On paper, I had the life I was supposed to want.
A good job. A lovely husband. A beautiful four-bedroom house in the Cotswolds (slightly excessive for two people, a cat and a dog… but at least they each had their own room, so… priorities). And a very impressive job title: Vice President of Sales, which is essentially a polite way of saying highly stressed, overworked overachiever slowly heading towards burnout.
I chased that life hard. Promotions, performance, doing more, being more, achieving more. Because somewhere along the way, I’d learned that success looked like that.
And to be honest, I was good at it.
But I was also exhausted.
What's in this post:
The Life I Thought I Wanted
From the outside, everything made sense. It looked stable. Successful. Put together.
But the way it felt… didn’t quite match.
Travel was the thing that kept me going. Every bit of annual leave was planned, squeezed, maximised, because when I travelled, I felt like myself again. There was a lightness to it. A clarity. A sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
But the rest of the time… something just felt off.
Not in a dramatic, everything-is-falling-apart kind of way. Just this quiet, constant feeling that I was living a life that didn’t quite belong to me.
And that’s a difficult thing to explain, especially when everything looks “right.”
Trying to Fix It the Wrong Way
So I did what most of us do when something feels off.
I tried to fix it by doing more.
More work. More projects. More pressure. More expectations.
Which, unsurprisingly, made everything worse.
It affected my health. It affected my relationship. And despite everything I was doing, I still couldn’t figure out what was missing.
Because the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t doing enough.
It was that I was doing the wrong things.
The Moment Everything Shifted
Then in 2022, I went to Sierra Leone.
And something shifted.
For the first time, I properly saw how much I had. Not in a guilt-inducing way, but in a way that made me realise something much more uncomfortable:
I had built a life I didn’t even want… and still had the privilege to change it.
That thought is both freeing and terrifying.
Because once you realise that, you can’t really go back to pretending you’re stuck.
The Messy Middle
What followed wasn’t some big, cinematic life overhaul.
It was messy.
2022 into 2024 was a lot of:
- What do I actually want?
- What does that even look like?
- How do I make that work without ruining my life?
Because knowing you want change, and knowing what to change it to… are two very different things.
Eventually, I realised I didn’t have all the answers.
But I did know this:
I wanted freedom.
I wanted travel.
I wanted a life that actually felt like mine.
So I gave myself a year.
I quit my job.
I left my marriage.
I sold my house.
Said goodbye to my animals.
Sold everything I owned.
And left with a backpack.
(No pressure, right?)
What Happened Next
And weirdly… that’s when things started to fall into place.
Not easily. Not smoothly. And definitely not in a straight line.
There were plenty of moments where I had absolutely no idea how I was going to make it work. Moments where I questioned everything. Moments where it would have been much easier to go back.
But somehow, it did work.
And more importantly, it felt different.
Now I work with safari companies. I help small tourism businesses grow. I design trips that give people the kind of experiences I was searching for myself.
I still work hard. I still have stressful days.
But it feels aligned.
And I’ve never felt more like myself.
Why This Matters (And Why I Do What I Do Now)
If you’re reading this and thinking:
“I don’t hate my life… but something isn’t quite right.”
I get it.
That was exactly where I was.
And that’s why I care so much about how people experience travel now.
Not just where they go, but how they see it. Who they meet. What they take away from it.
Because travel was the thing that showed me something wasn’t working. And it’s also been one of the biggest parts of figuring out what does.
It’s why I design trips differently.
Why I focus on experiences, not just itineraries.
Why I work with people on the ground who actually care about what they’re sharing.
Because I know what it feels like to be searching for something more… without quite knowing what that is yet.
If This Feels Familiar
You don’t need to quit your job.
You don’t need to sell everything you own.
You definitely don’t need to move your entire life into a backpack.
But if something in this resonates, if there’s even a small part of you thinking “this sounds familiar”, it might be worth paying attention to that.
Because that quiet feeling?
It usually doesn’t go away by itself.
If you want more reflections like this (and occasionally something practical when it actually helps), you can join my newsletter below.
Or, if you’re starting to think about your own trip, whether that’s a safari, a European escape, or something you haven’t quite defined yet, you’ll find plenty of ideas across the site.
Just… maybe don’t rush it.