How I Landed My First Online Job and Became a Digital Nomad - Then Quit

Photo by author

Back in the days of Vine, and YouTube make-up and lifestyle vloggers like Bethany Mota, little me combed through the internet to find ways to travel and work at the same time. The concept of digital nomadism was much less popular than it is now. Most blogs and YouTube videos would recommend jobs like becoming a language teacher, yoga teacher, or virtual assistant.

Career wise, however, my dream at the time was to become a fashion designer. Everything I did was tailored towards achieving that dream: I took sewing classes from age eight to sixteen, I chose a high school with an art program that allowed me to build my portfolio freely, and I visited all the fashion and art academies in the Netherlands and Belgium. I also visited study abroad fairs and was bummed out when studying fashion in London turned out to be too expensive. 

Meanwhile, to fuel my travel hunger, I participated in all possible exchange programs. When I finished school, I took a gap year in which I worked on a camping in France for two months during the summer, then worked four jobs in the Netherlands to save up to spend the rest of my year studying Italian and doing one fashion course in Italy. I thought it was all about fashion, but looking back, it was all about travel too.

While I was in Italy, my application was denied at my plan B fashion academy. I felt too insecure about applying to my plan A and decided to wait a year. On a whim I decided to apply for two study programs in the Netherlands at a university I had never visited an open day of. In fact, I had only visited one open day at a university that was not art-related. My choice of university was completely random and based on what I remembered a previous co-worker had studied — or so I thought. 

She had studied Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies in Nijmegen, a Dutch program that allowed students to go abroad on fieldwork in the third year. While it was never my plan to make it to the third year, I liked the abroad-oriented program and applied. 

While scrolling through the university’s website for the first time in my life, I also came across Philosophy, Politics, and Society, an international program that had a practical approach to philosophy. Looked fun. I had always liked philosophy. So I decided to apply there as well. I wasn’t going to finish either of them anyway. My plan was just to follow some courses of these programs for a year, while continuing to work on my fashion portfolio. 

But life had a different plan and it was already in motion.

I ended up loving both of these programs so much that I completely let my fashion dream sail. And the crazy thing? When I texted my previous co-worker to ask if I could buy one of her study books, she told me that she was not in the same study program nor did she study in Nijmegen. Instead, she studied International Development Studies in Wageningen. Did my forgetfulness and lack of topographic knowledge really just help me stumble upon the perfect study programs for me? 

Still holding onto my travel dreams, I arranged an internship in Laos for the summer after my first year. I spent five weeks on an organic rice farm with an ecotourism project and then backpacked for the remaining three weeks of my summer break. It was my first time backpacking outside of Europe and I absolutely loved it. I was determined to continue travelling each summer and do a semester abroad.

Then came covid-19. Both my study abroad plans and backpacking in the summer quickly fell into the water.

In that first semester of covid-19 and by now my second year at university, we had a course on ‘what the heck can you do with cultural anthropology once you graduate’ (but named differently). In one of those classes, the teacher had invited alumni with whom we could speeddate. We could ask all our questions, see the wild variety of job opportunities were available with this program, and practice our self-promotion pitches.

One of the alumni very openly mentioned that he was looking for interns. It sounded like a valuable and insightful experience to get a taste to the development cooperation field. And with my study abroad plans having fallen into the water, I decided to reach out. To my surprise, none of my fellow students had reached out. I got the internship and was offered a job towards the end.

I worked on a zero hour contract, allowing me to flexibly plan my work hours around my studies. Right when my first contract expired, I went on my postponed study semester abroad. Afterwards, I travelled to Ecuador with a friend to go backpacking. My abroad semester had greatly cut into my previous savings and so I contacted my former boss again. 

“Can I start a new zero hour contract, but working from abroad in the months that I am still travelling?” Since most of my work activities had been online anyway and since I would be back after several months, he accepted. Without having really planned for it and without having finished a degree, I had rolled into a digital nomad job — albeit temporarily.

I was back in the Netherlands after six months, just in time to participate in the in-person employee retreat. With my abroad semester and the work-travel combination, I had been away from the Netherlands for nearly a year. Being back felt good. I was ready to settle.

Within weeks, however, that readiness to settle changed. The travel urge slowly crept back into my being — subconsciously at first.

I hung up a vision board with photos of life in the Netherlands. Looking back at that board is funny. I tried so hard to want to settle in the Netherlands that I even hung up photos of enjoying rainy days. Who was I fooling with that?

