Oops, I’ve resigned!

I’ve been writing in this corner of the Internet for a while. 2015 was when I started. At that time I had no idea that 8 years later I was going to still be writing here. I had no idea my life would allow me to make this space mostly about travelling. I was in my early twenties, and remember thinking it was hard, this thing, this adulting. It was enlightening, but stupidifying. It was exhilarating but soul-destroying. To me, Charles Dicken’s intro to the classic “The Tale of Two Cities” describes what my twenties were like with phenomenal precision:

It was the best of time, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkeness, it was the spring of hopes, it was the winter of despair”

Charles Dickens, The Tale of Two Cities

Since I can remember, I have been doing life the way you are told you are supposed to do it. I was told I had to study hard to be someone in life, to get a good job, a career. So I studied hard, all the way to my Master’s degree. I was told not to pursue my fields of passion, Arts/humanities. So I pursued science and technology… And once in the job market, I was told to keep working hard. And if I was belittled, or humiliated, to just accept it as it was. Life’s tough. Swallow frogs (Portuguese expression that signifies that you should endure the shit and be quiet, never complain, never fight back). I was told to go ahead and beyond. To sweat it. To hustle. To work hard, play hard. All of these catch-phrases have been sickening to me for a while. I never stopped. I adopted the philosophy that you can rest when you’re dead, and to be honest, that is still a mantra I find myself embracing, despite my best efforts to be kinder to myself. Stopping isn’t good. It means you’re not producing, it means you are useless. Being useless became my worst fear. And so I never once stopped to even question who I was striving to be useful to. Never to wonder if I should be thriving to be useful to myself.

Who was I without a career? Who am I when I stop?

Millennials are often made fun of as if we were spoiled children who always are so demanding and expect so much. What a lot of others outside of my generation don’t understand is that we were lied to. Unentionally, perhaps, but we were. We were told that life would be easier for us if we did the homework. If we did all of those things I mentioned above. We were supposed to have a better quality of life, fantastic relationships, and people we could count on. I would say that Disney is likely a major culprit in this whole myth millennials were raised to believe that – if you work hard, your dreams will come true. Well… but at what cost?

Two years ago I got a new job offer in a big company, all very corporate in the early post-pandemic months. This entertained me a bit. I was back in London, but I wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same. I had the best salary I could have ever dreamed of just the year before. I was finally living alone, able to afford it. I had benefits I never thought possible and well… it simply was not the same. The job did not excite me and I had challenges from the very beginning that were putting me down, destroying my confidence. My anxiety was a lot worse, depressive episodes soon came back to me. Where was the happiness I thought would surely come?

I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do – overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

This year, after coming back from my trip to Vietnam, I was swept with melancholy. I kept having thoughts of leaving London, leaving the job. But I felt frozen with everything that was happening before my eyes – my fancy corporate job seemed unsafe now, with big tech layoffs taking the world by storm, making the job market terrifying to look at. The world was again such a bleak place to be living in, it was too much. But for the first time in my life, it was not a pandemic that made me stay home and not go out. It was me. I stood frozen, too afraid of making sudden moves. I isolated myself even more, not talking to anyone about anything that was going on my mind. I had to be frugal, I could lose my job. A job I wasn’t happy with. A job where I felt stuck, underappreciated, and honestly where toxicity had reached my bones. Most of all… I was (and still am) just so exhausted. So drained. Blood tests said all was good. So the diagnosis was burnout.

So when the time to renew my tenancy contract came along, and my landlord thought it would be okay to ask me for a 30% rent increase, I broke down. Life was giving me strong signals, and I decided to hear them. I decided not to hear the voices of what I had been told, what I was supposed to do – to just keep going, keep struggling. I decided to hear my own voice instead. I realised every time I had done so in my life, everything had turned out ok.

And that’s when I made a decision. I was going to resign. I was going to leave London, the city I had called home for all my adult life, for 8 years. And no, I was not going to simply move somewhere and start looking for another job. I am going to take a break. So many buzzwords for this as well – career break, gap year, sabbatical.. whatever people call it, it’s all the same thing.

I quit my corporate job to go travel for a year.

It’s something I always wanted to do but never thought possible. To stop working, and travel long term, only a backpack, living simply, exploring, ticking off those bucket list items that I’ve been hanging to since childhood. Now is really the time. I had enough savings, my tenancy contract was ending, I was unhappy with my job, my mental health was crumbling, and well.. the job market is pretty crap at the moment, so maybe after a year it will be better, precisely when I’m hoping to be ready to reenter the job market.

I’m currently in my last week of employment, and it dawned on me this is really happening. For the first time in my life, I will be away from work or academic responsibilities, and I’ll be living for myself only. And for my passions…and I am terrified!

I’m scared and nervous… what it would be like to be travelling without an income, how will it be for me to go back to the real world after it… and what lies in my future really?

Everyone I know, reassures me. These kind voices tell me how capable I am, how I’ll do amazing at everything I set my feet on. How I’m doing it at the best time. Some tell me how they have done the same, with no regrets. No one seems to be regretting taking a break. And it seems to me that way too many people regret never having taken it.

From my perspective, there are two kinds of fears, and you should listen to both of them carefully. there is the fear that comes from the very bottom of your animal survival instinct. The one that orders you to run, as danger is near. And then there is the second type – the one that is also born out of anxiety. Different things, different situations, change, uncertainty… all of this makes us uncomfortable, makes us fearful of the outcome. You can let this fear bring you down, and immobilize you – or you can take hold of it, grab it, and tame it – after all, bravery is about overcoming fears, not hiding them, not suppressing them, not pretending they don’t exist.

I’m keen to have some time to rest until the end of the year and kick off my adventures in January 2024. In the meantime, I will still be doing some trips here and there, and looking forward to writing about them.

Love, Nic