Why Blow up One Life to Create Another in a Far Off Land

Let’s ask the obvious question: what motivates a born-and-bred Aussie bloke to pack up his life and move to a foreign country? And not just any country—but one that doesn’t share the usual Western values, beliefs, or customs. I’m talking about a country that can feel so foreign, so fundamentally different, that you find yourself constantly muttering, "Why the hell doesn’t anything work the way it’s "supposed" to?"

It's like being Dorothy finding yourself in The Land of Oz.

I started chronicling this journey about a year in. Why not earlier? Honestly, I didn’t expect so much to happen—or to change so much, both inside and out. I didn’t think the experience would rattle me to my core or force me to confront parts of myself I didn’t even know were hiding in the shadows. I absolutely didn’t expect to have started with Plan “A” and now be on about Plan ”K”. Writing in hindsight also means that things, decisions and learnings may sound more polished or wise than they actually were at the time. Time has a way of sanding down the jagged edges of emotional chaos. It brings perspective—and sometimes even clarity. But let’s not kid ourselves: the terror and confusion leading up to major life decisions is real, even if I breeze past it now and sound in any way wise.

Let me get this out of the way early: I didn’t move to Thailand for the clichéd reasons. Not the girls, not the booze, not the bars. And no, not even because it’s cheap—because trust me, if you live in a tourist-heavy area, it’s not as cheap as people may think.

What I find so completely hilarious is that never in my life did I have even the slightest interest in Southeast Asia. None. If you’d told me a decade ago that I’d one day live in Thailand I would’ve laughed so hard I’d have needed oxygen. But the first time I came to Thailand, something shifted. I felt calm. I felt at peace. I felt—home. That "want" to live here eventually became a "need." And the more I came back, the louder that need grew. It took years to make the move work, but from that very first visit, I knew my soul had found its place. That trip cracked my world open.

Back in Australia, I started to feel like an outsider looking in. Everyone seemed drunk on ego, stress and unhappiness. It all felt fake, or at least hollow. And when forced to choose between the slow death of unhappiness and the possibility of peace, well, I became compelled to choose. I guess I always felt a little like a spectator on the world and never really fitted in. Thailand had shown me why.

Sometimes You Just Have to Blow It All Up

Before answering, “Why Thailand?” though we have to ask, “Why leave everything behind in the first place?” Or, how does a person get to the point of blowing up their life for the mostly unknown?

You can blow up your world in either a maelstrom of destruction or spectacular fireworks of rebirth. I was hoping it would end up being the later.

I’ve been employed. I’ve been unemployed. I’ve run businesses and watched them fold. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad. I even served in the military. Don’t ask me what my profession is—it gives career counsellors migraines and sleepless nights trying to work that out. My CV looks like someone shook up a box of puzzle pieces from five different sets. If I had to put a label on it, I’d say I’m a sales professional. I’ve worked in sales, had my own sales training consultancy, and built businesses where sales was the lifeblood.

But as anyone who’s stepped out of the rat race to run their own gig knows, getting back into the labour market later isn’t a smooth ride—especially as you get older.

I moved back to Sydney from Queensland for family reasons and closed up my business. I figured I’d just find a job to get by while I figured things out. Sales roles? Should’ve been easy. But apparently if you weren’t doing a specific job in a specific industry yesterday, you're no longer considered qualified today. You become invisible.

Meanwhile, I was dealing with a divorce. Let’s just say my ex made the process brutal. She took everything she could get her hands on, and that was before the settlement.

Welcome to Rock Bottom, Population: Me

Eventually, I landed what I thought was a decent job as a project manager. The pay was good, came with a company car, and had some flexibility. The company, though? A disaster. Management was a rotating cast of incompetent and indifferent middle managers who wouldn’t know leadership if it smacked them in the face.

..

