Thoughts on the Working World, Buying Houses, and Nomadic Life

’Twas a Monday evening and the week was heading to a boring start. We had the entire week off from work. Shut the businesses down for ten days to relax. Why is it, that boredom creates madness within? For me anyway, when boredom hits me like a wall I feel like a failure, I feel like I’ve lost it all. Perhaps just my dramatic self reeling and wailing.. but really. I cannot stand being bored when there is so much to explore. Austin came home to me enraged. “We just don’t do anything anymore! What is this mundane, boring life we live? Let’s go do something!” I think he must be shocked or even feel blamed for these feelings of mine… Yet this old outdated paradigm of work, work, work has run its course. It’s not his fault. It’s not my fault. Sure, I can blame it on society and our programming as a culture. It is all a choice, and we were choosing to pursue a dream of buying a house. So, Austin created this service business and it ended up being a pretty profitable and popular venture. We do have the power to create our own schedules, which is a super blessing, yet it is our programming that we are dealing with. It is up to us to make healthy working patterns and we’re doing our best with that. To be honest, the whole work life balance for me has been something I’ve struggled with. Earlier this spring we worked 80% of our time and hardly had moments for peace or beauty. Austin had surgery so he was out of work for about ten weeks. He could schedule and interact with clients, but the actual work couldn’t be done. We got a late start to our season. Our tax bill shocked us and is still holding us back. I took the reins of doing the service and washed houses and windows by myself while he healed in a lawn chair to guide me the best ways to do the jobs. On “off days” I worked at an organic farm two days a week and ran a nursery. For me, this is a huge deal. I personally don’t like working so much like this. It is exhausting and a bit traumatic for me, especially if I’m spending all of my time working for others when I yearn to work for myself and my artist career. I know that people do it everyday and tolerate it and would probably reel at me complaining about this, but really? Maybe we all need to work a little less and rest & play a little more. We do have the power to choose what we want in our lives, it can be as easy or hard as we make it. I am still detoxing from all of this. Did we have a choice in it? Our spring list for the business was about 50 strong, 50 clients waiting to have their houses and windows washed. Bills to pay. That daunting self-employed tax bill… Completely changing our lifestyle. A surgery. It is quite shocking to go from a plan we’ve been following for the last… six years? Living in a house, wanting to buy one, settling down, digging in our roots. Then it completely changed in a week and we uprooted our life, moved into a mobile camper, and had to figure out how we’re going to pay for the transition, and how we’re going to travel, work, and live for six months out of a year in winter without any connections to where we’re moving to. We’re just a little overwhelmed here… Going with Austin to work helps me to make peace with some of this stuff. We do very grounding work and like to call ourselves light workers. We clean peoples’ homes, windows, garages and make their lives a bit brighter, literally! Today I am with him on a job after being off for a few weeks and it is satisfying to watch him transform a driveway from being a moldy mess into something shiny and new. Going with to help gives me a sense of purpose outside of what I’m doing with my art career and gives me a fresh mind in our realm of life. I get a lot of perspective about my life and how blessed and simple it is compared to our clients who sometimes have million dollar homes and more difficult jobs than us. Sure, we spent the last six years building a dream and a business that gives us sovereignty, yet since we were paying nearly $2000+ a month to rent a cabin most of our money went to that and towards the dream of buying a house, and of course business expenses. Both of us feel like we’ve wasted our time & money and that all of this was a big shit swirling down a toilet, but surely the Universe has other plans for us. In trying to buy a house we realized we definitely don’t want one of our own to actually own, and that those dreams I wrote on paper didn’t need to manifest in a permanent way. I laugh sometimes. When I make lists for my dreams and things I want to manifest, I make them. Long. Detailed. Precise. I want the manifestation to be perfect, otherwise why even try? Perhaps this is flawed thinking. But I know truly that the Universe will give us exactly what we need. On my dream home list, I wrote things like “80 acres, mixed wooded & prairie, affordable, able to travel often, lots of foragables, kind neighbors, south facing slope (for gardening), under $80K, etc.” Maybe some of you scoff at such dreams, yet this list I wrote? Literally manifested in my current life. I would have never imagined it happening this way though. Instead of a house, we got a new camper (sure, we’ll have some debt for awhile, but much much less than a house!), live at an 80 acre campground with four different kinds of ecosystems, have neighbors for half the week and the other half we’re completely alone, and you guessed it, we got the south facing slope lot with great sunshine so I could FINALLY have my own garden. And indeed I planted one! What makes me laugh even more about this situation is that three years ago, we thought about living this way, at this same exact campground. We were in Sedona figuring out our next steps in life and I looked around this part of the Midwest, called the campground, talked to the owner, and she said there was a site for us that we could live on for the entire season. Part of me wishes I would have pursued that path more, but we needed to learn about what it takes to own a house by renting one that was falling apart. Looking back on the last three years, I see now that I personally could never afford to live in a house alone, nor do I ever want to pay that price. I don’t even know if we could do it the two of us. I send kudos to the people-of-the-day that can do these things. Maybe it isn’t for everyone, I don’t think it is for me. Not right now at least. I need things to change often in my external environment to be inspired not only to create art, but to live. Where I am right now with my own business and career isn’t enough to support me financially to buy a house. Over time I know that it can, but it truly does take time and dedication, shadow work included! To build and run a creative business. It just can’t happen overnight, or apparently in six years. I am still figuring things out for myself, how I want to run my business, and working on the foundational parts of it. Even though I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration, college taught me next to nothing of how to run a business in this modern day world. I have worked for other small businesses over the years and learned how to do everything, it is time for me to put it into practice and to find my pace and go at it. I know my pace is a slow one because I am easily stressed and overwhelmed, but rightfully so. I’ve been through so much in my 20’s and I just want to rest