I leaned back against the wall and sunk to the floor, my face in my hands. I was in my room in Phuket, Thailand. It was November 2018. I was 27 years old.
I'd been training at a Muay Thai camp for the past few months, occasionally spending weekends at my Uncle's place. He and his wife lived by the water, a short fifteen-minute drive away.
How did I end up sparring at a Muay Thai camp in Phuket, you ask? Well, that's a funny story...
It starts in Brisbane, Australia, in April that year. I'd been living there for six months, but my soul had become restless again. My good friend, Lachlan, and I were getting drunk on cheap wine and racing office chairs around our coworking space one Friday night. I told him I needed a new place to go; somewhere in a US timezone. He looked at me and said, “Doesn't your best mate live in Colombia?”
A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, I flew into Medellin, Colombia. Zac and I immediately opened some cold beers and sat on his terrace lounge overlooking the beautiful jungle city.
We caught up for hours. I hadn't seen him in years. When I was nineteen, we used to hang out at his place, laughing about stupid memes and working on our businesses. When we got bored, we'd wander down to a hidden Sydney beach in the middle of the night, sit on the pier, and eat mangoes while dreaming about everything we were going to do with our lives.
The thing is, those dreams weren't dreams for us. They were more like plans. We played tag around the world for several years, crashing together for three months in China or crossing paths for a weekend in LA — but always ending up back home in Sydney. That transient dynamic changed when I moved to New York as a 22-year-old. Zac moved too.
My startup, 99dresses, failed. Zac's business thrived.
As I packed up our New York apartment as a 23-year-old, I told Zac I wanted to try the “digital nomad” thing, running a location-independent business that did something wholesome and fulfilling. Zac had different plans: first stop was a business thing in Lithuania. Then he'd gallivant around Europe all summer before flying down to Colombia to buy a beautiful penthouse in the City of Eternal Spring. He'd been my trusty, hilarious, fiercely loyal sidekick for so long. That fork in the road marked the end of an era.
Years later, as I sat on his penthouse balcony in the City of Eternal Spring as a 26-year-old who ran a wholesome-and-fulfilling children's coding school, we realized we'd both done exactly what we said we'd do. He was a broke bartender when I met him. But now there he was — a small town Aussie kid running rampant in Colombia, becoming the man he always wanted to be.
And just to clear things up (because I know people are incapable of believing that a heterosexual male and female can be close platonic friends): no, there's nothing romantic between us. Zac and I spent the first few years of our friendship saying, “Y'know... it would be so convenient if we were attracted to each other.” But the body wants what the body wants. As Zachary likes to say, “there are so many things I want to do in this life, and my sister is not one of them.”
Anyway, I joined a boutique gym in Medellin in 2018. Only one other person worked out in the middle of the day. He'd arrive at the gym, take his shirt off, and spend the next two hours doing all manner of grueling exercises. He looked like he'd walked straight off the cover of Men's Fitness magazine — tall, dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled jawline, ripped body. Zac, being the colossal asshole that he is, would come to refer to this handsome stranger as “Hitler's Wet Dream.”
One day, I was packing my bag at the lockers when the stranger walked by. “Hey,” he smiled. He had a beautiful smile. I mean, who the hell looks that good after a workout? Honestly...
“I've seen you around for a few weeks,” he continued. “Where are you from?”
“Australia,” I replied. “What about you?”
“Vienna. I'm Mikel, by the way.”
He asked about my travels. I reciprocated. He was a construction engineer and property developer back in Austria. He'd spent the past few years traveling on and off, doing what he loved — hiking, training, sports.
After a thirty-minute conversation by the lockers, Mikel asked if I'd have coffee with him the next day. Several hours went by as we sipped cappuccinos and ate a croissant de almendras and spoke about various things. As the sun set, we moved on to drinks, then dinner, then drinks again.
There was something mysterious about him. He was like an enigma; an energetic puzzle. I found him hard to read — which I'm pretty sure was the point. The game knew exactly how to pique my interest.
Unlike most people I met on my travels, Mikel made his living the old-fashioned way: offline. He loved building things and talked with such passion about a house he wanted to construct when he arrived back in Vienna. I could tell he'd been raised with old-school European manners — opening doors for me, walking on the outside of the footpath, making sure I got home safely. In some ways, he was a time capsule floating around in a modern lifestyle. I found the paradox fascinating; it was a bespoke construction of Self.
We quickly became friends, but nothing more than that. Nomadic life is transient, and he was leaving in a few weeks — for the US, then Canada, then Thailand to train at a Muay Thai camp. “You should meet me there!” he said as he leaned against my treadmill one day. “I think you'd like the training.”