Around the same time, I was in a relationship with a woman I truly believed was the love of my life. The highs were euphoric, but the lows? Devastating. there were far more "highs" but eventually the "lows" start to outweigh anything good. She could flip from loving to cruel in a heartbeat. Not physically abusive, but emotionally? She was a weapon. I made excuses for her behaviour, blamed her Catholic guilt and manipulative adult children. But there’s only so long a man can be the punching bag before dignity taps him on the shoulder and says, "Enough."

I broke it off. Again and again. Each time, I thought, "This time she’ll change." She never did. One of us realised how special and unique what we had was, the other was too caught up in her guilt. Truth be told I’m probably still a bit damaged from that.

I know I’m not alone in all this. Everyone’s got their own version of hell. But survival isn’t the same as living. And I was tired of merely surviving. Ok, that last part is hindsight. I didn’t realise pre-Thailand that I was merely surviving.

Then came the injury that really derailed everything.

Freefall

Six months into the project manager job, I tore a tendon in my ankle doing work I shouldn’t have been doing. The company had me taking on technician duties because of my background and they were too slack to provide resources. It took three months just to get the surgery, and another three months in a boot not even allowed to stand on my injured leg.

I didn't know that when a doctor writes "zero capacity for work," on a certificate it literally means don’t work. I figured I could do some so I did. I was loyal, maybe to a fault. I kept pushing. Limping around job sites. Managing projects. Even doing technical installs myself.

The company never told me to stop. Never checked my certificates. Even after surgery, I kept working from home. Programming systems. Running jobs remotely. No one appreciated it. Least of all my managers, who kept demanding more. One even wanted to come to doctor’s appointments to pressure the doctor into signing off on more hours.

That same manager bullied me relentlessly. He didn’t care about my recovery—he just wanted to look good on paper. It was the darkest time of my life. I flirted with suicidal thoughts more than I care to admit. One day I even told my partner to get rid of medication from the house as I was worrying even myself. I was burnt out, broken, and drowning.

Eventually, they fired me while I was still rehabbing. Classic.

After that, life became a blur of failed job applications, financial stress, and gnawing self-doubt. I took jobs well below my ability just to survive. But those jobs drained me even more. The lower you go down the employment ladder, the more immature the workplace drama seems to get. Saying it was like being at a girls high school would be demeaning to girls high schools. Adults acting like they were jealous and spiteful children.

A Necessary Shift

I had plans on starting businesses. I couldn’t get a decent job so why not. It was a cool idea at first. But I couldn’t muster the energy needed to drive one forward. Another hindsight moment coming.

Look, I know we all get older and I’m not the man I was even twenty years ago. But, when your current capacity feels so far below what you know you should be doing (discounting a little for age) it makes you question everything you thought you knew about yourself. Everything about who you believed you were as a person.

My kids use to say to me "dad act your age". I would tell them "I can't, I've never been this age before, so I don't know how I "should" act".

But, I'm not delussional. I don't act like a teenager or a walking hormone, unlike many "mature" men.

I know men especially can have a hard time facing the fact that they're not as good as they used to be. Many men have huge ego problem that drive them to delusions like they’re as good as they were when they were twenty. I know many men who don’t just reminisce about the past, they camp there, talking rubbish trying to make others believe they're still the same person. I have no delusions that I have a hope of doing now what I did when I was a twenty-one-year-old fire in the belly and bulletproof killer of the night in the army. Nighttime comes now and all I think about is bed.

I wasn’t afraid to face myself in the mirror. I’d done it plenty before. But this time, it was different. I couldn’t see a way out. Every option felt like a dead end.

Turning Toward the Light

The hole I’d fallen into kept getting deeper. At first, I could still feel the walls and get my bearings. however I still fell deeper and deeper. Eventually, it got so dark I couldn’t even sense direction. I could have been floating in space I was so directionless.

Now, if you go to a therapist they will tell you to not look too far ahead, only the next step, the next rung of the ladder, the next thing. Hell, I’ve told people that as a Life Coach. I’d tried all that. It was time for something more drastic. Not a baby step. Not another Band-Aid job. A complete paradigm shift. Not a case of "throwing all the toys out of the cot" in a tantrum, more like throwing everything in the air and seeing where things landed.

