Why Starting Over Changed My Audience, My Income, and My Reality as a Solo Digital Nomad
Deciding to start over and travel around the world comes with many pros and cons, and nobody really talks about how those pros and cons start showing up in places you didn’t expect, especially in your relationships, your audience, and your business when you decide to share your life online. It comes with the addition of new experiences, new environments, new perspectives, and a version of yourself that you haven’t fully met yet, while also coming with the loss of certain comforts, certain connections, and even certain versions of people who were once consistent in your life.
As a single, childfree woman who travels the world full time as a solo digital nomad, I ran into a lot of shifts, especially within my online communities and my businesses, and I don’t think I was fully prepared for how noticeable those shifts would be. I found that some people stopped supporting me the way they did before, and not in an obvious or dramatic way, just in a slow drifting pullback that you can feel over time when engagement drops, when people stop reaching out, liking, when the same names that used to be consistent just… aren’t there anymore.
I lost clients in the process, and if I’m being honest, I think a part of it came from how my life started to look from the outside. When people see you traveling, when they see the views, the experiences, the lifestyle, there’s this assumption that you’re perfect, that you don’t need support anymore, that you’ve somehow “made it” to a place where investing in you is no longer necessary.
Meanwhile, I’m still running a business, still building, still creating, still paying off over $200k in debt between student loans and other responsibilities that didn’t magically disappear just because I changed my location. Heck, traveling full-time was to cut down on expenses with raising housing fees, insurance, and everything else.
My social media engagement dropped drastically, and I’ve been losing more followers than I’ve been gaining over the last couple of months, which is interesting because all I’ve really been doing is sharing my life… or at least the parts of it that people typically expect to see when someone is living abroad. The highlights, the views, the experiences, the lessons, figuring it out in foreign spaces.
What that shift has showed me very clearly is the real meaning behind the phrase “some people want to see you doing good, just not better than them,” and that realization hits a little different when you start seeing it reflected in real time through your own platforms and your own numbers. Even if I’m not doing “better”…it looks like it because I travel full-time and live from country to country.
What’s wild is that I genuinely want people to experience life freely, to move how they want, to build lives that actually feel aligned for them, and my business is literally centered around helping people do that. I teach this, (learn more HERE) I guide people through it, I create spaces for it, and still, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people prefer the idea of change more than the reality of what it requires. There’s a level of comfort that people stay in, even when they internally desire something different, because stepping outside of that comfort asks for decisions, discipline, and a level of accountability that not everyone is ready to take on.
There has been a level of detachment that I’ve had to learn as I settle deeper into this life of full-time solo travel, and it’s not the kind of detachment that makes you cold or disconnected, it’s the kind that helps you keep moving even when things around you shift in ways you didn’t plan for. You learn to release expectations around who will support you, how they will support you, and when they will show up, because tying your growth to that will slow you down real quick.
Life out here isn’t perfect, and I think that’s another part that gets overlooked. A big reason I decided to embark on this journey was to decrease my bills and create a different kind of financial flow for myself, and while I’ve been able to do that in certain ways, I’m still navigating responsibilities that didn’t disappear just because I chose a different lifestyle. Debt doesn’t care about ocean views, and responsibilities don’t pause because you decided to book a one-way ticket somewhere, so there’s still a level of discipline, structure, and intention that has to exist behind the scenes that people don’t always see.
People will idolize your life and create their own version of what they think it is, and that version usually has very little to do with your actual day-to-day reality. They see what they want to see, they fill in the gaps with their own assumptions, and they respond to that version instead of the truth. Once you understand that, it becomes a little easier to not take every shift personally, even though it still requires a level of emotional processing to move through it. This is why I love the book, The 5th Agreement! It goes into the act of assumptions and filling in the blanks…and how it can negatively affect us.
At the end of the day, I have to keep going, keep growing, and allow things to align the way they need to, even when it doesn’t look how I expected it to look. This lifestyle is teaching me more than just how to navigate new countries, it’s teaching me how to navigate people, expectations, and myself in a completely different way, and that’s a lesson I’m still actively learning as I go.