The future is always a funny thing for me. I enjoy making long term plans, and it is my rule to never give up on a dream. Yet I prefer the excitement of embracing the unknown. This has served me well as I embarked on this nomadic lifestyle over the last years. Yet I never stop changing, and it is always better to give things up. So, right now being more important, I am moving on to new adventures.
I shared my exiting the road on social media with a brief explanation, but part of me has been struggling with building the mindset to write this blog post actually talking about it. Honestly, I could write a memoir about my experience and how all of it has led to today. Maybe I will. (Don’t quote me on that yet.) For now, I’ll keep it short and explain what’s going on.
Also, this one is just a wall of text. I try to put pictures usually, and I haven’t done one of these in a good while. Here we go!
What?
I’ve left the road. At the moment, I am staying with family in Southern California, but I am eyeing longer term plans elsewhere. I like the idea of the Pacific Northwest, but I’m going to reserve being any more public about my thoughts than that right now. Ultimately, I’m going to get a place to live and settle down to some degree or another.
This does not mean an end to this blog.
I want to keep up adventures, and I’m going to need this blog for my expressive side of that. Perhaps I’ll do some overlanding trips and actually share that again. Definitely some kind of road trips. It’s still in me. I’ve been very absorbed by the hiking the last couple of years, and that’s been mostly what this blog has become, however. Frankly, I’m kind of hoping a little bit of space might be a good thing, helping me to bring back some of what I’ve left behind over the last couple of years on here. The hiking, itself, isn’t going to stop. If anything, I’d like to keep doing more than I already am, even! I will definitely be continuing to share trip reports on that.
Why?
For the last year now, the road and I have had an extremely tumultuous relationship. I guess it is fair to say I was dealing with harassment at work, since I got officially approved for unemployment on those grounds. It wasn’t kind to my mental health, activating parts of my PTSD I really didn’t like. While the road and the trail together offered wonderful therapeutic value, I honestly have known this wasn’t working since I bailed hiking in the Sawtooths last Labor Day. My usual internal stability wasn’t holding up very well, and the chaos of the road became oppressive.
Quitting my job did more damage to my relationship with the road than I knew at the time. I vaguely hoped that taking some time off to recover from the half a year of hell and build out a new car would put me on good standing once again.
It wasn’t long before I was applying for jobs and having to seriously answer whether or not I was willing to give up nomadism.
At the same time, I’ve had another issue brewing. It has been my dream for my entire adult life to pursue a career in clinical psychology. I previously even took several classes towards substance abuse counseling before the opportunity of software development and ultimately the nomadic lifestyle took off. That dream never died, and reading job description after job description for software developer jobs, I became acutely reminded of my initial hesitation at even starting a software development career.
I never wanted to be a software developer. It was just something I did for fun, and the thought of doing it for a career sounded miserable. I really wanted to pursue psychology, working directly with humans through human problems, with empathy and compassion. Software development has largely jack shit in common with that. But the pay was so good, and it enabled a completely different dream I thought would have to wait for me to get old and retire, if I was lucky enough to preserve my health so long.
I’ve found many ways I enjoy software development. In my position of 9 years, I got to develop software with an empathetic eye for my users. Sometimes, I find that this was even a deeply important part of my position. Also working in the healthcare space, I found I was able to appease myself. It would never be my ideal career, but I could thoroughly enjoy it given the proper conditions.
However, I had to find a new job. Reading through job description after job description, it became more and more clear that all of these jobs… They weren’t looking for me. Or rather, they weren’t the jobs that I was looking for. I have no desire for any of them. I was simply applying out of absolute, miserable necessity, nervously clawing my way through interviews, and getting increasingly frustrated at feeling pigeonholed into something I want nothing to do with.
What I really want is to pursue clinical psychology. This realization became so apparent, I signed up for university and began taking online classes. I’m now on my second term already, each term being 2 months long. It will just be a start with a Bachelor’s in Psychology, trying to get a focus around mental health and addictions. This would be useful for pursuing graduate school and all of that, and of course I am thinking about that already. Ultimately, this is where I am now.
I did end up getting another job. Software development, as a remote independent contractor. I know the owner of the company from working with him in the past, and it’s another one of those perfect little exceptions that I can thoroughly enjoy. It’s just going to be my job to justify keeping me on board and helping make the company a success! (I’m not too worried about that yet!)
However, even with the online school and another remote job, the road and I just haven’t gotten along.
I set off for a few months, trying it out again, with a goal that I was going to find somewhere to settle and better pursue my educational goals, including getting actual experience not truly possible on the road. For months, I just couldn’t get in my groove. It seemed like every time I turned around, the road was rejecting me. I got more hotel rooms in that time than during any other time as a nomad. It just wasn’t working. I couldn’t find a campsite that gave me enough sun, cell, and quiet to get all of my school and job work done, if I could even find a worthy campsite at all. I felt like the last over 4 years of my life on the road had vanished and I didn’t even have the tools that got me through my first miserable year on the road any more. How was I even worse at it than the day I began?
Worst of all, none of it felt worth it to me. I just felt like I was torturing myself in anticipation of settling down by the end of the year anyway.
So, there you have it. I left the road. A spot with family for a few months opened up, and I came here for a temporary solution to the nomadism not working. The future is somewhere else, but not the full nomadic thing again. For now.
That’s a big, long winded explanation of why. And a bit of what.
Here’s to the future! Cheers!