Fifteen days ago, I made the decision to quit my six-figure job — and here’s the story behind why.
Over the past six years, so much has happened in our lives — Trent’s and mine.
We broke up, sold the house we had together in East Atlanta, and walked away separately. Trent kept the van we had originally purchased together, and I went my own way and got my own van — a Class B RV, a Travato. We both love the outdoors and freedom, so it wasn’t surprising that we kept gravitating toward similar things: similar places, similar lifestyles, just in separate vans. After five years of living independently while continuing to work our full-time jobs — jobs that had gone fully remote thanks to COVID — we found our way back to each other.
This year, things changed. Most companies began requiring employees to return to the office, including mine. I moved back to Georgia to keep my job, and I managed to make it work for a while. Without getting into too many details about the other challenges I was facing at work, everything combined was pointing me toward one decision: choosing myself — my mental and physical health.
But the return-to-office wasn’t the only thing asking me to pay attention.
There’s also Tsali — my 13-year-old golden retriever. If you’ve ever loved a golden, you know that 13 is a gift. You hold it gently. I kept doing the math in my head: how many hours a week was I spending commuting, in meetings, traveling between states — hours that weren’t going toward him. He was in Colorado with Trent while I was in Atlanta, doing the responsible thing. And one day I realized I wasn’t just missing sunsets. I was missing him — the slow walks, the mornings, the ordinary moments that don’t come back. I didn’t want to look up someday and realize I had chosen my career over his last good years.
And then there’s the reason I don’t always lead with, but that lives underneath everything else.
Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer. I was lucky — it was caught early, and I recovered. But something shifts in you after that. The story you used to tell yourself — that there’s always more time, that you’ll get to the life you want eventually — quietly stops making sense. I carried that awareness with me for years, even as I returned to work, built a career, did all the right things. But it never fully left me. The certainty that tomorrow isn’t promised has a way of making you honest about whether today is how you want to be spending your life.
So when I finally sat down and looked at everything together — the return-to-office, Tsali turning 13, and the decade-old reminder that time is finite — it was hard to argue with what they were all pointing to.
I also want to be clear: this wasn’t impulsive. I spent months working through it. I saved, I planned, and I’m still actively looking for remote IT work that lets me keep this life going. I’m also building Trailnado into something real — a platform about the outdoor life, the van life, the dog life — as part of a longer-term vision. So yes, I walked away. But I didn’t jump without looking.
Fifteen days ago, I quit my six-figure job, leaving behind a stable career and a city office view to live fully in my van and go wherever I want to be.
It wasn’t an easy decision, and I’ll admit the doubts still creep in from time to time. But when I was making this choice, I made sure to sit with those feelings consciously — really feel them, not push them away. And in that stillness, I realized it didn’t feel like a choice at all. It felt like life had been quietly guiding me here, closing doors one by one, until this was the only one left open.
So here we go.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller, The Open Door