For a long time, I thought I had won at life by travelling the world for work. Then I dramatically called it quits and, to this very day, people still ask me why. The simple answer is that I physically couldn’t do it anymore. I felt lost. Looking back now, there was a lot that brought me to that point and, I suppose, this is the rawest version of the story, and as honest as I can be without ending up in a lawsuit.
The story goes like this.
I had the job everyone told me they would kill for. I travelled to over a hundred countries and got paid for the privilege. One week I would be sitting on the same throne as Saddam Hussein, the next I’d be at breakfast club at 7am in Paris, followed by a dash to the airport where I would jet off to cross the Silk Road. My office was the world and my clients became some of the most interesting people I have ever met. Somehow I made a career out of wandering around parts of the world most people spend their lives trying to avoid.
I loved it. I genuinely did and, in many ways, I still do.
Even writing this now makes me emotional because I know how fortunate I was and I know I spend far too much time replaying those moments in my head. The older I get, the more I realise that gratitude and sadness can exist together. You can be thankful for something and still mourn it. You can know you lived a remarkable life and still admit parts of it nearly destroyed you.
The truth is that somewhere along the way I became deeply unhappy, not because of the travel, not because of the countries, and not because of the people, although there were certainly a few people who didn’t help. Mostly it was because of myself. I knew I wasn’t okay. That’s the part that bothers me the most. I knew it.
The biggest lie I ever told myself was that movement was healing. Every time something went wrong, I booked a flight and convinced myself that was growth. If I was heartbroken, I left. If I was sad, I left. If I felt trapped, I left. If life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to, I simply disappeared and started again somewhere else. I always joked that I had the gift of goodbye and people laughed because it sounded adventurous, but looking back now I wonder if it wasn’t courage at all. Maybe I was just incredibly good at running away.
The problem with constantly moving is that eventually you become so good at outrunning your problems that you genuinely start believing you’ve solved them. A new country feels like a new beginning, a new tour feels like purpose, a new group feels like connection and another airport feels like momentum. Before you know it, years have passed and you’ve mistaken distraction for healing because nobody ever stops long enough to ask whether they’re actually happy.
What people don’t tell you about travelling for a living is how lonely it can be. People assume loneliness comes from being alone, but for me the opposite was true. I never got to truly be alone. I was almost always surrounded by people. I was the one making sure everyone felt included, the one trying to talk to everybody, the one who had to remember names, birthdays, dietary requirements and life stories. I was the common thread that held everything together and, somewhere along the way, I became so focused on everyone else that I completely lost sight of myself.
People often assume I’m confident, outgoing, endlessly social and, in fairness, that’s probably the version of me they met. But if you asked my family, they would barely recognise that description. That’s the funny thing. Every week I met hundreds of strangers and learned things people often didn’t tell their own families. I knew who was secretly getting divorced, who had recently lost a parent, who was terrified of ageing, who had spent twenty years saving for the trip they were finally taking. People tell you extraordinary things when they know they’ll probably never see you again. There is a strange freedom in that. For a brief moment, you become important to one another and can speak without judgement because there are no consequences.
Then the trip ends, everyone hugs goodbye, everybody promises to stay in touch (you rarely do)…. life moves on.
The following week another group arrives, then another, then another, and eventually you realise you’ve spent years building relationships that last days. Deep but fleeting, meaningful but temporary. I became incredibly skilled at meeting people and remarkably bad at letting them stay.
Then there was the drinking.
God, the drinking.
Nobody really talks about that part because there are so few people who understand what the job actually involves. When your entire life revolves around travel, alcohol slowly becomes woven into everything. You’re celebrating successful tours, mourning failed itineraries, sharing stories with travellers, saying goodbye to people you’ve spent weeks with and navigating cultures where hospitality revolves around food and drink. You’re constantly socialising, constantly networking, constantly available.
One drink becomes two. Two becomes normal. Five becomes normal.
You convince yourself it’s part of the lifestyle, but eventually alcohol stops feeling like a celebration and starts feeling like relief. Relief from always being available. Relief from always performing. Relief from always being “on”. Relief from answering phone calls at one in the morning because somebody’s toilet isn’t working and, for reasons still unclear to me, they have decided I am a plumber instead of calling reception.
Because that’s the part nobody sees, the frustration.
The version of me people met wasn’t always the version of me that existed. I was forced to smile when I didn’t feel like smiling and carried the responsibility for groups of strangers in countries where mistakes can have serious consequences. I had to solve problems I didn’t create and worst of all had to apologise for things that had absolutely NOTHING to do with me.
And this was when the bitterness crept in. Standing in some of the most vulnerable places on earth, listening to people complain about things that felt so insignificant it genuinely pissed me off. I would look around and see communities that had survived war, poverty, displacement and unimaginable hardship, then turn around and hear somebody complain because the hotel Wi-Fi wasn’t fast enough.
It made me realise something I still struggle with now, so deeply. Some of the poorest people I have ever met gave me the most. The best seat at the table, the biggest portion of food, the spare blanket, a place in their home. Yet some of the wealthiest people I have encountered seemed terrified of giving away even a fraction of their comfort. It makes me deeply confused about what success actually is and disappointed in the West even though I am grateful to be born in it (my deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me).
But I wasn’t allowed to be angry or sad because people had paid to be there and I was the guide. So I kept going, tried to shut my mouth and laughed it all off. Eventually I didn’t even know where the performance ended and I began.
Then, without me even realising it, old habits started creeping back in. The belief I had carried since I was a teenager that if you can’t control what’s happening around you, you can control what you eat, or what you don’t eat. The terrifying thing is that I genuinely don’t think I realised I was doing it.
