I have written here, more than once, that you should build the income before you buy the ticket. I still think that is right.
I did not do it. I got laid off on a Monday, and I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok on the Thursday of the same week.
The meeting took 20 minutes. It was in a small room on the second floor that we normally used for calls with suppliers. There was a woman from HR I had never met, my manager, who looked worse than I did, and a box of tissues on the table, placed exactly in the middle. Somebody had done this before.
Nobody touched the tissues. My manager said the word restructure 4 times. When I got back to my desk a man from IT was already standing next to it, waiting for my laptop, holding a cardboard box for my things. He kept saying sorry. I remember he had a cold.
I carried the box home on the train. A mug, a phone charger, a small cactus somebody had given me at Christmas, and a notebook with 2 pages used.
The letter said 3 months of salary.
On the Tuesday I did nothing at all. On the Wednesday I sat at the kitchen table and made a spreadsheet. Rent in Bangkok, food, a phone, a scooter I never ended up renting. At home, 3 months of salary was 3 months. In the spreadsheet it was about a year.
I had not applied for a single job. I did not even look. I told people I was taking some time to think, which was true, in the sense that I was thinking about Bangkok.
I bought the ticket at 1 in the morning on the Thursday. One way, the cheapest one, with a 9 hour wait in an airport in the middle, which I spent asleep on a bench under a sign for a perfume shop.
I understand now what that ticket was mostly for. It was a way to never apply for anything and hear no.
The first 6 weeks were very good.
The heat, the noise, the fruit sold in plastic bags with a little wooden stick in them. I was busy all day with not knowing things, and that felt exactly like getting better. I ate standing up at a cart most nights that first year, which is a different story.
I told myself I was building my own thing. In practice, that meant a website to show the work I had done, made in a café with a fan that blew my napkin off the table every few minutes. I changed the font on that website 4 times. I did not send it to anybody.
Somewhere around week 7 the low feeling came back.
It came back in a room with one window, and the window looked onto an air shaft. Somebody below had a radio on the same station all day. The money had gone down faster than the spreadsheet said, because the spreadsheet did not have a new phone in it, or the week I spent in bed after some bad prawns.
I was the same person I had been at home. Hotter, with worse wifi.
The first real work came by email, on a Wednesday afternoon.
It was from a man who had been my manager 2 jobs before. He had left to run the marketing at a company that made garden furniture, and he had heard I was freelance now. I was not really freelance. I was a man with a website in a room over an air shaft. He needed somebody to write their emails for the summer.
I said yes in about 4 minutes.
He stayed a client for 4 years, until his company was sold to a bigger one and the new people had their own writer. He was the reason I could stay out here that first year. I never really told him that.
It took me a long time to see something very simple. That email could have arrived just as easily at home. He did not know where I was, and he did not care. The ticket did not make the work happen. The ticket only made life cheap enough that one client was enough to stay.
So the move was half right. The cheap rent part was right. The rest of it was running away, and I did not admit that for about 2 years.
I get more emails this year from people who have just been let go than I have ever had. Some of them were replaced by software, and they say so plainly. A lot of them have a flight open in another tab while they write to me. I can tell, because they ask about rent before they ask anything else.
I am not going to tell them not to go. That would be a strange thing for me to say.
What I tell them is to write the plan part down. It fits on one line. Who is going to pay me, and roughly when.
If you can write that line, the ticket is part of a plan. If you cannot, you might still go. I did. Running away is allowed. It just gets expensive around week 7.
Andrew - No Refunds •••