The Day I Stopped Waiting for Permission

The day I stopped waiting for permission to be the real me. 

This photo was taken on the eve of the year 2000 on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, just before my whole life was about to change. 

I love this photo for so many reasons: one is that in the front seat is adventurer and my lifelong friend Athalee Brown! We were on a road trip with another friend, travelling from Sydney to Melbourne to Adelaide and back again to celebrate the big millennium, and the feeling of being free was also because I had just made the biggest decision of my life to find the right life for me and leave a life that no longer brought me happiness or enthusiasm. 

There were so many signs I craved: change, authenticity, and finding who I really was and what I wanted to do with my life, even before I actually made those changes. One of the signs was this 1964 Valiant.

Let me go back about a year or two before this photo.

I was a successful business owner, driving the latest Honda something, living in a beautiful one-bedroom apartment in Darlinghurst, and eating lots of Thai takeaway on my own. My life felt like the flat line on a hospital monitor just moments before you are about to die.

One day, it struck me as I drove to work, that I didn’t feel good or even like my car. My ‘Honda something’ made me feel like a homogenised person, and what I wanted was to feel good driving my car and feel like me.

I’d always loved old cars, and some of my fondest memories as a child were the road trips I took with my family in a 1964 Valiant from Bourke to Sydney. 

So I bought myself this old Valiant with a blue leather bench seat, a white steering wheel, and the bluest metal dashboard my eyes had ever seen. 

I left my Honda parked at work, and I would drive around Sydney in my Valiant, feeling like I was travelling, being adventurous, and something started to happen. People actually waved to me or would give me the ‘V for Valiant’ sign that was a thing in the 60’s, and it wasn’t only on the outside that things changed but something inside of me was shifting too.

That car ignited something inside of me, and I started to feel good. The day I bought that car was the day I stopped waiting for permission to be myself and instead gave myself permission to take a step towards the real me.

It was the beginning of a train reaction of events that would lead me to the day that I won ‘Customer of the Year’ at my local Thai takeaway, and I would make the most important decision of my life. To step out of a ‘cosy life’ that was killing the woman inside me and into a life of adventure and an eventual crusade towards a life that was true to myself. 

All these years later, so many wonderful life experiences have happened, and often I look back and think it was because I had the courage to buy a Valiant and that was the first part of a long and adventurous journey to self.

What would be one thing you would do that would be a step towards the real you?