As you already know if you have been following my blog for a while, exactly one year ago I downshifted at my desk job to have more time for writing and focusing on this blog. It has been a very intense year and has brought me to the 1000 follower milestone on facebook, to publishing my travel stories in several magazines and even in a couple of books, to developing partnerships with different companies and –above all- to spending my time doing what I like most: travelling and writing.
There is this thing about beginning to turn your passion into your job: it’s additive.
So, after an emotional roller-coaster of a summer, I was back thinking about my life goals and how to make my dreams come true. Eventually, I realized that I had had the answer right in front of my eyes all the time, specifically on my blog’s homepage: ‘I dream of quitting my desk job and doing this instead’.
But, having been in the travel blogosphere for a couple of years by now, I’m also sick of the ever-returning story of ‘I quit my desk job to travel the world’.
Everyone is entitled to their own life decisions, of course, but if you follow tons of travel blogs as I do, you will begin perceiving this leit-motiv as the opposite of what it claims to be: conventional.
I’m also the type of traveller who needs some ‘decompression’ time between one trip and the next. As some of you have already pointed out, I still haven’t published half of the travel posts that I promised about my trip to Macedonia, which was in October: I’m not lazy, I just need the time for my impressions to settle inside me before I can share them with the outside.
Money is an issue, too. I don’t want to jump from one press trip to another, writing paid content and rambling about fabulous hotels and breath-taking views all around the globe. On this blog I want you to find only my honest opinions and my genuine enthusiasm. I might go on some press trips in the future, if the destination is a place that I long to visit anyway, but most of the time I am going to pay for my own trips and –therefore- visit only those places that I really care about. Which means I can’t afford to travel full time. I’m not complaining: I do it for the content’s sake.
So, if not to travel full time, why did I quit my desk job?
Because I don’t want to live a life always in the same place, doing the same thing. This was already clear to me one year ago, when I took that first step, and finally I can move forward, still pointing in that direction.
So I am not monetizing my travel blog, but I can still earn some money from my travel addiction and passion for sharing my stories, whether by freelance writing or showing my hometown to visitors.
My life-goal is still to be location independent, even if I will end up spending most of the year in Rome. It’s a matter of principle: I want to feel free to jump on a flight whenever I wish.
Speaking of which, I’m already dreaming about three big trips to undertake in 2016, which are Cape Town (SA), Bristol (UK) and New Orleans (US). If you have been there, let me know your impressions in the comment area below!
