Who am I?

ME IN 10 SECONDS:

I’ve skydived over 9,000 times and have travelled to over 30 countries.

I love eating ramen, drinking coffee, and doing partner acrobatics.

I read and write every single day and am obsessed with learning about how to live a truly happy and fulfilling life.

ME IN 10 MINUTES:

I was put into foster care when I was four years old. My mother was an alcoholic, my father gambled away all the money we had, and both were heavily into drugs. I moved around a lot between the age of four and ten, before finding my forever home.

As a child I was hyperactive and always geting into trouble. I was diagnosed with both ADHD and Asberger’s Syndrome when I was quite young, but my disruptive behaviour at the time was attributed more to my childhood than these conditions, so they were never treated. I’ve recently taken assessments for both conditions and am pursuing behavioral therapy and medication.

As being fostered is different to being adopted, I was still able to see my biological parents while I was growing up. Before seeing me, my mother would see a social worker who would ensure she was sober. This meant that every time I saw her she seemed like a beautiful, normal person, and as I didn’t know the whole story I ultimately blamed myself for being taken away from her. Even now as an adult, when I’m sad my first instinct is to reach out to her. This maternal bond prevented me from ever truly connecting with my foster parents or allowing myself to feel loved by them.

When I was eighteen I moved out of home. At the time my life revolved around hip hop music. I had an entire music studio which included turntables, a microphone, an expensive Mac computer and thousands of old vynils. I made my own beats, wrote song lyrics, did graffiti and was even learning to breakdance. I also competed regularly in local rap battles. It was my life.

When I was nineteen I was given a free skydive in exchange for doing graffiti on the side of the company’s van. As I wasn’t working at the time, I started hanging out there every weekend, and they taught me how to pack parachutes. I used the money I earned packing parachutes to pay for my skydiving license and my first parachute. Skydiving took over, and making music was all but forgotten.

I packed parachutes every weekend for almost four years. In this time I had many different jobs including stacking shelves, washing dishes and even starting a butchery apprenticeship.

At one point I was getting up at 5:30am and driving over an hour to work a day-job as a labourer for a tree cutting company. I would leave that job around 5pm, drive back home and then work from 7pm until after midnight stacking shelves, as well as packing parachutes on weekends. One day when driving to work in the morning I indicated and began merging lanes without looking, almost causing a serious car crash. I quit the job with the tree company as soon as I got to work, and the job stacking shelves soon after.

After four years and 875 skydives I got my Tandem Instructor rating, and began my career as a full-time skydiving instructor. At the time I was the youngest person in South Australia to get this rating. After working briefly in South Australia I moved to Queensland, and then in 2014 I began to travel internationally. My first overseas travel was to America and then to Germany, where I worked for 6 months. This was my first time traveling and was when I first discovered minimalism, and how to travel lightly.

In 2015 I backpacked around Asia for almost a year visiting Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal, and India, before working again as a skydiver in the Phillipines and then Japan. When I first left Australia I had a huge backpack on my back, weighing over 20 kilos, and another bag on the front. These days I travel with a bag small enough to fit in carry-on, and weighs less than 10 kilos.

After Japan I got a job at Skydive Dubai, and moved there in October 2017.

When I first got to Dubai I had 3,055 jumps, and when I officially left 5 years later I had 6,645 jumps, more than double of what I started with! In total I was there around 4.5 years, with a break back in Australia due to COVID. While I was there I was always working 6-7 days per week and have therefore never really explored the UAE.

During COVID I started to seriously study Mandarin Chinese, as well as getting my TESOL qualification so I could teach English online to foreigners. At my peak I did 70 Chinese language lessons in 2 months, and could speak for an hour without using English. The methodology I use to learn languages is Fluent Forever. I’m currently getting back into language learning.

During my time in Dubai I did do a lot of travel, visiting many countries in Europe. At the time as a freelancer I could take as much time off as I wanted, as long as there was enough staff available, and was travelling for a week every few months. My travels were almost exclusively for acrobatics trainings and took me to Italy, Spain, Greece, Israel, England, Thailand and America. I’ve now visited more than 30 countries.

By the time I left Dubai I was completely burnt-out and severely depressed. While I was there all I did was work, and even though I was earning more money than I ever had before I was stuck on the hedonic treadmill, funneling the world into my living room, trying to make myself happy with purchases. This really showed me that money doesn’t buy happiness.

After quitting my job I went travelling around Europe and visited England, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and Gibraltar. I was lost, not sure what to do with my life, and it was one of the lowest points in my life in terms of my mental health.

While I was in Spain I hiked over half of the Camino Santiago, covering almost 500 kilometres in two weeks. I planned to complete the entire hike, but decided to leave early as it was far too crowded and cheap accomodation was extremely limited. On my last night doing the hike the only accomodation I could find was a €300 hotel room with 3 beds.