“Maybe...” I replied. I was enjoying Colombia. I'd established a productive work routine and social circle there. However, my visa was going to expire in a couple of months and I needed a new place to go — preferably a cheap one. I still kept all of my money invested in my children's coding school, so I'd only withdraw the minimum salary needed to live comfortably. Luckily, “living comfortably" is far more affordable in foreign countries — much cheaper than living a mediocre lifestyle of ramen noodles in a place like Sydney. And yet, despite this hack, my career still felt like a never-ending exercise in delayed gratification: invest, invest, invest, hold on, hold on, hold on, it's just another month, another year, another failure, another business... but one day, you will reap the harvest. Compound growth is the eighth wonder of the world.
“Come on,” Mikel coaxed, flashing me his movie-star grin. “It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of training. There are so many things to try: Muay Thai kickboxing, yoga, jiu-jitsu, fitness classes, traditional boxing, Thai sword fighting-”
“Sword fighting?” My ears pricked up. I'd been having a recurring vision for the past eighteen months: me, wandering around the world with a sword in my hand. I wasn't sure why I had a sword or what the vision meant, but Mikel's words caught my attention.
There. I felt it. The soft sensation of clarity. It was a voice that whispered, Follow the white rabbit, Nikki. Follow the white rabbit.
So that's how I ended up in Phuket, sinking to the floor of my apartment, my face in my hands. And no — my mental distress had nothing to do with a man. Nor did it have anything to do with Muay Thai, which turned out to be a poignant metaphor for my life: getting repeatedly punched in the face while learning to love the taste of your own blood.
No. My mental distress was self-induced. I was just furious at my soul.
You see, before arriving in Thailand, I'd begun to free-fall into another full-blown existential crisis. I could usually feel these waves build up in my consciousness, and I wasn't good at diffusing them before they crashed down on my life, obliterating everything in their path. This one was accompanied by an uncomfortable pressure in my solar plexus — like the power of a mighty ocean, trapped inside a little box.
I'd recently begun feeling constrained in my career. It wasn't matching up with my interests anymore and everything felt like a chore. I was scared and confused and disillusioned. What went wrong? I thought I was doing everything right — taking risks, working hard, overcoming obstacles, leaning into fear, allocating time for myself so I didn't burn out, staying active, following my passion and curiosity, making daily progress towards my goals.
I used to love building tech products. But now the thought of doing that seemed so humdrum. I adored my children's coding school, so I didn't know why I suddenly felt complete apathy towards it — just like so many other creative projects that had faded in and out of my life.
Please don't do this to me again, I begged my soul. Can I please stay focused on this one? I like this creation.
Nothing was ever stable for me. Everything was always transient and fluid, like sand shifting through an hourglass. One minute, I was high on life. The next, I was crashing and tumbling and falling and lost.
I judged myself so harshly for it, too. I'd tried corralling my soul when it wanted to change directions, but I was starting to learn that resistance was futile. I'd tried running in the opposite direction of my curiosity, with abysmal consequences. I'd tried smashing it into the mold that society had built for it, and that gave me no success. I'd tried muting it, and subduing it, and lassoing it, and yelling at it, and every time I tried to fight against it, the roaring ocean would rise up at full force and come crashing over my head, sending me tumbling down into the darkness.
The depressive phases were hopeless and debilitating and grey. I'd swing down into these apathetic states for months on end, but it wasn't a depression in the sense that I had no will to live. No, not at all. I had plenty of will to live. My mind was a silent explosion of ideas in the depths of a pitch-black ocean.
The darkness only swallowed me when my heart pulled one way but my head resisted it because it wasn't what I “should” be doing. I should be doing this and this and this to be successful and be a good person and be responsible. I should be reaching my potential and earning more money. I knew I was capable of earning way more, but money didn't motivate me like it seemed to motivate other people. My soul only cared about money to the extent that it allowed me to follow the white rabbit. Once that need was met, it ceased to provide any incremental value to my life.
I should be making my parents proud of me. They loved me and supported me, but I also knew they were worried I'd never grow up. It was hard for them. They wanted me to be safe and secure, but I wanted to be wild and free. I was their challenging child, and although they'd done everything right by the parenting books, I think they wondered where they'd gone wrong with me.
“But how is this going to earn you money?” my mother would ask. “I don't understand where the value is in all this work you're so obsessed with. Why does it matter?”
“Mum!” I'd say, incredulously. “I don't understand how you can't see this! It is the only thing that matters. It is the root cause of everything. What is the meaning of life? How is the illusion being constructed? When I kick a soccer ball, why does it move? Don't tell me it moves because of Newton's laws — that's a description of what it is doing. I want to know why it is doing it. I want to know what is happening in the lower dimension. And if I can just figure it out then this mad world will finally make sense to me. And maybe other people would like to know the answer, too.”
“Well, as long as 'other people' pay for it somehow. That's all I care about. You can't keep working for free forever, Nikki. You need to think about your future.”
She didn't understand. No one understood. I was all alone on my quest. And if I failed, I'd be all alone in that too.
