The trouble with following you heart is that most people around you think it’s a great byline but a really bad idea.

I recently decided to change from a secure, interesting, challenging, high profile job in one of the most beautiful and cleanest cities on the planet to a short term one year assignment that I can do standing on my head in pollution-infested Asia.

Dear friends and colleagues, I love you all, admire many of you and even respect a select few. I am however going to tell you and all the career advice you’ve given me to kindly and respectfully f&%*k off. I truly don’t have the words to tell you all why this utterly mad choice seems like exactly the right decision for me. If you ask me for my ‘business case’ for my decision, well, I fess up, I don’t have one.

In fact, instead of writing that business case I’m going to tell you 10 reasons why you can all f&%*k off; and once I’ve done that, I’m going to go out there and follow my heart and live courageously and in total bliss with all the consequences of this mad decision.

1. I’ve made madder decisions than this before and it’s always worked out.

2. I’m the kind of girl who’s been known to leave town or change countries when I need to dump a guy. A new job and a new city are a breeze.

3. My parents drove around Australia with three kids under six in a bench seat Ford. I went to six different schools in 12 years. This is normal in my family.

4. Home gets old sometimes. You have to leave it to come back to it to make it feel like home.

5. My life is not your life, we want different things, you don’t understand it, get over it.

6. I don’t want to be comfortable. Comfortable makes me break out in a cold sweat and feel like someone’s choking me. I want uncomfortable. It makes me feel alive.

7. I have a life plan, roughly, like in big brush strokes. Just trust me.

8. Unfamiliarity, new people, new culture, new language, new food, new everything ? It’s the best excuse ever to embrace humanity. Call it a forced heart-opener.

9. My life is not something of the future. It’s right here, right now and I will not wait any longer for my ‘best life’ to appear (thank you, Oprah).

10. Because doing this makes me feel like the best and truest version of myself and that feeling is unbeatable.

So whilst I tell you all to f&%*k off, I also offer up tremendous gratitude to you all. Every doubt or question you have had about this path I will take, has offered me clarity about my choice for which I am grateful.

And for those of you wondering if following your heart is as good as the multitude of Facebook quotes and hippy websites say it is, well the answer is yes. Be brave, tell the rest of the world to f&%*k off and go out there and find out for yourself.

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Assist Ed: Zenna James/Ed: Sara Crolick