I recently went diving for the first time, and second.. and tenth. and then… I’ll admit, I fell in love with diving very quickly. I found this little love note in my journal from after my 5th dive:
The tides pulled me in as if to tell me why the moon floods the beach at midnight. They whispered forcefully enough that I wanted more – leaving just enough air to understand that breath isn’t what causes breathlessness.
Big Blue Diving, Koh Tao, Thailand
My first time paled in comparison to my decade of underwater experience; my fear was equally as consummate as my lust. The water is a familiar embrace that leaves me no stranger to the fact that this is a door. My first stride was a deep ingress to be reconciled every inevitable subsequent plunge.
This boat only needs a brief introduction, the rocking is simply a response. Don’t tell me to slow down. My mask hides nothing as it pulls my hair and reminds my heart why I’m here. I am weighted, I am supported, I am sinking in the best way.
Rocking, responding. Thalassa rose up on the deck and grabbed me by the ankles, her sultry whisper persuaded me from 18 to 30 and then went out just as quickly as she’d come. Tease. I chased her around the island, riding the smallest of swells.
Her power surged, swelled, and disappeared, and her energy was palpable. Everyone on the island was sucked into her Bermuda triangle. Coming up for air is just an intermission. In blue there is a secret that nobody can hold on to. We touch it, and pass it up into the corporate stars and wait for it to be breathed back into our awarenesses only to realize it never left.
We can’t leave the island, nor can we bottle it into an 80 cubic foot tube. It’s here to be loved and left, wild. It’s our rope and our anchor, moored here until next time.
Sometimes, I feel like I time travel. In reality, I just don’t understand how time and airplanes work.
For example when I flew back from Hong Kong, I left at 11:30 am in Hong Kong. I landed 15 hours later at 1:15 pmthe same dayin Chicago.
Are you up for scuba?
But I’ve time traveled once in another way.
Did you know that in Thailand, they use a different calendar from the rest of the world? YES. In Thailand, it is currently August 26, 2562.
Here’s a few other super interesting things that I learned in Thailand:
–They adore their king. The late king Rama Vajiralongkorn died in 2016, yet he is still very well revered. His face is printed on all Thai Baht, and stepping on money can be an arrestable offense. What to do if a 100 Baht ($3.30 USD) note gets whisked away by the wind?
–Thailand is the only country in SE Asia that was never colonized. Thailand translates roughly to ‘land of the free’ for this reason.
–They drive on the left-hand side of the road: typically reserved for countries once colonized by Britain. However, they were briefly occupied by Japan in the second world war, and this is when they adopted the practice of driving on the left.
–There is a college for monkeys in Surat Thani, a city that I spent one night in en route to Koh Tao
–I learned how to SCUBA dive and became obsessed. That isn’t really about Thailand, but it’s notable because I WILL be going back to do it again, and I WILL be doing a lot more diving in the future in other places.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my time spent traveling, it’s that people are people everywhere.
Don’t hate in my state
I firmly believe that every person, regardless of location or culture or otherwise, has more in common with any other person than they do differences. Here are a few stories to prove that:
Story 1:
When I was in Palestine in April of 2014, I was sitting on a stoop facing the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. School must have just let out because several kids dressed in uniforms came out into the stone-paved plaza. Groups of girls crowded together, giggling. Maybe I only noticed them looking at me because I was watching them in return, but after a few moments, I felt a tug on my hair. As I turned and smiled, the little girl ran back to her group of friends, giggling. I wondered to myself, “Is it because they’ve never seen big, blonde, curly hair like mine? Or is this just little girls being little girls?”
Story 2:
In Southeast Asia in 2019, so many skincare products promised whiter skin. When I asked people about this, the explanation boiled down to: darker skin means a lot of time spent outside. Time spent outside means manual labor jobs in the sun. Manual labor means you’re poor, so dark skin equates to a lower social class. Meanwhile, tourists spent time on the beach in bikinis, ordering their drinks from people in full sleeves and wide-brimmed hats. At night, both the tourists and locals ditched their makeup and headed to the beach bars.
