your mailbox? I need to know if you’re refusing so I know what I’m dealing with and plan accordingly. And that was his response above.
Read his message again. He tried to document that he “tried” to help me. That is not vulnerability. That is a power stance wearing vulnerability's clothing — a soft pivot from accountability to his wounded feelings, designed to make me manage his emotions instead of my own crisis. It is gaslighting in a cardigan. And if you have lived as a free and strong woman long enough, you have met this exact face, in this exact costume, on more than one continent.
Frankly at this point it’s mind-numbingly boring.
What I Sat With in That Apartment
Napoleon Hill, in Outwitting the Devil — written in 1938, considered too dangerous to publish until 2011 — described the single force that ruins more lives than any other. He called it Drift. A drifter, Hill wrote, is one who permits himself to be controlled by circumstances outside his own mind, who takes the line of least resistance, who accepts whatever life hands him without protest. The customs agent who cannot say "I don't know, let me find out." The host who goes silent because responding is harder than not. The support rep who answers a question I didn't ask and closes the ticket. These are not villains. They are drifters — and Drift is exactly what every system relies on to keep running.
Michael Singer, in The Untethered Soul, gives the other half of it. He describes a person who builds a house in the middle of a vast, bright field and then spends a lifetime inside it — decorating the walls, hanging pictures, generating artificial light — terrified of the open world just outside the door. The walls we build to protect ourselves, Singer writes, are the very walls that imprison us. Most people are not living. They are interior-decorating a cell and calling it safety.
And then there is the book that put all of it in historical context for me: Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman, published in 1976. Stone — an art historian — documented, through archaeology and ancient text, that humanity's earliest religions centered on a female deity, and that under goddess-worshipping, matrilineal cultures, women bought and sold property, traded in the marketplace, and inherited land and title from their mothers. Then came the systematic conquest of those cultures by patriarchal religion. The goddess was recast as wanton and depraved. The fall of Adam and Eve was authored to justify the overthrow. Woman was rewritten as derivative, sinful, secondary — and that rewrite is still, today, what most people mean when they say tradition or how things are done here.
I sat in a Turkish apartment, waiting for a reply that wasn't coming, and I understood that the man ignoring me and the customs maze around me and the holiday no one warned me about were all, in their small way, maintenance. Maintenance of an enclosure built thousands of years ago to keep women off the thrones we once occupied.
The enclosure is real. And it hates women like us. Not because we threaten it the way it understands threat — we don't litigate it or storm it. We simply exist outside it. We move.We don't ask permission. We cross borders with our children and our dogs and our businesses and our own authority intact. We arrive in places that are only now discovering that women like us exist — and we do not shrink, and we do not leave quietly.
For Every Woman Reading This — Awake or Waking
If you are still deciding — still in the safe apartment, the known city, waiting for the right amount of money or the right sign — hear me.
The system will not assist your exit. It was not built to. The people who slow you down will not look like enemies. They will look like hosts and lawyers and customs agents and well-meaning men with hearts and tangerines in their messages who say we're here for you and mean it precisely up until the moment it costs them something.
You will meet this everywhere there are people, because people are the system — choosing, every single day, whether to maintain the enclosure or break a wall.
The question is never whether you'll meet him. You will. The question is whether you've built yourself — your money, your documents, your systems, your capacity to act alone in a foreign country with a closed office and a language you don't speak — solidly enough that when you meet him, he cannot stop you.
He did not stop me. My packages will be in my hands. We will cross that border before the visa runs out. My son will make his enrollment. Our dog will fly.
Not because anyone helped me the way I deserved.
Because I built the architecture I needed to navigate this “men’s world” at the very early age that I noticed it.
And here is what I need you to carry out of this: YOU CAN HANDLE IT. And the more of our kind of women who stand up to these systems — calmly, relentlessly, without feeding the pendulum a single drop of our energy — the faster they crumble and bend to our will. That is not a fantasy. It is mechanics. A structure built on the compliance of women collapses the instant enough women stop complying. We are the load-bearing wall they never tell us we are.
The day we know it together and act upon it is the day the whole thing has to answer to us. The bringers of life. The portals connecting the spiritual realm to this 3D realm.
The Practical Notes You Also Need
Because I promised the frequency, not just the sermon — before you ship anything to Turkiye. Or any other country as a matter of fact:
Never use a building or business name as the recipient. Use only a person's full legal name and do what I have done since 15 years old when I learned business etiquette- Add your name in the TO and add c/o the person who lives there or who can (hopefully) help you handle it. The building name alone flags your shipment as commercial.
You can definitely ship personal contents on a business courier account as the owner of the company. Declare contents as "personal documents," never "general business."
Turkish customs is genuinely one of the strictest in the region — even locals cannot easily import goods. Assume difficulty. It has been one of the most enraging experiences of my life. Because if there is one thing I hate more than liars, pretenders, fake people and fake behavior, is beaureacracy. Well, I just described beaureacracy right there.
