I don’t have a permanent home. I’ve lived in more than 10 countries and Airbnb is my best friend. I run around with 1 or 2 suitcases. Pack and unpack, pack and unpack, pack and unpack and I F*%$g love it. I make friends wherever I go, some will stay with me for life and some will forget me when I’m gone. Some have changed me forever. I have changed them forever too.
I live to see the world while building my own business and I refuse to be told that I have to “be in one place” in order to be successful.
Screw that!
I don’t have kids. I don’t have a husband and I don’t have dreams of owning a house with a dog and a car (and good old fashioned American debt). I think playing house is for lemmings. I want to see trees bigger than buildings, animals roaming in the wild, mountains that are snow capped in tropical terrains and eat food that will probably make me sick later. Gimme more.
Now that you know what I am all about, let me tell you the story of how I left my “dream” life in America to live out of a suitcase in perpetual wanderlust. Also known as the lifestyle of a “digital nomad”.
New Year, New Nomad
It was a cold day in Miami Florida and the sun was dipping early. January is usually tough for me. Before you think “oh poor you, you were living in sunny Miami what are you whining about” – let me tell you that S.A.D (seasonal affective disorder) is a very real thing and YES Miami has a winter. But let’s not bust out the violins just yet. Truth is, I was on my last year of my work visa (I’m Canadian) and I wasn’t qualified for a renewal. The only option left? Get a Green Card at a whopping 50K investment. The hoops I would have had to jump through were on fire with poisonous snakes threatening to bite my little ankles as I dangle in the air by an unraveling rope. Fat chance in other words.
I asked myself some hard questions that day in January: What’s keeping me in the states? Am I wholey and truly happy here? Is the drive to succeed as a business woman enough to suffer the fact that this place can sometimes feel lonely and soulless? Have Americans lost the art of a balanced lifestyle and only care about career success?
After nearly a decade in the USA as a Canadian on a work visa, I found myself tired. Life here seems to be all about work. If you made your fortune or if you’re working towards it. What you do for a living is your social status and friends care, but not like other cultures where friends are actually FAMILY. Dating… is hilarious. That’s another blog entry of it’s own, and food is f*g fake. Health care is a joke, there is a pill for that and that pill has you on more pills.
“To Be As Free As A Bird”
It hit me like a tonne of bricks. Leave.
Just go.
You can work from anywhere.
Your business is entirely online.
All you require is wifi.
Why stay?
Why suffer?
Go.
Be free as a bird.
My entire body… lit up with goosebumps. Everything felt right all of a sudden. I made an overnight decision that took a year to execute.
I sold my furniture, listed my apartment, told all my friends to get used to not having me around, let go of memberships and prepared myself to be completely baseless. Some people travel but always “come home”. There was none of that for me. I was going to get rid of everything. EVERYTHING. And go from one country to another without ever “going back home”. I was going to do this for real.
I was petrified.
Yet addicted to the idea.
The idea of bonding with completely new people from completely foreign cultures, possibly learning a new language, working in different time zones, the challenge of tackling travel AND entrepreneurship.. became a daunting, haunting, “I-simply-gotta-do-this” rap song on repeat in my mind.
I wanted to prove to others and myself that you can succeed while living an outside-of-the-box life. That being “ in front of people and face to face” is no longer necessary in today’s digital obsessed world. That if you feed your fantasy life, your happiness levels will skyrocket and you will undoubtedly find yourself EVEN MORE PRODUCTIVE!
My furniture sold like cupcakes and I found someone to take over my lease within two weeks of announcing it. It’s almost as if this was supposed to happen. Things went TOO well. I held a mini goodbye party, cried. I cried a lot. Got a one-way ticket to Mexico to start and booked an Airbnb for 3 weeks. That’s all I had planned.
The rest? Read about it in the next entry.
#digitalnomad #socialexposure #travelandwork #seetheworld #catchmeifyoucan
