I Googled My Way Out of a Career. Here’s What I Found.

There’s a specific kind of tired that a demanding job gives you. Not the good tired, where you fall asleep feeling like you earned it. The other kind. The kind where you lie on your rental apartment’s single bed, staring at the ceiling, mentally running through the seventeen things you didn’t finish today and the twenty-three that are waiting for you tomorrow – and the deadlines lurking just around the corner, tapping their foot impatiently.

That was me at twenty-something, two and a half years into a Clinical Research Associate role I’d been promoted into after just three months. Clinical research, pharmaceutical trials, constant travel. On paper, impressive. In reality? I was running on fumes and a very unhealthy relationship with my to-do list. (They were not on speaking terms.)

A few dramatic breakdowns later, I was done. I handed in my notice, bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand, and spent my three-month handover period in a very specific emotional cocktail: one part quietly terrified, one part giddy with relief, one part already mentally choosing hiking boots. It was somewhere in that in-between, already gone but not yet gone, lying on my single bed at 3am, that something went quiet and clear.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

The ticket was already booked. But what happened after New Zealand? What was I actually running towards?

The Netbook Moment

Here’s the thing about epiphanies – they don’t always arrive looking like epiphanies.

I was already planning the WHV. That part was decided. But lying there that night, I started thinking: what if I didn’t have to choose between having an income and being somewhere else? What if the work could just… come with me?

I sat up, opened my Acer netbook (yes, a netbook. It later got stolen in Sweden, which felt like a very dramatic end to that chapter), and started searching.

I don’t remember exactly what I typed. Something about working online, working remotely, location-independent income. And then, somewhere in that rabbit hole of late-night searching, three words appeared:

Virtual Assistant.

I read everything I could find that night. Forums, blog posts, Reddit threads, random websites from 2009 that still had Comic Sans and were inexplicably still ranking on Google. By the time I finally closed the laptop, something had shifted. I didn’t know exactly what a VA did or how to get clients or whether I was cut out for it. But I knew: this is the thing.

I didn’t do anything about it for seven years.

The WHV, Europe, and the Return

New Zealand, Australia, three years backpacking Europe. The idea sat in the back of my mind the whole time, patient and a little smug. I came back, returned to the corporate world, did what I knew how to do. Four years later, I was still there. Eventually, I stopped arguing with the idea.

The Proposal Graveyard

I started the way everyone starts: badly, and with too many tabs open.

I set up profiles on Fiverr, Upwork, and PeoplePerHour simultaneously. I wrote proposals after work, sent them into the void, and refreshed my inbox at midnight. Then 1am. Then 3am. Then set an alarm for 7am to sit in traffic and be at the office by nine, pretending I wasn’t running on four hours of sleep and misplaced optimism.

This part doesn’t get talked about enough. The proposals that go nowhere. The clients who ghost you after three messages. The strange, deflating experience of putting a number on yourself and watching someone shrug and walk away.

I decided early on that I wasn’t going to race to the bottom on rates. It made the early days slower and lonelier. I don’t regret it, though I did have several conversations with myself about it at the time.

Eventually, someone took a chance on me. Some online research, basic analysis work. Nothing glamorous. My first client came from Fiverr – not Upwork, not PeoplePerHour, just Fiverr, which I mention only because everyone assumes it’ll be Upwork.

Forty-Five Dollars

Three hours. Fifteen dollars an hour. Forty-five dollars total.

That was before Fiverr took their cut. And PayPal took theirs. Because I didn’t know better yet about alternative payment methods. Let’s just say the final number was a lot more humbling and leave it at that.

It was 2016. By any reasonable standard, not impressive. But I remember the exact feeling when that payment cleared. Not excitement, exactly. Something quieter and more durable than excitement.

I made this happen. In my own time. On my own terms.

That feeling, it turns out, is addictive in the best possible way. One client became the next. Over time, a stable base. But that’s a story for another post, one that involves more rejection, worse clients, and eventually, figuring out how to get paid without losing a third of it to fees.

What I’d Tell the Person Lying on That Bed

If you’re in the middle of it right now: the ceiling-staring, the to-do list spiral, the vague sense that there has to be another way – here’s what I want you to know:

You don’t have to execute immediately. You don’t have to quit anything tomorrow. You don’t have to have it all figured out.

Sometimes an idea needs time to sit. Mine sat for seven years. Through a working holiday, through a continent of backpacking, through four more years of just doing what I knew how to do. It waited.

And when I was finally ready, it was still there.

The question isn’t whether you’ll get there. It’s just a matter of when.

Next up: the not-so-glamorous reality of building a client base: slow months, questionable clients, and eventually figuring out how to actually get paid properly. Coming soon.