Although it has been a few years now, October 18, 2018, is a date firmly planted in my mind. It was a beautiful fall day in NYC. The leaves were making their journey to the ground, the air was crisp, and I was giddy with the knowledge that this was to be my last day as a cog on the wheel in Corporate America for the foreseeable future.
But this isn’t a post in celebration of how that was the best decision ever (spoiler alert: it was).
Instead, I am going to examine the points of fear and trepidation that could have stopped me from walking away from my dream, and show y’all how I reframed these fears to find solutions so I could move forward.
Now, you might not be itching to ditch your job and pick up a backpack as I did, but that is okay! This post is also for you if you’ve ever had a dream that scares the crap out of you, and you are wondering if you should do it.
Another spoiler alert: probably so.
Fear # 1: Am I Too Old To Make This Happen?
If you’ve been around for a bit, you’ve heard the story of how in 2017, I got laid off from my job literally the same day I was supposed to sign a lease for a new apartment. Even at that moment when the world felt totally uncertain for me, I recognized that I was in the midst of a shift.
What I didn’t know is that it would change my life.
I was 32 when I got laid off. Thirty-three when I decided to quit my new job in favor of traveling and 34 when I actually started my journey.
What I did is called an “adult gap year” for a reason. The term “gap year” is reserved for college students and early twenty-somethings who have only crumbs of life experience under their belts.
Making the decision to step out of the societal expectations for my life in my thirties was a big ass decision. It was at the center of my fears and a path that felt totally foreign and unnavigated at the time.
Taking a break from a career that had really only stabilized at thirty? Walking away from my grinder of a city that it took me years to eke out an existence in? Not fully knowing what would happen next?
Whew, chile! It was ALOT!
If this feels like the part of the story where I say, “but” and then try to make you feel more settled about the apprehension I’m sorry….that part isn’t coming quite yet.
Let’s lean deeper into the fear, shall we?
So, here’s the inescapable truth: especially if you’re a woman reading this post, you know that by design, we have to think about and function with certain timelines.
There are some people/women out there who have managed to plan their life out down to the minute and who have been lucky enough to have everything they’ve ever wanted show up exactly when they wanted it, but sis, that wasn’t me.
In my early thirties, I was thinking a lot about how much my future could change in a few years.
I still wasn’t sure if I wanted kids or not. I’d just ended a nearly three year-relationship that maybe/sorta could have headed for marriage (at least on paper and in our heads) and while I wasn’t so strongly tied to the idea of marriage, I was aware that a lot of women my age were out there trying to find a partner and I constantly wondered if I should have more of a focus on partnership as well.
I won’t front: It was scary to think that I would be using a prime year to go off to travel.
I was a woman on the brink of everything and nothing, but I did believe then, as I know now, that for women, there are windows of time that start out wide open and then gradually narrow.
Well, until you decide to smash the window in favor of living on YOUR terms, but I will save that for a different post!
My thinking at that time was that if I’m going to make a run for it, NOW was the time. If it was in the cards for me to become a wife, a mom, a person with RESPONSIBILITIES, then now was the time to GO.
While age ain’t supposed to be nothing but a number, the reality is that different stages in our life bring up different considerations, but who says that achieving a goal any later or earlier makes it easier or less scary?
I knew it was vital for me to use a prime year to go off to travel. I wanted my body and mind to be sound and I wanted enough time to let this chapter have a hand in shaping the rest of my story. NOW will always be the time.
What else rhymes with “fear?” CAREER!
Ladies and gents, let’s open the door to Fear #2: that I would drive my career off the rails!
The ex-boyfriend mentioned in the previous paragraph tried to convenience me that if I were to quit my job to travel, I would basically NEVER get another job.
Like, he really tried to say that if I stepped off the hamster wheel, I’d never be able to get back on.
Thank gosh, I didn’t listen.
Maybe it was him trying to deter me from leaving, or giving me advice from his places of fear, but I decided not to play into it. His insistence annoyed me, and I was determined to shake this fear off, but how?
When I started doing deep research on traveling, the questions about my career rattled me, but I refused to give in to let them scare me out of envisioning what my life could be like on the other side.
One day, I was catching up on Grey’s Anatomy when I was struck by an idea. A character in the show had proposed creating a fellowship for herself where she could have the freedom to decide which areas of work she wanted to focus on.
That scene sparked a huge “A HA!” moment for me. What if I did something similar?
What if I decided to look at my time off as a kind of “Amber Fellowship” and structure the time in a way that could serve areas of my career in ways that most interested me?
I go into this idea more in-depth in my workshop, “I’m Back, Now What?” where I teach you how to leverage your travel story, but I ended up deciding that I would spend part of my travel time helping women entrepreneurs with their branding and marketing plans which lined up exactly with where I was in my career.
At this moment, I chose to stare my fear down, and get creative about how I could circumvent it.
If you’re in a moment, where it feels like the options are out of your control, or you’re not seeing a way, stay open to ideas coming to you in ways that aren’t direct and aren’t expected.
-my fear around my career lead to one of the big breakthroughs: I could structure this travel any way I wanted, and I could structure it to serve the areas of my career I was most interested in.
Fear # 3: FOMO
I’ve made it pretty far in life without admitting one of the things that I hate to acknowledge about myself: I suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out) BIG TIME.
It’s something that I have been working on now that I have more awareness of where it stems from, but at this time, it was way more pronounced.
I wasn’t just quitting my job to go travel, I was also stepping back from my life as I knew it. I was walking away from living the way that everyone else I knew did, and at the time I had no idea how that would impact my relationships with my friends and family.
Deep down, I knew they would love me no matter where I was and what I happened to be doing, but their lives would be continuing on without me and I felt a degree of sadness and fear about that.
I was exchanging happy hours after work, for tapas in Spain. It was an incredible opportunity, but I did think about how my decisions would ripple out.
I tackled my FOMO head-on by leaning into social media as a way to stay in touch with my friends, and treat their life events and day-to-day happenings with the same reverence that I wanted in respect to my travels. I wasn’t always able to do a ton of phone calls about the little things that crop up in life, but I could show them that I was watching and that I cared.
I also built in time for the big things. In between my time in South America and my travels in Europe, I came back to the States so I could be at home when my nephew, Asher, was born.
If you are on the verge of taking up an endeavor that is going to alter or take over your life, you need your support system. The way you communicate with them might need to change, and this might feel weird at first, but we have so many ways to keep in touch these days, that this is a fear that I can confidently say you can find a solution to!
Those were my big three fears. Each decision was like setting off a tiny grenade in my existence, but despite the fear, I set them off anyway and what was eventually revealed was more than I could have ever imagined.
I wish that for you, too.