Story 3:
I had brunch with friends on Sunday in Dallas and made casual conversation with our server. Nothing out of the ordinary: I asked what she’d recommend between two options, and made friendly banter. As she dropped the check off at my table, she said, “You’re so friendly.” I laughed uncomfortably. “No seriously! You’re the friendliest customer I’ve had so far today.” I replied, “A smile is the same in every language.”
So perhaps we all want to be appreciated. To be appreciated and respected. To be appreciated, respected, and honored.
Xenophobia runs rampant worldwide as well as at home. I’m wearing a t-shirt today in solidarity with the victims of hate crimes here in Texas. It happens here, it happens elsewhere. But today I’m choosing to remember that we have a little more in common than we do in differences with every person we meet.
“I was under the impression that you weren’t working and taking some time off?”
“If you took time off to travel, why are you working?”
“How do you deal with the mindset that this isn’t a vacation that will end and then you’ll have to go right back to work?
These are all questions/statements I’ve gotten in the last couple of days, so I think this is a good time to clear things up and be explicit about my goals.
“When will you go back to work?”
I suppose I’ll start with what my goals are not. I have no intention of going back to corporate America. When I quit my job, I quit a lifestyle that I never wanted. I quit to pursue the lifestyle that was 8 years in the making; everything I’ve done since I was 19 was with the mentality that someday I would travel full time. I’ve known my goal and have stuck to it.
My goal, in case it wasn’t crystal clear before, is to visit every country.
Stonecutters Credo
To do this, I need time, I need money, and I need my health. I have all three right now, but I won’t forever, and that’s where the urgency of my decision comes from.
The ultimate goals lie under the ‘every country’ umbrella. There’s so much behind it, but the three under arching goals are:
I will lay roads for other people to travel who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity.
I will create a home for people who are traveling against their desires.
I will generate a passive income through multiple avenues. This will be enough to both live on, save money, and be generous.
What I’ll Do Instead
So when people ask me if I’m working, I’m absolutely working toward these things. I believe that I wasn’t put on this earth to be employed but to be deployed.
I get to spend my days writing and having conversations with influential people and doing things that make my heart happy. I think of it in a Sonecutters Credo context:
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Stonecutters Credo
In other words, every day I get to live in a way that is a drop of water, knowing that the ripples tomorrow will be waves in the future.
Life is either a great adventure or nothing at all; this adventure is a vacation, or possibly nothing at all. And hey, it takes a little work.
Y’all want to know the number one question that I get about quitting my job that’s none of anyone’s business? It’s about how I fund my lifestyle of leaving my corporate job and traveling constantly. Lucky for you, I’m not shy when it comes to talking about money.
When I started working after college, I told myself that when I was debt-free, I’d quit my job to travel. That moment came and passed three years after graduation.
When I became debt-free, I told myself that when I had a year’s expenses in savings that I would quit my job to travel. That moment came and passed a year after becoming debt-free.
When I had a year’s expenses in savings, I told myself that when the time was right, I’d quit my job to travel. That moment came while in Vietnam when a friend asked me why I didn’t just leave my job, and I didn’t let it pass.
This photo has no relevance to the article. At all.
I still haven’t answered your question though, have I?
I have some runway with my savings and am continuing to work online to supplement my savings. The goal is to not go back to corporate and to evolve my online writing, editing, and blog to a point that I am fully sustainable, ideally creating streams of passive income. Of course, life happens and we’ll see what other avenues open up to me as I go.
Also- I’ve always wanted to work as a beertender in a brewery. I might look into that soon, or look at being a barista. That’s always looked fun, too! I want to get my dive master’s certification next year, but I’m not sure if I’ll want to work in that or not. Ideally, I’ll be living a super low-expense lifestyle and in time be able to make enough to start saving again.
So that’s it- I’m making a little money, I’ve saved enough to be fine, and I’m living the life that I want.
Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘Man, I just want to quit my job and travel’. Because same.