In Portugal I rented a campervan for 10 days and travelled down the coast, while at the same time working through a personal development course called LifeBook. I wrote out all my goals for the next 5 years, as well as all the habits I needed to develop, dreams I had and who I needed to become to achieve it all. To date it is still the best online course I’ve ever done, and I read my life vision every single day. I also read multiple books and did a course on building habits.

The habits I’ve found to have the biggest returns are meditation, mindfulness, journaling, exercise and time in nature.

When I returned to Australia in September 2022 I didn’t want to return to skydiving. Instead Idecided to follow my passion for coffee and get a job as a barista in one of the busiest cafes in Melbourne. We were routinely making over 1,000 coffees a day! Unfortunately, even the best baristas in the best cafes still only get paid minimum wage, and there’s not much career growth besides starting your own cafe or roastery.

Later that year I attended Tony Robbins’ Date With Destiny. This 6-day event was profound, and to date is still the last time I’ve actually cried in years. I’ve described it as LifeBook being the ingredients in the pot and Date With Destiny being the flame on the stove. During COVID I also attended his 3-day seminar “Unleash The Power Within”. I attended both courses virtually, and while they were still great experiences, going forward I plan to only attend in-person, fully immersive events.

I was in Melbourne for almost about a year. During this time I did a 6-month course called “Daring Humans Level 1” with a family friend named Dan. One of the most pivotal exercises we did was using a digital whiteboard to map out our Ikigai. This was the first time I’d thought about first mapping out all the things I’m interested in and then finding the point they converge to help me choose a career path. Usually we look at a job title and work backwards, instead of using our skills and interests as the foundation and moving forwards from there.

This insight made it very clear to me that writing is what I want to be doing every day.

Since primary school I’ve always been good at writing. I was in a special writing class in my junior years, and when I was a teenager I wrote a 100+ page story just for fun. Unfortunately,  there’s no linear path to making a living as a writer, and I’ve moved platforms from instagram to X and now to Substack. Nothing happens over night, and my goal is to publish consistently for as many months or years as it takes to be able to make a living from it. I don’t need to be rich, all I need is enough to cover my freedom number, which for me is about $1,000 per week.

After about a year of working in cafes the cost of living had exhausted my savings and I decided to go back to skydiving. The allure of being able to earn the same money in a weekend as in a whole week at a normal job has made it hard to walk away from, regardless of all the injuries I’ve accumulated over the years.

I moved 1.5 hours south of Melbourne, and returned to sydiving full-time. The weather was so bad for the next 3 months that I was barely breaking even, earning less than I was making coffee. I started studying to be a Life Coach online with Robbins Madanes Training, but quit soon after due to financial strain, and not having any internet where I was living. Soon after I transferred to another skydiving location in Airlie Beach, which is 10 hours north of Brisbane.

My time in Airlie Beach was short-lived, lasting less than a week, and I found myself once again retreating to the safety of my parents’ house with my tail in between my legs. This launched me even deeper into depression than when I left Dubai. Although I didn’t continue with the RMT training, I did have the fortune of meeting a lovely woman named Pip, with whom I started having regular therapy sessions. I’ve tried a lot of different types of therapy throughout my life, but this style was the closest I’ve come to truly experiencing and connecting with my emotions.

After a few dark months I decided to start University and study Psychology. The human brain has always fascinated me, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to work towards a completely new career. This only lasted about 6 weeks before I decided it wasn’t for me, but unfortunately I decided to pull out of the course just days after the cut-off date, leaving me with several thousands of dollars of student debt for a course I barely started.

I went back to working in a cafe, while at the same time trying to build a habit of writing every day. My longest stint was 54 days in a row of writing 1,000 words a day. In the beginning it was easy, and I could write pages and pages about a single topic. After a month I found I could barely string a few new sentences together, and had to write snippets of multiple ideas to achieve my word count.

The cafe I worked at also roasted their own coffee, and I spent time on my days off shadowing the head roaster and learning what I could. In order to gain experience roasting coffee I moved to Sydney to work full-time as a coffee roaster for a large company. The first 3 months were amazing, as the learning curve was steep and I was learning a lot. The next 3 months were a grind, and the reality of working in a big dusty factory with no windows and no music really started to get to me. In the end I was let go from the role and deemed as “not suitable for the role” due to my short attention span and need to be constantly learning and growing, and not just repeating the same thing over and over every day.

Almost exactly a year to the day, I once again returned to my parents house and am now working weekends skydiving and doing my best to write every day. Building a writing habit is hard, and I’m finding it difficult to stay focused and disciplined amidst all of life’s distractions.

I’m not sure what the next 12 months will bring, or where I’ll end up, but my focus for this year is writing, first and foremost.