The vision board was on my wall for weeks until one night, I woke up in the midst of a dream from my vision board falling down the wall and on top of me. The dream had been about following my heart. I only understood the message a few days later.

And so, I prepared to leave once again. Instead of following up my double bachelor with a master from my university in Nijmegen, I took the leap to apply for an online master that started a year later. With regards to my job, however, this meant that I would completely do it remote without a plan to come back to the Netherlands any time soon. 

This was challenging because my increased responsibilities over the years had provided me with some in-person assignments in the Netherlands. I discussed my plans with my boss before extending my contract. With the knowledge that I would go either way, though not incredibly excited about it, he agreed. 

I was now living my childhood dream and was fully a digital nomad.

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I lived in Xela, Guatemala for nearly eight months in total and travelled through Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador from there, while working remote. With only a 16-hour contract, I tried to build my freelance writing and storytelling career at the same time.

All of this, however, turned out to be much more challenging than I thought. Not because building a freelance writing career in itself is challenging, I had expected that, but rather because combining my digital nomad job with travelling did not work for me.

I realized that I had a hard time taking breaks and I felt too far removed from the work I was doing. With that, my job drained the creative energy that I needed to start my freelance business. And, more importantly, it changed what I loved most about travelling.

Digital nomadism is advertised as a dream lifestyle. The truth, however, is that travelling when working is very different from just travelling. 

What I love most about travelling and backpacking is emerging myself in different places, cultures, and environments. Travelling and hearing people’s stories feeds my curiosity, gives me inspiration, and awakens my creativity. It makes me feel present and alive — all which fuels into my storytelling.

Working and travelling, however, is different. The whole context of my work was in a different place — the projects we supported, my colleagues and our clients — and on top of that I was working on many different assignments. So, although my body was in Central America, my mind was constantly elsewhere and switching between contexts. I had not learned yet how to find a balance and that was draining my energy.

And you know that wonderful feeling when travelling or on vacation of losing sense of time and forgetting what day it is? You also cannot do that when working and travelling.

As I was backpacking in Nicaragua with a friend who was fully travelling, I quickly started doing things that I had unconsciously stopped doing because her energy inspired me. I am talking about hiking, swimming, surfing, walking barefoot, going out to see a sunset, firespinning, and doing yoga and meditation not as a to do but because I genuinely wanted to. All things in which I was fully in my body and in (literal) touch with my environment. 

From Nicaragua, I called with my boss and we worked out an arrangement that allowed me to quit one month prior to the official end of my contract. I felt relieved.

Photo by author - The exact spot and moment in which I called my boss to say I wanted to quit

Working remote as a digital nomad and travelling fulltime sounds like a dream. But what I did not realise was that not just the fact that you are travelling and have a remote job matters, but also how you travel and what remote job you have.

This story does not end with another dream that sailed. For me, being a digital nomad and travelling fulltime was never the dream in itself. It had always been about the feeling of travelling and the stories it leads to — I had just forgotten about that.

Three days after I worked my final hours, I sent out my first writing pitch. It got accepted and although the pay did not reflect the hours I spent on writing that article, it was my first paid writing assignment — a milestone! At the end of that same month, I participated in a Storytelling Expedition from Actually Abroad in Uaxactún, a forestry concession community in the North of Guatemala.

I had encountered the project while looking for scholarships for my master program. Although I had been about a year late with applying for the scholarship for the expedition, I decided to e-mail them anyway. I was already going to be in Guatemala in June, I had relevant experience through a Visual Ethnography summerschool and a minor in Cinematography, and I was simply super excited.

One of the owners replied that we could hop on a call. Over video chat, I beamingly shared my motivation and enthusiasm again and at the end she said that there happened to be a leftover fellowship grant. I was not working at any university and technically was not eligible, but she would discuss it with the board. It turned out they were looking for the perspective of an anthropologist in the team and thus accepted.

That is how I directed my first short documentary (Planting Seeds for the Future) and worked as a cinematographer on two others (including The Giving Tree) — all within a month of quitting my ‘dreamlike’ digital nomad job.

Living your dreams is rarely as you imagined them to be, nor does it usually fall into your lap. Sometimes opportunities come to you when you are not looking and you just need the space to see them. Other times you have to ask, seek, and create opportunities yourself. Do not give up on your (childhood) dreams if they still resonate, but also realise that the dream-image you created might turn out to be more complex in real life. Dreams change — sometimes we let them sail and sometimes we adapt them. The most important thing is to remember what your dreams are really about, work on them, and evolve them as you go.

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