16 Aug We’ve Done This Before…And It Doesn’t Get Less Terrifying
This post is part of The Second Leap: a series about choosing uncertainty on purpose, twice. In 2015 we quit our jobs in advertising and built a life that didn’t look like many others’. Now, nearly 12 years later, we’re doing it again – bigger leap, more at stake, a 3-year-old in tow.
If you’ve been following How Far From Home for a while, you’ll know the short version of our story. Two advertising creatives, Johannesburg, 2015. We quit our jobs on the same day, told ourselves it was a creative sabbatical, and started a travel blog mostly to justify the decision to ourselves.
What followed was 12 years of something we never quite planned: 68 countries, over 830,000 kilometres, a creative studio, clients we’re genuinely proud of, and a daughter named Elodie who has never known her parents to have a boss.
If we backtrack to married life, post-pandemic (circa 2022) some of you may remember that we moved to Prague, had Elodie, and nested, properly, for the first time. We built our studio into something real. We also applied for Australian permanent residency around that time…one of those things you do and then quietly forget about because the waiting becomes part of the background noise of your life. Then we moved back to South Africa and found a home in Plettenberg Bay, where we enrolled Elodie in school. We tried, for the first time in 12 years, to actually stay somewhere.
Then we unpacked the last box, and the email came:
Congratulations! You are now permanent residents of Australia.
Which means we’re leaving…again…by choice (with more at stake than last time).
We’ve been sitting with this news for a while, trying to figure out what to do with a life that keeps asking you to be brave 😅 And we’ve decided to do what we did in 2015: document it honestly, in public, for anyone who wants to come along.
This series is called The Second Leap. It’s not a how-to guide and it’s not a highlight reel. It’s just what’s actually true.
This is five posts about doing something scary on purpose. Twice.
Over the next four posts I want to share the things nobody told us in 2015: the financial stuff, the identity stuff, the relationship stuff, and the specific, unglamorous reality of building a life that looks like freedom from the outside, and feels like a constant negotiation from the inside.
Not because we have it figured out (because we don’t…and that feels worth saying out loud).
See you soon with the next post,
Chanel (and Stevo & Elodie)
If you’re new here, you can read more about how How Far From Home started here, or follow along on Instagram @howfarfromhome where we’re sharing the second leap in real time.
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