NOT (NOT) HOMELESS
hi friend,
It's the end of Week 45, and I have been on the road for 35 of them.
I'm back ‘home’ in Trinidad, Colorado, for overdue doctor's appointments and to visit my family and friends, but I'm right back on the road by mid-November.
I'll be driving through AZ to Albuquerque, taking the “Avoid Highways" route on my Google Maps, before flying to NYC.
Then it's DC with my bestie from college for the holidays to fulfill our 18-year-old-NYU-destingy to write a screenplay about our favorite female murderer.
But I honestly couldn't tell you where I'll be after that…
When people ask, I like to say, “I am living out of my suitcase,” but technically, I have been homeless since I packed up my apartment into storage over a year ago.
THAT RANDOM FRIEND ON A TUESDAY
Unfortunately, I am that friend who will show up on Insta-story taking a meeting from a sauna in Poland on a random Tuesday morning in February.
I get to wake up, work from bed, in a new place, every few weeks, and the best part is that I have not spent a single dollar on rent.
(My secret is TrustedHouseSitters… think international house exchange, but with pet sitting.)
I go to bed early, work wherever there is a wifi signal, make my own schedule, and see movies in the middle of the day if I feel like it.
But life in 2025 has started to feel like a video game. Wearing the same outfit every day. Same mission, different game map.
NO SLEEP. BUS. CLUB. 'NOTHER CLUB. PLANE.
Living on the road 24/7 can be a real son of a bitch sometimes.
Cut to me at 3 am in a tiny local Colorado airport, and the car rental place is closed when I get there, asking myself, ‘Who in their right mind would choose to live like this?’
(✋ It's me. I choose to live like this.)
Mail is a pain in the ass, and my driver's license has an address on it that I have not been to in 4 years.
Most people have trouble making friends in their 30s, but it's even harder when you live nowhere and everywhere. My closest friendships are split between voicenotes and the annual IRL hangouts (if we're lucky).
Change is my only constant. If I'm not somewhere I've never been before, I'm on my way to someplace new.
I have no consistent space of my own, so I've had to adapt to make the things I do consistent, since I can't make the space I do them in consistent.
THE SCIENCE OF SELF-SABOTAGE
If you managed to get to your 30s without having to adapt to a divorce, a death, a breakdown, or a bankruptcy, congratulations.
But if you're like me, you've gotten so good at adapting to trauma that it has become your success pattern!
I can't name a breakthrough in my life that has not come after tragedy, so it has felt like the price for entry.
For years, I self-sabotaged to pay that price, but that is a long walk off a short plank. Any profit I made with the breakthrough did not cover the expense of my mental health, and so I burned out.
Back in 2020, when I still had my studio, I had a doctor's appointment for COVID, and he clocked my heart rate at 190 ❤️🔥!
Now, in the wisdom of my 30s, I've learned I thrive in a challenge, but I can do it without hitting the self-destruct button.
Instead of working myself to death and picking fights with vendors, only to be running a business that I resent, now I do healthier things like pack up all my belongings and fit my entire life into a suitcase.
But now, because I no longer had the physical space for things that did not serve me, my goals snapped into focus.
WHAT FITS IN YOUR SUITCASE?
What would you pack if you had ot live out of one suitcase?
What would you cut out first?
What's making you keep it around?
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You don't have to go to the extreme to have the extreme effects; you really just need a system that eliminates all of the things wasting space in your life.
I was forced to create one for myself to make this extreme life possible.
Getting my personal belongings down to a few square feet is one thing, but making my entire business digitally portable in one organized system was a whole other thing.
But I can promise you that if my system that can hold my life together -- traveling full-time, scaling my online business, while making art with grants – it can help you, too.
It's like when curb ramps became required for wheelchair access; the mom with the stroller, me with my suitcase, and the UPS delivery driver with his cart all benefit.
My system is my curb ramp. This is the thing I have made for myself that has helped so many other friends that it became my career.
It's the only reason I can schedule my content, manage my finances, track my workouts, book my flights, pack my bags, apply for grants, and grow my online business with time to spare is because my systems are on LOCK.
I HAVE A SYSTEM
I would lose my head if it were not attached to my body.
I've only managed to live this way by solving the questions that I think people ask themselves when they give me that look, “Where does she get the time?” or “How does she make a living?”
And if you think that you're too disorganized, too hopeless, too non-committal, or too busy, you're not. I have been there, and this thing has been tested in the trenches with me and my clients for 5+ years 💪.
But I don't want you to believe me, I want you to watch me do it in front of you because it's what I actually use. Not something I just say I do to sell you a course.
From now until the end of the year, I am just doing so to show you how I do a full life reset by simply updating my virtual office that I have built inside Notion.
It's the closest thing to what I imagine running the dishwasher would be like when your work has piled up in the sink of the metaphorical kitchen of your life.
With Notion, I can update all of my Tasks across all of my Projects to meet all of my Goals with the click of a few buttons. Literally.
If you follow me on @not_not_notion, you'll be the first in line to get it and get little gifts from me along the way!
My system is foolproof, Daryl Oh