I thought it every day for the five years I was in corporate. Honestly, I know I even thought it in college.
Yet, even though I knew the travel lifestyle was for me, I finished college, got a big girl job, and kept pushing on this inauthentic (to me) life. Why? So that I could travel.
Sound a little bass-ackwards? That’s because it is. But, hear me out: I wanted to learn from big companies before going out on my own. I wanted to experience corporate life so that I could make an informed decision. And, I wanted to make a ton of ‘easy’ money so that I could LOVE entrepreneurship and appreciate the hustle even more.
In Gent, Belgium on my one-year quit-my-jobiversary
I believe that just about anyone with the drive to do it can quit their job and see the world. I’m a white, middle class, solo-traveling marketing major from Iowa, and I’ve seen 51 countries on my own time in the last decade. I’ve been a digital nomad for a year. Here’s my story:
The Back Story: Why I Quit My Job to Travel
I decided to visit every country when I was 19. I was two semesters into university and assumed that I had gone too far (read: had too much debt and not enough earning potential) to turn back. My thoughts were that I didn’t have marketable skills that would allow me to get a job that paid well enough to both enjoy my life and pay off my debt. I held on to that belief until I graduated.
Looking back, I’m not sure that I was wrong in that belief, but I also think I’d have figured it out along the way.
However, in college I did everything that I could to set myself up for a lifetime of travel. I studied abroad and traveled solo during that time. I minimized my debt and took lots of domestic road trips. During college, I even started credit card hacking and created a savings account just for travel.
After college, I spent 3 months in Bahia, Brazil. Here’s me, enjoying my time at a waterfall in Chapada Diamantina National Park
After graduation I was unsure of what success meant to me, so I kept heading down the corporate path. I did take six months after graduation to travel to Colorado and Brazil, but eventually went to work.
And then… my wandering soul landed in a cubicle.
However, I kept traveling and accomplished my financial goals super quickly. In theory, I was super successful. I’d paid off my car and student loans in three years. I had savings set aside, owned a home, and used my 15 days of PTO a year to travel as far and wide as I could.
However, I knew that the lifestyle of working 49 weeks a year and then having to balance seeing my family and seeing the world with the other three just wasn’t for me.
So I created an escape plan.
Originally, the plan was to eliminate my debt, then quit to travel and work. After a taste of a full-time income, though, my college plan of bumming around the world wasn’t as attractive. So, I told myself that I’d save up a year of expenses (roughly $40k), and then I’d quit my job. Once I saved enough money, I told myself I’d give myself a year in my current role at work before I quit…
Do you see how I kept pushing the metrics for success further out in front of me?
Then, it all changed.
How I Quit My Job To Travel
In June of 2019, I had officially spent five years in the traditional workforce. I’d moved to Rhode Island, Florida, and Texas for work. Each time, I found a little adventure that helped me accomplish my travel goals. I got closer to major airports, had doubled my income, and was generally happy.
Then, a few things happened at work that I wasn’t ok with. Nepotism, harassment, and more were happening around me daily. When I raised concerns, I was met with indifference at best. By day, I was miserable. By night, I was having anxiety attacks that kept me up. Which, in turn, led to even worse days. I’d cry in my car on the way to work, eat lunch in my car, and spend my free time daydreaming about my escape plan.
To cope, I decided to take a two-week long vacation in Southeast Asia to unplug and reevaluate.
The view from where I quit my job – Vietnam
The Final Straw
While there, I accidentally sent a hotel confirmation to my work email, so I logged in to retrieve it. It was then that I saw a chain of email messages blaming me for something that I didn’t do (because I was in Asia?), and the demand that I’d meet with several layers of my higher-ups when I returned to the office.
I was standing in a hotel on the beach in paradise, and all the anxiety that I’d felt over the past few months flooded over me again. Instead of soaking up the sun, I wanted to run out of the lobby and into the water. I wanted my activity level to match my racing heartbeat.
