The day I chose the sea over a salary and what it actually felt like
The last night I worked in the club, my manager booked us a table at Dynasty.
If you know Amsterdam, you know Dynasty. A place where the lighting is always exactly right, where the food arrives like an event, where you feel like something important is happening just by being there. That night it was. Twenty women around a table and every single one of them dressed like the best version of herself, laughing too loud, ordering too much, and telling stories that would never leave that room.
Soft music in the background. The kind you don’t notice until you do.
I looked around the table at some point during the night; I don’t remember exactly when, and felt something I wasn’t prepared for. These women had given me something no office ever had. No corporate away day, no team lunch, no end-of-year drinks. They had given me realness. Stories with edges. A kind of loyalty that doesn’t need a contract.
I cried. Not because I was leaving something bad. Because I was leaving something that had changed me for something I couldn’t see yet.
I was terrified.
I booked the flight anyway.
But this story doesn’t start in Thailand. It starts years earlier, in a corporate office in Amsterdam, wearing the right clothes and sitting in the right meetings and listening to people talk about mortgage rates and school districts.
I remember looking around those meeting rooms and feeling a specific kind of loneliness. Not the kind that comes from being alone. The kind that comes from being surrounded by people and realising none of their stories are yours.
I didn’t want those stories. I wanted real ones. The kind that cost something. The kind told by people who had made choices that scared them, who didn’t fit the mould and had quietly stopped pretending to.
So I left. And I found them in the most unexpected place.
The strip club was never about the money, though the money was good. It was about the women. Every single one of them had lived something. Something real, something complicated, something the polished LinkedIn version of a person would never mention.
We looked out for each other in ways I had never experienced in an office. No politics. No quiet competition. No performance reviews. Just women showing up for each other, night after night, with honesty and dark humour and absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit.
I loved it. And then, slowly, I started to feel safe again.
Safe is comfortable. Safe is also the first sign it’s time to go.
It was a friend who first told me about diving. One evening, almost casually, she mentioned an introduction class she’d taken in Egypt. The week after, we went together.
I was hooked before I surfaced.
There is something about being underwater that is almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The silence. The weightlessness. The way it demands your complete presence and gives you complete stillness in return. I signed up for my instructor course before I fully understood why.
I just knew it was pointing somewhere.
I worked a few more months in the club, saved what I needed, and then did something that felt equal parts logical and completely insane. I wrote an email to a Dutch dive school in Koh Samui, told them I was coming, and asked if they had a job for me.
They did.
I had a two-day layover in Bangkok before my final destination and nothing, not my friend’s tips, not anything I’d read, prepared me for what walked through the airport doors.
The city hit me like a wall. Heat first. Then sound. Then smell, food everywhere, from every direction, street stalls and markets and little restaurants spilling out onto pavements. I dumped my bag at the hotel and immediately went out. Ate things I couldn’t name on Khao San Road. Drank soup from a stall at midnight. Walked until my feet hurt and then kept walking.
I was mesmerised. Not in the tourist way. In the way that happens when a place feels like it was waiting for you.
Two days later, I landed in Koh Samui. My friends picked me up from the airport, one of those small tropical airports that feels more like a garden than a building, with little wooden carts and orchids everywhere. Orchids are my favourite flowers. I took it as a sign.
Everything was so green it almost hurt to look at. We drove around hunting for my first rental and found it eventually; a small house tucked between coconut trees in the middle of a green field, the kind of place that exists in the imagination of everyone who has ever thought about leaving their life behind and actually doing it.
I slept like a baby that night. The deep, uncomplicated sleep of someone who has just done something irreversible and is at peace with it.
My first students were arriving the next week.
The morning of, I got to the dive shop early, partly to set up, mostly because I needed something to do with my nerves. My boss had fresh coffee waiting. He asked me how I was feeling.
“Nervous,” I told him. There was no point pretending otherwise.
We walked to the pool together to get everything ready. It was outside, just behind the dive shop, tucked between tropical trees, the kind of green that makes everything feel slightly unreal. The kind of setting that makes you wonder briefly if your actual life is happening or if you’ve wandered into someone else’s.
When my students arrived, I sat with them first, just talked, and let the nerves settle into something more like excitement. My boss made himself comfortable on one of the sun loungers around the pool. He didn’t hover. He didn’t interfere. He was just there, close enough that I knew I wasn’t alone, far enough that it was mine to do.
That was exactly what I needed.
The lesson almost ran itself.
I don’t know how else to explain it. Everything I had learned came through me cleanly, calmly, without force. I wasn’t performing. I wasn’t teaching from a script. I was just there, in the water, with these people, doing the thing.
And when my students surfaced for the first time, when I saw their faces break into those expressions that are somewhere between disbelief and pure joy, something in me went very quiet.
Not the quiet of relief. The quiet of recognition.
That night we all had dinner together, the students and I, somewhere easy and warm and loud with other people’s conversations. They laughed about being my first. I laughed too, mostly with relief, a little with pride, and underneath both of those something harder to name.
Arrival. That’s the only word for it.
I had arrived.
Here is what I know now, looking back across all of it.
I have felt that feeling twice in my life. The first time was my first night in the club, terrified, out of my element, doing it anyway and feeling something click into place that no approved life path had ever given me. The second was that afternoon in the pool in Koh Samui.
Both times I was scared. Both times I showed up. Both times, the feeling that came afterwards was the same one I had been chasing without knowing I was chasing it.
Real people. Real stories. Real feeling. The sense of being exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, with exactly the right people around me.
The feeling came first. The life built itself around it.
That is not a strategy. It is not a framework. It is just the truest thing I know about how to make a decision that actually matters.
Ask yourself what you want to feel when you wake up. Then go and chase that without waiting for permission, without needing it to make sense to anyone else, without a guarantee of anything except that you will find out something real about yourself on the other side.
If something moved in your chest while you were reading this, that is not nostalgia. That is not fantasy.
That is your compass.
You already know which direction it’s pointing.