This is a story about how our whole world got flipped, turned upside down from a series of events that led us on a wanderlust journey. We said goodbye to “normality” and set out on an adventure as a family that would change our lives forever.
It all started when I was pregnant with my first child, Jordyn. I was finishing my degree and working full-time for a big blue chip company (who shall not be named) and after surviving various rounds of lay offs, my department was up next. Naturally I was not worried. I had been performing well, upper management was happy and HELLO, I’m very visibly pregnant. There was no way they were going to kick me to the curb.
I was wrong.
Despite my achievements within this department, I was laid off. Their reasoning was simply budget cuts and since I was one of the last hired, I was one of the first to go. This was the first time I realized that despite my experience and degree, I was nothing but a number on a spreadsheet to this company.
Was this normal? Why didn’t anyone in college tell me about this? Why didn’t my expensive ass degree save me from being laid off?!
I knew I NEVER wanted to allow my fate to be in someone else’s hands like this again.
Part Deux – Not what it seems
Life finally started stabilizing. My husband and I got married, we bought our first house before age 30 and we both had great jobs; but the wound of being laid off at one of the most vulnerable times in my life still played like a broken record in my memory bank. But after years of what I like to call “normality programming” I wanted to give this “American Dream” thing a real chance. So I hunkered down and gave my career a real shot and for about 2.5 years, it was pretty awesome. I was traveling, rubbing elbows with all the big wigs and making waves (good waves) in my company. But my personal life was falling apart.
My husband worked 12 hours a day so that meant that we only got to spend time with each other on the weekends. We were practically longing roommates who happened to be in love. Because of my travel schedule, our daughter was spending 3 – 4 nights a week at my mother’s house and we barely got to spend time with her.
It didn’t feel right.
We finally were making good money. We had the cars, the house, could buy what we wanted yet, we weren’t happy.
Things really came to a head when I was 5.5 months pregnant with Aria. My hectic work schedule continued and I was traveling on average 2 – 3 times a month. One morning, while getting ready for a meeting, my left side went numb.
My heart started racing and I felt like I was trying to catch my breath. my stomach started to get extremely tight and I could no longer feel my extremely active baby moving. I panicked! My husband rushed me to the hospital where I learned that I had just experienced a mock stroke. The neurologist came in and said that was definitely stress induced and if I didn’t change whatever it was stressing me out, a real stroke would be making an appearance very soon.
I was placed on bed rest for the remainder of my pregnancy and I quickly came to the decision that the great American dream experiment had come to end. I was done trading my time, energy and health to companies who only saw me as something they could use up and easily replace.
So in March 2014, I said goodbye to my last corporate job and embarked upon a life of entrepreneurship.
Broken to find who we are
Business coaching. Podcasting. Online magazine. I tried it all. We did everything we could to stay afloat but our soloprenuer income was laughable in comparison to our corporate salaries. While our perspective in life changed, our bills had not. We were drowning and in 2015 we declared bankruptcy.
The day before my 30th birthday, my car got repossessed. The day of my birthday, our gas was cut off. We were the definition of struggling.
We did everything we could to keep the one thing that was a symbol of our prior success, our home. My husband worked Uber, Instacart and other odd jobs and I spent hours each day applying for gigs on sites like Upwork and LinkedIn advertising my expertise to land the next project. Life went on like this for almost 2 years. Until one day we woke up and realized, what was the point of all this?
This home had literally been sucking the life out of us and for what? Were we so egotistic that we felt like giving up this dwelling with four walls somehow defined who we were as people? And for a time, we did feel that way. But have you ever been sick and tired of being sick and tired? Well, we were there.
We were done with living life this way. We were done with making physical things such a priority in our life that we literally didn’t have one. We were done with never being able to travel and see the beauty that this world had to offer. We wanted to spend real time with our kids and as a couple. We wanted to build lasting memories and help our kids become global citizens.
So we said SCREW IT ALL…. We were going to define what our normal was and didn’t care what anyone else thought about it.
We sold everything and decided to become a full time traveling family. We want decided to live life on purpose everyday and document our crazy-ass journey for other families who ready to kiss “normality” goodbye.