So my mind would say, “Do this responsible thing.” But my soul would whisper, Come over here, instead. Come over here and get lost in the middle of the night for hours on end, chasing rabbits down imaginary rabbit holes, and achieve none of those responsible goals. Oh, and don't worry about everything else in your life — I've replaced it all with apathy. I've removed all passion from everything you used to adore and focused myself right here, in this vortex of fate that you can't fight. Come over here or get lost in depression.
If I could just remove the cage of “should” I'd shackled around my mind, maybe I wouldn't feel this guilt and anger and frustration wash over me like waves smashing against rocks.
I just wanted to feel like I was useful to the world. What did I have to do to feel useful to the world?
Just be, Wisdom whispered. Just be.
No, Wisdom! I want to know what I have to do. What do I have to do to finally feel like I matter? Like I'm valuable? Like I'm in my element? Like my life has a purpose? What do I have to do to finally feel proud of myself? To finally feel like I'm not an imposter? A loser? A failure? Tell me what to do and I'll do it!
I was so sick of working hard and developing a skill, then having my passion change form, constantly manifesting in different areas. Every time I applied myself diligently and began to feel successful with a project, my curiosity would pull me in a different direction. I felt like I was being dragged through a winding path, over rocks with jagged edges that left scars in my confidence and ripped at my self-worth.
But for what purpose? It didn't make any sense. I'd spent four years running around, observing things, trying things, learning things. What was the point of it all, anyway? What was the point? I couldn't see the bigger picture. My life was a mish-mash of random brushstrokes. It was chaos.
Nikki, my soul whispered. You tell a tragic tale, but you're lying to yourself. I gave you The Prophecy. You've seen flashbacks of your future. You already know how this story ends. Yet you're feigning ignorance so you don't have to come to terms with your own power. You're not scared that you're wrong about this — you're scared that you're right. You're scared that you could strike one match and blow up the whole world. Yet know this: the privilege of a lifetime is to become Who You Really Are, and the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Master this lesson and you'll set yourself free.
But I couldn't hear the whisper of my soul over the frantic screams of my ego. I leaned back against the wall and began to cry. Alone, in the middle of the day, in my bedroom. I'd been crying a lot lately.
“What the fuck do you want from me?!” I yelled at my soul. The sobs were erupting from my mouth. I was a mess. “I don't understand what you want from me! I've followed you around the goddamn world and here I am, miserable and alone on the floor of a Thai apartment.”
I want to return you to yourself, my soul smiled. I want to-
“Where's all the success I was promised, huh? I followed you, and followed you, and followed you, and you promised me it would lead to something. You promised me my dreams would come true if I just had the courage to pursue them. I trusted you and you lied. I've followed you for a decade and all I have are some beautiful and bitter-sweet memories.
I followed you with 99dresses, and that failed. I followed you with Jesse, and he left. I followed you with all the different skills I've learned and then lost interest in. I followed you with CodeMakers, and now I've suddenly fallen out of love with that business too and it's breaking my heart. It's too painful. I can't bear it.”
That project has served its purpose in your life. It's time to let it go and move to the next phase of your journ—
“—And now, to top it all off, I'm starting to question my entire choice of career. I don't even think I want to build these tech products anymore, and I've been doing this since I was a teen. Why do I feel a longing to write, and teach, and talk instead? Why do I feel a longing to tell stories, and make people laugh, and make them cry, and help them see the world in a different way? Why? I'm not perfect. Look at me. I'm a fucking wreck right now. I oscillate between melancholy and euphoria. What can anyone learn from me?
Fuck you, intuition. Fuck you, curiosity. Fuck you, passion. Fuck you, soul. I thought you were supposed to be looking out for me. Whatever happened to that, huh? Whatever happened to 'follow your heart, and everything will all work out?'”
Oh, I am looking out for you. Just let your ego throw this tantrum, then it's time to pack up and keep moving. The next clue is in Sydney. Go home, say hello to your family, and start looking for a job. I know that sounds like failure to your ego, but trust me: basecamp is right on the other side of this dark ravine. The shortcut to heaven runs straight through hell—
“—I just don't get it. I don't get it. I'm done. I'm sick of this. Do you hear me, God? If you want someone to solve this fucking riddle, maybe you should pay them for it. Isn't that what academics are for? Don't they get paid for all this shit I'm doing for free? I'm twenty-seven and I'm getting older and I have to think about my future. I can't keep going on like this — being a slave to your childish agenda. I can't keep treating the world like a wondrous playground. Can you please just stop this storm raging in my mind and let me be? My God, what is wrong with me!?”
In that moment, and many moments like it, I hated myself. I loathed who I was. Unsuccessful. Undisciplined. Fucked up. Failure. Loser. Idiot. Fraud. Imposter. Unlovable. Worthless. There were so many colorful labels that I placed upon my own forehead.
What value do I add to the world? I wondered. What is the point of it all? If I follow my soul, I end up here. If I don't follow my soul, I kill myself at twenty-seven, then spend the next seventy years waiting to die. What gives?
I needed some meaning in my life.