By Andrea Joshua Asnicar - Film Director & WeLife Editor at large
Leaving home is probably one of the easier things, and at the same time, the most challenging thing you can do in your life.
Our generation is abroad a lot. We take gap years, we travel, we go around. But leaving home with the intention of never come back again is an entirely different story.
Most of us never intended to leave for an extensive period. It just happens. You leave one day, you find a job, friends, a girlfriend and before you know it, home gets smaller and smaller.
For people like us, who are the creative type, the crazy ones with dreams of building something bigger than ourselves, leaving seems to come easy. Our small towns are snuggling up too close and we feel the oxygen getting dragged out of our lungs. Our friends, which we love and respect and miss now, don’t always understand what we’re looking for when we leave. Our mothers bribe us to stay with comfort food. Either way, we leave, looking to find ourselves in places where we have no roots.
Either way, we leave, looking to find ourselves in places where we have no roots.
My name is Andrea Joshua Asnicar, and for the past six years, I’ve been living in Melbourne, Australia, working with multimillion dollars consultancy businesses run by women who have redefined what leadership means to me. But I dream of making movies. And as most of us approaching 30, those dreams start to accumulate under the weight of reality. And it dawns on us that the only people who can make those dreams come true, are us.
Next year has to be my year—the year where I stop asking for permission. We spend so much of our life waiting for someone to give us what we want, to give us permission to be great. That tyrant is our inner critics, our shadow self. It’s not our fault, most of the time. We grew up conditioned from the start to fall in line, to follow the rules and listen to our teachers.
We are walking in a minefield, with a basket of mines, spreading them around like flower seeds.
It’s time to change. And I want to take you on this journey with me so that we can change together. We’ll talk about what it means to leave home, find yourself and your life in another country, creating the work you want and following your dreams.
Leaving home was one of the best things I’ve ever done. And if you’re thinking to leave home or follow your dreams I want to help you by sharing my story.
Yeah, I know. It’s a bit pretentious.
But I didn’t want this to be a travel column. I want you to know what it means to run a business, trying to follow your dreams, being creative and living in a country that’s not yours. I want you to hear how lonely, hard, isolated, discouraging and exhausting it is. But also how rewarding, fulfilling, liberating, satisfying, illuminating and life-changing it is after you survive the bad part.
Leaving home was one of the best things I’ve ever done. And if you’re thinking to leave home or follow your dreams I want to help you by sharing my story.