Face flushed, heart racing, I was a million mental miles away from where I should’ve been. My mind should’ve been on the beach. Instead, I was two weeks in the future, in a conference room in Dallas getting chewed out over something that I no longer cared about.
Ultimately, it took the friend that I was traveling with to ask me some honest questions about why I was living the life that I was. This friend and I had lived together a few years previously, so he knew that my goal had always been to travel around the world, nonstop, while earning and income and making an impact.
The guy on the right is Matt – my former roommate and the pal that helped me find the courage to finally quit
He asked me what was keeping me from quitting my job and traveling full time. I didn’t have an answer.
There was nothing but myself holding me back from doing what I’ve always wanted to do.
So, the next working day, I called my boss from the beach. I told her that I was leaving the company, and she was supportive. She also knew where my heart was, and told me that I didn’t need to come back to the states to turn my computer in.
In that moment, I was free.
One Year Later: What’s it Like?
When people ask why I quit, I can tell that they’re looking for some juicy dialogue about why I did it. In the end, corporate and I aren’t made for each other, and that’s okay. I decided that it was better to let go of the success metrics and daily activities than to hold on and get emotional rope burn.
I was becoming an emotionally and intellectually concave version of myself, all while becoming physically convex. When I looked to the future, I saw the best parts of myself move to opposite corners. I couldn’t stomach that as a reality.
I quit my job with some savings, but they wouldn’t last forever. For real – I was 27 – my 401(k) and a years’ worth of savings was a nice cushion, not a full-on retirement.
When I quit, I was left with a whole lot of question marks. The thing is, they did’t scare me the way I thought they would. They feel more right than anything I’ve done since graduation and that feels like a success to me.
When I quit my job, I jumped without a parachute, and built it on the way down. I figured out how to cut my expenses at home and while traveling. This means I gave up my lease, car, insurance payments, and more. I cut my annual expenses in half immediately.
Life on the Road
Then, I started ‘slow traveling’. Basically, I get by-the-month leases in places rather than stay in hotels now. I can stay just about anywhere in the world for less than $700 a month, but in many places, my rent is closer to $350. Now, I eat in because I have a home everywhere, make friends, and go on budget-busting adventures regularly.
I started off by freelancing, then realized that people wanted to learn how to travel solo, so I started teaching them. Then, I built a course to streamline the process, and work with people one-on-one, too.
But it hasn’t all been rainbows and giggles.
Most of my last few months have been spent at this makeshift office at my mom’s house thanks to COVID-19.
Coronavirus killed my freelancing gigs, because nobody was paying for travel writing. I stopped traveling for five months to live in my mom’s house in Germany. I put a lot of money in to ventures that didn’t pan out.
Here’s the truth – I’d much rather be doing this than be stuck in my corporate cubicle back home. Any of these setbacks are better than corporate life, because I get to take complete ownership for every. Single. Thing.
Whether or not my work is successful in anyone else’s eyes is TBD – but what is that success anyway? Is success measured in Instagram followers, or money generated? Time spent, or things that make me feel gratified?
Are You Glad You Did It?
Yes.
When I quit, my year of expenses was my ‘in case I have to go back to corporate’ money. I still have 90% of that money, but invested it because I don’t need it as a fall back anymore.
Besides making this life financially work for me, I FEEL better. The other day, I had my first anxious night of sleep in over a year. I woke up feeling so grateful, because I haven’t felt that way in so long. Now, I’m so much more in control and in touch with what goes on in my work and life, that I can make changes on a dime to prevent those awful nights. In the past year, I haven’t cried over my work, lost sleep over KPI’s, or stressed about someone else’s ideas of what I should do to be successful.
Life as a digital nomad isn’t always glamorous – but it IS always worth it.
Success to me is what I allow myself to feel. In my solo traveling, corporate escapee, solopreneurial life I am choosing to create a value for myself that is higher than in any office. I hope that in writing this, it gives me something to look back on in a month, a year, or 5 to give a fond smile to, knowing that my confidence in these moments carried me to where I am.
