A Speech Therapist Abroad

What No One Tells You..

I grew up my whole life in Australia, in a Dutch-Indonesian family. I spent a lot of time growing up in Bali and always felt deeply drawn by heritage, memories, family and a general pull to life here. It was something I always knew I wanted to come back to and explore in a deeper way, but I never quite imagined it would look like this!

The honest version of why I left Australia

I had built a genuinely wonderful life in Australia. Working a career I loved, living in a home I adored, surrounded by incredible friends and family. By most measures, I was extremely comfortable just a few years after graduating. By no means did I leave because I hated my life, but the opposite. I left because I loved it… and it was still burning me out.

I had built an early career that I was very proud of. Even now, I think fondly of my first few years in the field and sometimes even miss it. After graduating, I went straight into a community speech role working with urban Indigenous populations. It was a role I was extremely passionate about; meaningful, complex and a steep learning curve as I developed my clinical experience, knowledge and skills. And then, only a few years in, I hit a wall. It took me by surprise because it was not something that I felt gradually weigh on me, but rather a sudden and overwhelming sense of exhaustion. I was emotionally and physically exhausted in a way that was starting to take a real toll on my health. Burnout is something extremely common within the speech pathology profession, and although it was spoken about by mentors and peers, experiencing it was far more difficult than I had expected.

I loved my life so incredibly much, but I needed a significant and physical change to properly disconnect, reset and find a new way of doing this work I love. To some it may seem drastic, but for me, I felt physical relocation was one of the only ways to properly shift how I felt. Leaving something extremely comfortable is very scary and it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was without a doubt the right one.

Taking the leap

An opportunity came up to relocate, and I seized it. It felt like a door had appeared in the wall that I had just been staring at for so long. The only thing left was to find work that aligned with my career goals. I considered telehealth, applied for a few things, but what I really wanted was to work on the ground in Bali. So I took a leap of faith and without even knowing if she was hiring, I reached out to Aly, the founder of BSLC, on LinkedIn, essentially just hoping for the best. The timing was absurd, and she was looking to expand at exactly that moment. I was insanely lucky.

What surprised me about the work

It took time to build my caseload in Bali, which was actually such a gift and something I am now really grateful for. I started by taking on some of Aly's clients, which gave her the space to focus on growing the business while I found my feet and sank into life here. That slower start meant I could build my life in Bali alongside my career rather than being thrown straight into the deep end.

I found community faster than expected, and it wasn’t long before I felt I had built a whole new life, beautiful and full. The caseload here is really unique - multilingual families, multicultural backgrounds, children navigating communication across two or three languages simultaneously. As someone who grew up between cultures and languages, I never imagined I would have a job in my field where I could work in a way that draws upon my own cultural and linguistic experiences so specifically. I even get to work with clients in Dutch, Indonesian, and English - sometimes at the same time!

The work is busy enough to feel meaningful and free enough that burnout does not feel like an inevitability. That balance, which felt impossible to sustain in Australia, is just the reality here.

The hard part

If I am being honest, Bali is transient and fluid in a way that is both its greatest gift and its greatest challenge. Work here is not contained to nine to five. Boundaries are harder to set and structure doesn’t come from the outside world the way it does in Australia, it has to come from you. A lot of speechies I know, myself included, are very type A, and adjusting to the chaos of Bali is something that takes time. I also must say I sometimes miss being able to do a full grocery shop in one place.

But… the other side of the coin is that the flexibility and freedom that comes with working here has given me back something I did not realise I had lost. In Australia, by the time the working week was done and I had seen my family or friends and ticked off all the life admin, there was very little left. Time to myself came at the expense of connecting with my community or feeling accomplished in my career. I think this is largely what contributed to my burnout. Here, in a single week I can workout everyday, spend meaningful time with my friends and family, go to the mountains, visit a smaller island or beach down south, get a massage between clients, eat extraordinary food, and still feel like I showed up properly at work. My week feels full of my own life and not just full of obligations.

Two years later…

I had no idea how long I would stay when I arrived. I kind of just told myself I would see how it felt and go from there. Here I am, two years later, still waking up with gratitude every morning. This big, scary decision I had made truly paid off tenfold. It gave me back my health, gave me a career that feels sustainable and alive, and it gave me the connection to culture, community, and language that has been part of my identity my whole life.

I would do it again without hesitation. If my story resonated with you and you feel a pull in the same way I did - maybe now it’s YOUR lucky timing. BSLC is still growing, and we are now looking for another speech-language pathologist to join our team!