Behind The Glass with Charlotte Eriksson

Come hang with me as I answer ALL the questions about vagabonding, loneliness, travel hacks and more!

www.charlotteeriksson.com

The number 1 most popular episode of all time is back!

“Your relationship with your future self is the most important relationship in your life.”

Future me, whom I looked up to 3 years ago, is me now, and that’s why I feel so familiar with myself because I’ve communicated with future me for years.

I’m really grateful to past me for putting in the work, pushing on, making plans, and creating, because without past me doing this, my life would look very different now.

So when I go through hard times, I try to think about future me in a year from now, or just 6 months from now. What can I do today, that future me will be really really grateful for? What can I do today, to make life for future me a little easier and more beautiful?

💭 www.CharlotteEriksson.com 💭

Today we're diving into the topic of living a wandering or vagabonding life on a minimal budget. We'll explore how it is possible to create any lifestyle you want for yourself if you just want it bad enough. If you’re ready to sacrifice the lifestyle you have right now. If you’re willing to paint a little bit outside the box.

We will talk about how to create a remote working career and what doors it might open up for you, how to be smart with your money, how to live simply and minimally, and how embracing solitude can unlock a life filled with incredible experiences and long-term travel.

So, if you've ever dreamed of wandering the globe but thought, "I can't afford it" or "I'm not born into wealth" or "what about my job," this episode is for you.

My goal in life is to show by example, how it’s possible to live a life on your own terms, a life that gets you excited to wake up every single morning, and how this life is 100% possible to create, if you just want it bad enough. 

The books I'm mentioning in this episode are:

Find all my books, links and story at www.CharlotteEriksson.com ♡

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

7. Don’t think you know yourself. You're an ever-evolving incredibly vast thing. You’re not static. Wake up every day excited to discover new sides of yourself. New passions, new hobbies, new talents. Be your own biggest change-supporter.

8. Have less, do more. Simplicity is the key to everlasting peace.

Learn to live on as little as possible.

9. Embrace unexpected opportunities.

10. You can never save people, but you can inspire them to believe they can save themselves.

11. Build a connection with the natural world. Greet Father Sky, thank Mother Earth. Meditate. Walk barefoot. Eat foods from the ground. We’re all under the same sky.

12. It’s ok to spend a year on your own if that’s what you need right now. It’s okay to go quiet. It’s okay to pause that dream, pause that project, cancel the contract and just sit and watch the waves come and go in some lonesome town in Portugal. It’s all ok. Trust your story. Be where you are and don’t be sorry.

13. Your only task is to live.

💭 Find links to all my books, music, writings and socials at www.CharlotteEriksson.com 💭

Part two of the 13 truths I have learned about being alive. Part 3 coming next week!

3. Don’t underestimate yourself. If you don’t have the necessary skillset now, you can develop it. If you don’t have the resources now, you can get them. If you haven’t met the right people yet, you’re just getting ready for them. Everything is possible if you just want it bad enough.


4. Slow down. Stay in bed an extra hour. Sip your coffee while watching the clouds drifts. Read the instructions one more time. Fast is no longer useful. Slow, steady, conscious, and aware—that’s the way to go.

5. Uncertainty can grow into excitement if you learn to trust your own path.

6. Friends are hard to find. Take care of them when you do.

Find all my books, music, and story here: www.CharlotteEriksson.com

Find me on IG: @justaglasschild

Signed copies of my books: www.charlotteeriksson.com/shop

What I’ve learned after 32 years on this planet ✦

The books I'm recommending in the episode:

Come find everything I do and create at www.CharlotteEriksson.com ♡

Relationships with cities are very much like relationships with people. Sometimes even stronger, or more formative. You fall into them feeling like a child. Everything is new and exciting, endless opportunities, everything is possible. You wake up in a rented bed, smiling not knowing what the day will bring, and you lie down at night taking a long exhale, perfectly overwhelmed by all new smells and sounds and sights and sounds. You feel like your life has restarted. You imagine yourself in this new relationship, who you could be now, who you could grow to be, the life you could live out. Shiny. Everything is shiny.

But you change and sometimes the person, or city, you’re in a relationship with does not, or just changes in a different direction, and one day you find yourself in an argument and you can’t seem to reach each other. Like suddenly you speak two different languages and nothing translates. You flail your arms, raising the white flag, not understanding where you’re being misunderstood, but off you both go and there’s a separation growing in between you. Something has changed. 

I left Berlin many times between then and now. Asked for a break, needed to see if maybe there was another match for me out there. Something always felt a little off but I never managed to put my finger on it. I felt in love, but also constantly daydreaming about something else. You know those people who say you just know it’s right when you meet the right one? I guess I still want to believe in that. I guess I still want to feel that, certain, knowing this is it. I had secret affairs with Bali, with Barcelona, with Lisbon, with Prague… but I always came back. For a person, for a job, the wind brought me back, a flight… I always ended up riding a bike through Friedrichshain in July. Flip flops and cheap wine from the corner shop. And I always found my way back to moments of falling asleep smiling, thinking, “maybe I could be happy here”. 

Joan Didion describes her time in New York as never really realizing she lived out a life there, like she only planned on staying for a few more months. But suddenly 8 years went by and she had lived out a life there, without meaning to. That’s how I feel about every place I’ve ever lived out a life in, I never actually meant to stay anywhere, just a few months, which sometimes turned into a bit more. I wonder what it would feel like to actually intend to stay somewhere, live out a life, make some plans.

It was somewhere on the streets of Budapest that I realized I have reached the beginning of an ending. I have started my leaving. Like that moment in a relationship when you know there is no saving. You stand empty in front of someone who used to make you feel a million feelings per second and suddenly you feel nothing at all. And even though it will take months, maybe even a year, you know the breakup started for you in that second, and one day you’ll say goodbye for the last time and it will feel heavy and free at the same time, because endings are always beginnings and they carry you forward, always to something new and different. 

Where to next? Not sure, I know I’ll find it when I get there. Maybe Porto. Maybe Prague. Maybe I’ll spend a few months dancing to rhythms in Ibiza. Maybe something brand new. I always wanted to visit Canada. Maybe a few months in New York? I have no one who will miss me, nothing pulling me back. Maybe I’ll go nowhere at all, for a while. Floating somewhere in between, feeling everything, holding on to nothing.