You Don’t Have to Want This Life for It to Change You

What full-time travel taught me about stability, work, and myself.

Dec 15, 2025

It was 2017 and my husband was deployed to the Middle East. I had just started a new yoga routine, and the YouTube channel I was watching mentioned selling off their household goods and buying a van to travel. I mentioned the idea to Nate, and we both had this aha moment where we realized the potential of the world around us.

He returned in 2018, and that year we started the process of selling our belongings and eventually our home.

We bought a motorhome and began traveling in it in 2018 to get a feel for what this lifestyle might look like for us as a family. We loved it, and that only made us more excited to try it full-time.

Fast forward to March 2019, when my husband left the military after ten years of active duty… we hit the road.

Living this lifestyle wasn’t everything we expected. I didn’t really get a full sense of it during our part-time travels in 2018.

The reality didn’t set in until we’d been on the road for several months, once the honeymoon period wore off. I wrote recently about the stages of immigration, and honestly, I never made it past the “reality bites” phase.

To be clear this year on the road was the best year of Nate’s life. He can tell his version of this if he ever feels up to it.

After a year on the road, Covid happened, and we ended up settling down again and buying a house. The last thing we wanted was to be in our RV in a gravel lot during quarantine.

My Experience as a Digital Nomad

Living on the road is so romanticized. Most content creators only show the good parts. They need to fund their lifestyles, so they show the places they go, the things they use, the highlight reel. Complaining isn’t really an option.

We once filmed a video sharing some very warranted complaints, and it reached the wrong audience. They tore us to shreds for daring to express anything negative.

The first signs that this lifestyle might not be what I personally imagined…

Moving constantly and never knowing what our schedule would look like was putting me into a tailspin
Skipping activities with my family to stay in the RV and work was not what we had planned
I realized the stability of a home was a safety blanket —familiar grocery stores, the house, steady income, healthcare — all of it was necessary for me to thrive

You never really know how you’ll react to completely changing your lifestyle. You just don’t know until you’ve done it. Lodging a few complaints shouldn’t have started a firing squad either and people on the internet are just assholes at times. They feel safety of being semi-anonymous and it makes them feel empowered to be mean.

Seeing so many places we’d never seen before was a privilege. Experiencing them with our girls was life-changing. We saw more in that year than many people see in their lives.

This lifestyle opened our eyes to the world around us and shattered the traditional concept of the American Dream.

At the same time, the unknowns of freelancing were wearing on me. I was losing clients and income, building debt, and it became too much. My brain was used to having a safety net and suddenly I didn’t have one.

I started experiencing panic attacks for the first time. One night in particular stands out. We were at a state park in New Jersey. That afternoon, we’d taken a beautiful hike through the woods, the trees still holding onto their fall colors. But the entire hike, all I could think about was this sinking feeling that I was failing. Later, I sat wide awake on the couch in the RV—everyone else asleep—covered in sweat, heart racing from panic.

I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to start trusting my own instincts in running my business. Up to that point, I had taken everyone’s advice from the internet and it had gotten me only so far. I was stuck and not progressing.

I was still new to freelancing, but I had a couple of years of Pinterest marketing experience and I had solutions to problems people were actually having.

Side note: It was in that moment I decided to start my YouTube channel, launch products and begin teaching. That channel now has over 22,000 subscribers and has brought in more than a million in revenue.

But in that moment, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

I knew I didn’t want to live in the Midwest anymore, but I also didn’t know if RV life would work long-term the way I was experiencing it.

We’d talked about RV life for two years and then buying a property somewhere we felt drawn to—maybe Montana, Wyoming, or Florida. We even discussed buying land and building a pad for our RV and Jeep, then building a home later.

But constantly moving—while amazing—was financially stretching me to the point of regular panic attacks.

So what did we do? Honestly, we didn’t have to think too hard, because Covid hit while we were in Tucson. We didn’t want to be in the RV during quarantine, and we needed money. Nate joined the U.S. Air Force Reserves and got a civilian job in the same role he had at Whiteman AFB. Pure chance—but it worked out. We were able to purchase a home again. So we shifted quickly, bought the house, and parked the RV.

Settling again was tough at first, adjusting back to a sticks-and-bricks lifestyle, but it was a balm to my nervous system.

We knew it was temporary because of everything we’d experienced while traveling. As challenging as the lifestyle was, it was also eye-opening in terms of what was possible.

We always suspected Tucson would be temporary. We bought the house in 2020, and by 2022 we were dreaming again—this time, about Europe.

In that time, I had built a business on a much more stable foundation. I was following my own business instincts and the degree I’d spent four and a half years earning. I felt more prepared to take a leap, knowing we wouldn’t be trying to do it as nomads.

Lessons Learned as a Digital Nomad & Freelancer

I learned a few important lessons while traveling full-time and digging into a freelance career.

I had to trust myself and my instincts and tune out the internet noise.
I learned the cost of trying to do too many things at once instead of focusing on one thing, getting good at it, and scaling from there. That’s what I focused on from 2020–2022 as we dreamed again.
I learned I do want stability—but that we can still choose adventure whenever we want to.
I learned I love having an RV or camper, but I don’t want to live in one full-time
Sometimes when shit is bad you make de

I recently saw a video where someone joked, “If you never fuck around, you’ll never find out,” and honestly, I cannot stress this enough if you want to experience life differently.

We may or may not stay in the Netherlands long-term, but we will experience a new way of living that we never would have known if we hadn’t taken this leap.

Until next time,

Heather

P.S. This post was inspired by two other writers here on Substack that I follow.

First a piece by Jen Cook at Poco a Poco, “The Thing You’re Not Supposed to Say About Life Abroad.” Second, a post by Kaila Krayewski titled, “The Digital Nomad Lie.”

I found both pieces to be moving and really sparked a fire in me to write this post entirely by hand. Then it took me a month to type it out and fully bring this small piece of my life to life. I was scared to share this because years ago I had a feeling like I had failed at nomad living when in reality my therapist helped me to realize there are no true failures, only lessons.