Then one day I stepped on a scale and saw forty-three kilograms staring back at me. I remember feeling confused more than anything else. How had this happened?
The answer was slowly, the same way everything happens. One missed meal because you’re busy. One stressful week. One long tour. One delayed flight. One customer yelling in your face. One year becoming another until eventually you’re staring at evidence of a battle you convinced yourself no longer existed.
I remember being so sick on my final tours that I couldn’t get out of bed and had pressure sores on my hip bones and tail bone so could never get comfortable to sleep or sit on the bus. I tried to force myself to eat but I physically couldn’t which I know sounds strange. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I could navigate Afghanistan, I could organise complicated itineraries across multiple countries. I could confidently walk into situations that terrified most people, yet I couldn’t take care of myself.
I think for a long time I convinced myself I was oblivious, that all of this happened accidentally, but after weeks of walking and talking to myself for eight hours a day, I don’t think that’s true anymore. I lied. Not to other people because I really hate when people lie to me but to myself, which I am starting to think should be worse.
Realistically I knew, I always knew. I know on reflection the only joy I felt was knowing I could fit in those jeans and disappear, that was control. And what an awful thing realising your entire life has become about escaping life itself, that you can survive almost anything but yourself. That unless you actually sort your own shit out there’ll never be a fresh start. There will only ever be you.
There were other realities too, realities that are harder to explain.
I spent much of my career as a young woman in spaces largely occupied by older men. Most were kind, supportive and became lifelong friends.
But not all.
Sometimes lines were crossed, comments lingered longer than they should have, attention became uncomfortable. Sometimes professionalism and vulnerability collided in ways that left me feeling deeply exposed. I often felt like a sheepdog amongst wolves, not because everyone was dangerous but because you only need a handful of experiences before you become permanently aware of your vulnerability.
Especially when you’re young and a female.
I look back at twenty-four-year-old me now and realise how alone she really was. My livelihood depended on getting people to like me and my dream depended on maintaining relationships. So I laughed things off, minimised situations and convinced myself things were normal. I questioned myself instead of questioning the people responsible.
For a long time I carried shame that was never mine to carry. I analysed my behaviour, my clothing, my friendliness and my decisions as though I had somehow caused another person’s actions. Looking back now, I wish I had been kinder to myself.
Then there were the stalkers, five of them at one point.
One who turned up in Algeria and tried to break into my room demanding sex violently. Another who still emails and WhatsApps me and my family from different numbers. Another who forced me to delete LinkedIn entirely, making it even harder to move on and find another job even now because he contacts my work.
These experiences left me with an anxiety that never fully disappeared and a distrust in people that I still struggle to shake. There is something uniquely unsettling about realising a stranger feels entitled to your life while remaining entirely dishonest about their own. And yes, I share my life online, but never live, and never as openly as people assume. When I moved back to Sydney I deleted all social media for 5 months, I thought the answer was to disappear, to become smaller and harder to find. Now I think the opposite. If anything, it has made me more determined to tell my own story before somebody else decides to tell it for me.
ANYWAY….. while all of this was happening, life outside travel continued. People died, relationships ended, my heart broke. But I had a job to do so sometimes while processing enormous grief I was simultaneously explaining historical monuments to tourists. Sometimes everybody around you is having the best holiday of their lives, as they deserved too, while I wanted to burst into tears.
But honestly, I think the hardest part has been the guilt.
The guilt of being a girl from Sydney who somehow ended up living the exact life she had dreamed about and still finding herself unhappy. The guilt of standing in some of the most beautiful places on earth and feeling empty. The guilt of knowing people would have swapped places with me in a heartbeat and still not wanting to be here.
Nobody talks about that, the disappointment of getting everything you’ve ever wanted. Not because the dream wasn’t incredible, it was, it really was but because eventually you realise the dream was never the thing standing in the way of your happiness, that you were.
And that is a much harder conversation to have with yourself than admitting you chose the wrong job, the wrong city or the wrong relationship.
But at least now on this walk, time away I have come to believe that I don’t regret a single country, flight, heartbreak or drink. I don’t regret any of it. Half of my favourite memories involve strangers, alcohol and places I can barely remember clearly anymore. I travelled to what felt like the ends of the earth trying to find my way home and be a better kinder, more forgiving person but here’s the thing……
There are people I do not forgive. To the men who stalked me, harassed me and crossed lines they never should have crossed, I am angry and I think that’s okay, I don’t need forgiveness, I need to move on.
There is this narrative that healing requires forgiveness and I don’t believe that anymore. I think you can move on without forgiving. I think you can build a beautiful life without forgiveness. Some things deserve anger, not obsession or revenge, just anger. Because the consequence of all of this is that I have changed.
My softness has changed, I used to approach the world with endless openness. I wanted everyone to feel welcome. I gave people the benefit of the doubt without even thinking about it. Now I often find myself cutting first. I have developed sharp edges. When I sense danger, I become cold. When I sense manipulation, I become intolerant. Sometimes my words arrive like knives because somewhere along the way I learned that if I cut something down quickly enough, it cannot hurt me.
Maybe that’s healthy, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know yet but I do know I do not want to be like that and 30 feels like a nice starting point.
What I do know is that, for the first time in a very long time, I am actually making a plan. I signed a full-time contract, I am working on opportunities I never expected to come my way. I am documenting these experiences because of that opportunity (fingers crossed). I am trying to be proactive. Return to my hobbies – surfing, reading, tennis.
Because for years I thought another flight would save me, now I think staying still long enough to face myself might.
Anyway, that’s part of why I quit and as always, the story took a turn.
PARIS HAILWOOD 
Leave a comment