From Freedom to Freelance: Leaping off the Corporate Carousel to Pursue My Dreams.
“The bedrock of experience is not made up of the family or work, of what others say or think of you, but of moments when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.” ~ Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
Can you recall a moment in your life when you decided to follow your dreams, when you reached a tipping point and leapt out of a lifestyle that no longer nourished you?
Can you remember the fear and exhilaration as you perched on the precipice of change, wanting to jump but not trusting if the ground beneath could support you?
If your toes have never shuffled to the edge of such a precipice, then be sure that your time will come.
My time came in the South Australian desert one night, while nestled alone in the rocky embrace of Wilpena Pound. I lay motionless, gazing at the stars. They spoke silently to me. They mirrored a message that I didn’t want to hear.
In that moment, I knew I had to change everything: my job, my relationship, and my lifestyle. The thought of following my dreams was as daunting as it was liberating.
I’d always dreamt of being a freelance travel writer, but my writing CV was lackluster to say the least. I was working a dead-end call center job at a major financial institution where I spent my days liaising with mortgage brokers about their clients’ loan applications. Every single conversation revolved around money and the desperation to acquire it.
In Latin, the word mortgage means contract ’til death. Some of my co-workers took this a little too literally. I was in the lift one Friday afternoon when an overweight colleague stepped in. His eyes were at half-mast, as if his brain had been temporarily switched off for maintenance repairs.
“Anything planned for the weekend?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he replied. “I’ll be back here in 48 hours.”
Welcome to the next 40 years of your life, I thought as the lift descended. Surely there had to be other, more enjoyable ways to fill the coffers without spluttering through existence.
You could tell how long somebody had worked at the bank by how pale and fat they were. We may have been deprived of direct sunlight, but we did have sprawling city vistas from our twenty-first floor perch. The view did nothing but tease me. I stared at sun-drenched horizons and the freedom of floating clouds.
Then the phone would ring and I’d be sucked back into my listless cubicle, back into a world where I was numbed by numbers and lost amid the jargon of home loans.
Everything has a tipping point. The Universe was doing its best to get me out of the bank. One day, I scored -37 out of 100 while being monitored on a call. My supervisor, or Viper Tongue as she came to be known, began delaying sending off my timesheets so that I wasn’t paid on time.
Fears of losing the security of a regular income and the sanctuary of my Northcote flat kept rooted me in stagnant fear.
But my health was suffering. Constant stress induced volcanic bursts of reflux. Some belches were so hot that they sent me into coughing fits. An endoscopy revealed that I had a swollen lower oesophagus and lacerated upper stomach.
I was on the verge of spontaneous combustion.
Ironically, the day I decided to quit the bank was also the day they decided to fire me. In hindsight, I can see that Viper Tongue’s vindictiveness actually did me a massive favor; it was the kick up the backside I needed to pursue the kind of lifestyle I really wanted.
The sun sank over Melbourne as I stepped out of the stock exchange building. It was Friday night and the metro hive was abuzz. As I walked through the streets, the smile I’d had on my face since resigning started to fade and a sudden surge of heartburn sent me into a coughing fit.
It was time to step into my dream job as a travel writer and the thought petrified me.
Was my writing good enough to even be published? Who was I going to write for? And how was I supposed to fund my travels and make a profit, let alone break even?
It seems that whenever you take a leap off the precipice and flail into a world of change, the Universe rewards the risk and responds by throwing you a lifeline.
That night, at a house party, I bumped into a friend who told me about a gay Islamic detainee who was languishing in Villawood Detention Centre. Since his incarceration, he had developed a heroin addiction to help him get through the days.
She told me of his plight for asylum and how his father and brother would kill him if he dared return to Pakistan, which the Australian government were threatening to do. She offered to set up an interview with him. And so, less than four hours after leaving the bank, my first freelance story had literally fallen into my lap.
Create the space, and the opportunities will come.
Within six months of my trip to Wilpena Pound, I’d left my job and my relationship, and was on the road to Sydney in pursuit of my first freelance story. Villawood Detention Centre was a foreboding place to start. Barbed wire fences and concentration camp-like watchtowers rose ominously; I felt totally out of my depth.
The detainee was a withering and nervous wreck, and hearing this man’s story put my life into perspective.
Suddenly my concerns of leaving a relationship and making a living from freelance writing seemed trivial. There were no serious consequences if my writing career didn’t pan out; the detainee faced an honor killing if his application for asylum was rejected.
My world changed upon leaving Villawood. I was determined to make the most out of my freedom, and for the next five years I traveled the world with blind faith, forging a niche as an adventure travel writer and even winning an award from the Australian Society of Travel Writers.
I went to all of the places I’d dreamt about while working at the bank. I hiked along a supposed yeti migration route in Nepal, in search of a Sherpa who claimed to have had a firsthand experience with the elusive ape-men.
I kayaked around the world’s largest saltwater lagoon — Marovo — in the Solomon Islands, paddling to isolated villages to meet the descendants of notorious headhunters. I hitchhiked with Romanian nuns to villages that felt like they were still in the 16th century. And I delivered picture books to a remote Lao village where some of the children had never seen books before.
Following my travel dreams revealed facets of my personality that lay dormant in the comfort of my usual day-to-day existence back home. It gave me a perspective of who I was and how I fitted into the world’s jigsaw puzzle.
Most important of all, my new life enabled me to mold a lifestyle where work and pleasure merged in joyous juxtaposition.
This, to me, is the meaning of true freedom.
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David Cauldwell is a visionary artist and raw dessert chef, and has been a freelance travel writer for seven years. He has been published in a variety of publications both in Australia and overseas. In 2010, he won an award from the Australian Society of Travel Writers for Best Adventure Story. He has a degree (with Honors) in Linguistics, a Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing from RMIT, has authored three travel guidebooks, and once wrote his own dictionary (all 29 words of it!) that pertains to places of speech articulation. Nobody bought it, but at least he learnt that the alveolar ridge is located in the mouth and not somewhere in the Pyrenees. He lives in country Victoria next door to a goat.
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