Zeland explains this in Reality Transurfing with a precision that I’ve been trying to describe for the last three decades of my adult life: pendulums don't just create systems — they create people to run those systems. Adherents. The deeper inside the structure they go, the less capacity for independent thought remains. They follow the script because the pendulum has absorbed their energy and replaced it with its own agenda. Middle management — in Turkish customs, in DHL, in every corporation and government office I have ever had to navigate — is this principle made flesh. They think they have power. They have none. They are the pendulum in a uniform. Uniforms lol- that’s a whole ‘nother post. And the moment you understand that, you stop being enraged by them and start routing around them.
Learn the national holiday calendar before anything time-sensitive ships or before your travel plans altogether. Some countries at one point or another close for full weeks. This is the second time I was caught off guard by an important National holiday. The first time was in 2022 when staying in an Ayurveda center in Kerala India. I was expected to dress up with their traditional attire and watch their dancing and singing celebrations. At least that one was fun and lasted one day. Not a week where the Nation shut down to all normal business right before I exited.
Istanbul has two airports plus district facilities. Confirm exactly which one holds your package before you travel — don't assume the main airport.
DHL Turkiye rarely answers the phone and even though you press 2 for English, you won’t get a fluent English-speaker. DHL Netherlands and DHL Russia answered the phones before they did. The phone system took me there. The chat was taking me there. The ridiculousness knows no bounds. There is more I could say about what navigating this country taught me — about bureaucracy, national identity, and what it looks like when a people chase a system that doesn't want them. That essay is coming. It will either make you deeply uncomfortable or make you feel profoundly seen. Probably both.
And before you book any long-term stay as a nomad, ask the host one direct question: "If an urgent logistics issue comes up that needs your name or address, or any urgent need to translate and navigage your local systems, how do you handle it?" His answer will tell you everything you need to know.
Walk Through. They Always Move.
The wall is already cracking. It has been cracking since the first woman refused to be managed. There have been many but not enough. You are not being asked to push it down alone. You are being asked to stop holding it up. Stop complying. Watch what falls. They built the enclosure to keep us off the thrones we once occupied. They did not count on us remembering. I remember. And every woman who reads this and feels something stir — that is your memory waking up too. We are not asking for the throne back (well, I am). We are simply done pretending we don't recognize it.
So the next time a man in a cardigan tells you he's sad, that he's a lawyer, that you've made him feel bad for asking him to do the bare minimum — recognize the costume. Document. Move. Act. Do not hand him a single drop of your fire. You will need all of it for the life waiting on the other side of him (and for the couple of claims you will file :)). And it is so much bigger than he is. He is not the gatekeeper. He just stands near the gate and hopes you'll believe he is. Walk through. They always move.
This was never about the packages. It was about showing you what the wall looks like up close, so you stop mistaking it for the edge of the world.
It isn't.
It's just a wall.
And you come from women who knew how to walk through them. So will you.
🌀Postscript from Phu Quoc, Vietnam — as I publish this:
As I publish this, it happened exactly as I stated here. My son flew to our final destination- skipping Georgia- South Korea (ROK) with the dog in a crate. We picked up the package with the titer test two days before he flew (we trusted the Universe and as always, it delivered, protected and rewarded our determination), he had the crate delivered to the hotel the day before he flew and he found a wonderful place to board Midnight, not 1 hour away, but 20 minutes away. As I publish this it’s been 10 days that Jovan is in ROK. The first week Midnight stayed with him in the AirBnB in Incheon, a resting spot. While there, last minute, my son was helped by the Dog Boarding owner to find a dog-friendly taxi to drive them 6 hours from Incheon to Busan. And! the crate didn’t fit in the car so the AirBnB agreed to store the crate for one month. The taxi driver agreed to drive Midnight without a crate. It just “so happens” that the taxi driver loves dogs and he loved Midnight cuddling up to him with his nose from the back seat while he drove and Jovan slept.
I flew two days after them in another airline and landed in Incheon with 5 hours to spare. I dropped off Jovan’s second suitcase I had kept for him, showered, talked a bit, hugged and kissed and reassured Midnight as he cried to me as if saying “where were you? why did you leave me?” 15 hours before, as I waited for my flight in Istanbul headed to Seoul for the next 10 hours I booked my flight to Phu Quoc Vietnam which I had just found out the day before allows foreigners to land on the island and stay for up to 30 days without a visa!!!! This was my second attempt to go to Vietnam and I didn’t have time to apply for the visa to go to the mainland. I am loving Phu Quoc like you wouldn’t believe. So much so I will spend parts of my year here every year.
Isn’t life wonderful? Take that, shitty host! You- can’t stop, won’t stop, “stopping” me! As I tell my kids half jokingly sometimes- DO YOU KNOW WHO I is???!!!! While my head tilts back laughing so hard.
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🔵 Next: The Business of Being Free Post 4 — coming next week - or close to dependant on me living my best life
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