I needed to summon every ounce of courage, energy, and more courage to stop looking at the dark walls of the hole, focus on the light at the top, and throw myself up and out of the hole. For me, that was the commitment to buying a plane ticket to Thailand and selling most of my things.

As an FYI. The timing was also helped by a landlord who wanted to raise my rent by forty percent. That wasn’t going to work for me. Whatever it takes to push us forward I guess.

We aren't programmed to move towards "good". We're programmed to move away from bad.

It's not until "bad" goes passed uncomfortable, passed painful, all the way to intolerable before we are really propelled to move towards the light.

Oh no dear friends, don’t go assuming that arriving in Thailand had everything plain sailing. when you've been in a deep dark hole, finding yourself suddenly in the bright light is like sensory overload. Myriad options and possibilities. But, it's a clean slate. You can still feel overwhelmed, frustrated, anxious and depressed, but over the right things. Far more challenges were to come, and still lay ahead of me still, however I was one huge leap ahead of where I’d been stuck.

My biggest challenge is I must find some of the old me. The me who could tolerate stress, making hard decisions, dealing with set backs when things don't go to plan, and the obvious unexpected.

A New Home

I’d visited Thailand several times. Each time, it felt like I was plugging into a different energy—one that fed me, not drained me. Back in Australia, all I saw was a future filled with grey. But Thailand? It had colour.

So, I put my big boy pants on and I asked myself the same question I used to ask coaching clients:“How unhappy do you have to get before you finally make the decision you already know you want to make?”

Of course, some people never make the decision they always want to make and just get unhappier with life. But, they're the ones who never get asked that question.

I didn’t know what would happen if I moved. But I knew what would happen if I stayed. A life of survival leading most probably to an early death.

Now I live in Thailand. And when locals ask when I’m going "home," I tell them this is home. They’re always surprised. Seems a lot of foreigners who live here aren’t actually committed to being here. I joke with women here: if they want to marry a foreigner to move overseas, I’m the wrong guy.

Don’t get me wrong—my anxiety and depression didn’t magically disappear when I landed. Some days, the weight of uncertainty is brutal. I still have so much to work out, so much work that needs doing. But even on the hard days, I’m still a better version of myself here than I was back there.

Plans? None of them have gone the way I expected. But that’s the point.

Apples and Steak

What started as a journey of geography became a journey of self. I came here thinking I’d change my location. Instead, I’m changing who I am also. Maybe, discovering who I really am is more accurate. That’s not only a Thailand thing. Many foreigners live here and learn nothing, reflect on nothing, absorb… nothing.

Foreigners get that Thai culture is “different”, in the way that oranges compare to apples. But that’s not true. Once you scratch beneath the tourist facade you realise, it’s more like apples and steak.

And here’s the kicker: Thai culture, especially through the lens of Buddhism, holds answers to many of the mental health crises we struggle with in the West. Simplicity. Community. Sabai-sabai. Non-attachment. Concepts that we desperately need, but rarely practice.

No, I’m not converting to Buddhism or going to be preaching Buddhism in my writings. But, we need to always be open to information, learnings and wisdom that we can use to make us better people. I don’t care where it comes from, if information is valid for me and can bring benefits I’ll take it.

That, to me, is the greatest gift. Not the beaches. Not the food. Not the cost of living. But the opportunity to unlearn the bad parts of growing up in the West brings—and to be.

I Don’t Know Where This Journey Ends…

I only know I’m finally heading in the right direction, for me. That’s enough for now.

There's an old saying that "diamonds are made under pressure". I spent many years feeling like I'd slipped back from acting like a diamond to being more like a lump of coal. Now, I must harden up again, because I have no choice.

Unlike Dorothy in The Land of Oz, I'm not looking for the yellow brick road to find a way "home". I feel "home".

No clicking heals three times needed.