and be assured that everything is okay. From graduating college and choosing a nomadic lifestyle, having to restart my life pretty much every time I moved, to learning the hard way that work-exchange is another word for modern day slavery, to my dad dying suddenly and having to process not only the traumas we went through during my childhood, but also the trauma of losing someone so close to you… and feeling rejected by my family for my life choices, learning how to heal the utter loneliness that comes with the path I’m on… Then all the social issues that came up during the 2020-2023 🤯 I’m just a little bit burnt out. I want peace and harmony in my life, so my business must align with that too. 90% of what I do doesn’t get seen because 10% of it is actually the finished product that I do put up for sale. I am still working on meeting my audience and finding who it is I am speaking to, yet the Universe aligns me with new people everyday. It is just slow. Slow. Slow. The part of me that needs security is often panicy because she sees that we’ve only got a few months before we move, and neither of us want to get jobs in the working world since we both run our own businesses. I find myself rushing often, having never ending to-do lists, and feeling overwhelmed by all the things I need to do to even get to the point of making money with this. For me, social media is my marketing and I know that I need to post everyday or every other day to keep it going. From there, people can find my store and buy my books, art, and my blog & YouTube channel. I am working on being monetized so I can make money from my content, which ultimately is the goal I’m working towards the most. I want to be able to make money from my content. Creating videos, writing blog posts & books, sharing photography all make me happy and I would like for an audience to enjoy them as much as I do making them. Perhaps my mind is a little clouded from all of this stuff mentioned above, I feel like I could make content that is more inspiring, more catchy. But this is where I am at right now. This is the best I can do. Stress and overwhelm are things I’m not too proud of in my life, but I think everyone has to deal with them. I’m not proud of them because I promote living simply and being stress free, yet… here I am feeling stressful! My dad always hit me with, “Don’t make excuses. Just do it.” He’s right in a way. But really? He was just way too hard on me. It bothered me so much that he pushed me so hard to “be something” even though I was a straight A student who was also musically & artistically inclined, a part of all the clubs. It just wasn’t good enough! I was just making some Instagram stories about this. About how I was good at nearly everything I did, and I still feel that way (in the most non-egoic way possible). My talent is being able to do anything I set my mind to. In my younger years, it was the arts & academics. Nowadays, I have literally taught myself everything I know to build & run not only my tiny publishing company, but an art store, a YouTube channel, social media marketing, living life as a nomad. I’m a badass man! And no one knows it. Like… I’m not doing nothing here. I know much of my internal chatter is leftover from the days we’d argue for hours literally everyday about my life path and how I wanted to live. He wanted me to become a part of the corporate world so I could create a sense of security for myself in this world, and he was right! If I did do that, I might be much better off now approaching 30. But where’s the heart, soul, and adventure in that? I think I might have died or completely lost myself and who I am truly if I went that path. I’m glad I chose mine and not gone into the corporate world by being a cashier at the grocery store getting teased by my peers and pursuing that degree in engineering I started after realizing it was totally bullshit for me. He wanted me to follow the path of suffering for fulfillment, and I wanted to follow the path of self discovery & adventure without knowing if I’d get rewarded for it, but believing in myself that one day, it would all pay off. So, this is where I am at right now. I know I need some mindset altering because I feel traumatized by a lot of what I’ve been experiencing lately. I know I have limiting beliefs, fears, and all kinds of mental things that are holding me back from being seen and appreciated, making sales and show casing my art. I know this, and will continue to work on it. Life seemed like it was organized and structured before the wave of events hit me, now I am just floating in a sea with my sanity shipwrecked, floating in the open ocean. How does one put a ship back together while floating in the ocean? Being so honest about all of this is hard for me to do, especially publicly. I’m marketing and sharing that my shop is open, there’s things people can buy and I want to sell to people who genuinely want what I’m selling. When I am open and share how I’m really doing, I feel guilty about it, and like people only buy from me because they feel sorry for me, or want to support me but don’t actually value what I’m creating. I know this isn’t the case, it is yet another limiting belief. But it is showing me that I do care about my self image and how I present myself to the world, and I definitely don’t want to appear to be a hot mess! I’m not a hot mess, I just feel and experience the world very deeply, and my experience this year has been so hard on me. Censoring myself and holding myself back from sharing my writing and thoughts is starting to suck. Mostly afraid of what others will think, and feeling what “they” feel about me sucks the joy of writing on this blog. I have much compassion for people and their life situations, but it just sucks when they project that onto me. If someone doesn’t like their life, then they should change it instead of making people who do choose great lives feel like shit. My dad was like that, “If I’m suffering in my life, you should too because THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS!” he’d always say to me. What a fucking miserable way to live. Or die I should say. As for nomad life, I will say I’m truly excited for this again because we did find a way to support this lifestyle for us in a better way even though it’s costing more. In the old days, we’d ramble around with much more debt and just hundreds of dollars to support us, traveling and living out of a tent, and allowing the Universe to guide the way completely for us. That’s how this started. My book A Year Against the Rain has allllllll the feels and experiences of that first year. Living on farms, in desert basements, working for small businesses has taught me so much, especially when it comes to self worth, and I know that I am worthy of my dreams coming true, those dreams being financially able to live this life we set up for ourselves. Never before have we been able to take our literal home with us, one that is brand new and fulfills all of our living needs. I can finally say “home is where you park it” and who knows what this journey will entail for us. Scary, but exciting.

Tell me below, dear reader, what you think of the "times," buying houses, and your personal dreams. Do you face adversity on the path of your highest excitement? How do you deal with adversity?

I hope all is well with you, friend, and I'll talk to you real soon.

Much love,