My lovely creative friend…

First, let me apologise for being a bit out of touch over the last 12 months, and let me tell you: it is time for an update about the life overhaul I just went through!

A LOT of things happened during 2023 and I needed to take a biiiig step back but I’ve missed you!

Would you like to know? It’s all positive, I promise 🙂

Let me rewind to the end of 2022…

Most of you will know I ran my own business, The Mixed Media Store, selling mixed media art supplies to the whole of Australia.

Remember the jars of Dylusions paints???
Ahhh, so impractical but so pretty to look at 😉

While many changes were happening in the world, and especially, during the second half of 2022, I watched how the cost of products, overseas imports, and of shipping within Australia just kept on rising, making me wonder where this was all going. For my lovely friends outside Australia, I’d love to hear if you noticed the same thing happening during that time??

I was really in a pickle for a while, wondering what to do: one minute I was ready to hire someone to help me cope with the workload, and the next, everything was slowing down!
Of course, when you’re in business, there are always ups and downs, however…

After working so hard for about 6.5 years building the business from scratch and getting several thousands of beautiful customers throughout the country, I also felt trapped with no way out for me to follow some of my other dreams!

You see, having lots of customers comes with lots of responsibilities and since I promised them the best customer service I could possibly provide, this also kind of backfired on me(having integrity can be a problem sometimes hahaha).
I always felt like I was ‘on call’, even during weekends and holidays and could never completely ‘switch off’ because I always wanted to give the best I could.
At times I would lay in bed for hours unable to sleep until I got up and packed a bunch of orders so the following day would be less hectic. What a catch 22 hahahaha

On top of feeling my freedom and dreams thinning out, the workload made my physical health suffer.
The problem was: it wasn’t obvious until much later that the pain I felt (which prevented me from getting good sleep for several years) came from my work!
As you can imagine, all of this added up and made my mental health suffer too  – no surprises there.
I thought I was keeping it together but I think I was going a little crazy on the inside!

The start of my life overhaul…

Many years ago, I had a 1975 kombi I adored – I often dreamt of living in it and becoming a gypsy travelling around Australia.
I don’t have it anymore but I have always had a campervan of some sorts so I could get away on my terms, and dream of going where-ever the wind would take me.

Pete, my hubby, was not a gypsy AT ALL when I met him!! But after many years together, my passion rubbed off on him a bit 😉
While working hard on my business, I watched the tiny house and vanlife movements becoming more and more popular, and the itch started, well…’itching’ again!!

My kombi and I, along with my beloved little Poppy (rest in peace) went on a LOT of adventures together!!

Hubby and I had many, many discussions about this and the more we discussed, the more I knew I just could not postpone this dream anymore!
And so I made the difficult decision to close the Store temporarily so I could fulfil my dream of travelliing around the country.
But, I’ll be honest, it was a very, very hard decision, and it put a lot of stress on our relationship – to the point that I thought I would have to do this trip on my own 🙁

sell house. Quit jobs. pack it all away.

Thankfully Pete can adapt once he puts his mind to it and after a lot of resistance, he finally agreed to go along with my crazy plan…

That one sentence above does not begin to describe the intense stress that decision ensued though!

The following 2.5 months (Jan-Mid March 2023) were spent in total madness:
We fixed and cleaned up the house and I guess did something right as it sold in a flash.
We packied ALL our belongings into a big shipping container (a nightmare).
Pete quit his job.
I sold off most of the Store’s stock and said a temporary ‘au revoir‘ to all my customers.

And if that wasn’t enough, while doing all of that we worked day and night to finish building our campervan (which was completely empty when we bought it.
OH. MY. GOD. So, so, soooo stressful!!!

the release: 5 months of travel

We moved into our van full time the day we handed over the keys to our house. Well actually, 2 days before because we had packed all our stuff away and had to clean the place up so… There we were, sleeping in our van in our own driveway 😉

We spent a couple of weeks finishing up the van and visiting family in Sydney before finally heading north along the coast of Australia. This was so, so exciting and so liberating!!

I won’t go talk about our travels because we documented it all (in bite sizes) on our youtube channel ‘FurryAdventuresOz’. If you’d like to see how beautiful Australia is and how we spent our days, go check it out!
By the way, this is just a personal channel to keep track of our travels, not to become youtube famous or gain followers 😉

Our van about to enter the Northern Territory!

Phew. This is a rather long story so I’ll stop here for now.

In part 2, I will tell you about the two light bulb moments (big realisations) that happened to me during the trip, how I got ‘sensory overload’, moved to a different part of the country and enrolled into art school!!

Have you gone through or thought about a life overhaul too??
Tell me about it in the comments section below, I’d love to hear about your experience!
And if you have any questions, please write them there too 😉

See you soon with PART 2 – stay tuned!
xx Mimi Bondi