MEET MARIANA
I don't know if you're familiar with this feeling of being chosen by a dream. As if that dream was meant to be yours from the start. That you could have been raised by any other family, had completely different friends or experienced any other direction in life, that you would still feel pulled towards that dream, because long before you fell in love with it, it had seen potential in you and chosen to remain with you for the rest of your life.
I live with this feeling for a long time when it comes to my passion for travel.
I've written it on the pages of my journals over the years. My handwriting has changed and so has my way of writing, but when it comes to my desire to travel, well, that remains the same.
Before high school all these thoughts were very well replaced by childish fantasies. It was like if being a kid would already take too much of my time.
My friends and school were fun, weekends at home playing were fun, doing nothing was fun, and I was okay with fun.
So all my premature thoughts fantasizing about the outside world didn't deserve more than a diary page from time to time.
When I turned 16, it was as if my dream had gained consciousness and decided: “Hey Mariana, it's time for you to really start giving me attention”.
And just like that, I became that girl who always dreamed of being where she wasn't.
High school was difficult for me to get through. For me, every day meant being closer to the end of it and also the possibility of being able to leave for another country.
I lived with this feeling daily for many months and that feeling got even worse when, for the first time, I experienced flying on a plane and exploring another country. In 2017 I went to Berlin and during all the days of that trip I didn't want to be anywhere else.
For a long time I felt like I didn't belong here, but then I realized that I'm one of those people who belong everywhere. Who could easily call many places home. A Traveler.
Finally high school was over, I worked hard on getting good grades, not because I believed that what I was being taught would help me in the future or take me somewhere, but because I didn't want to stay there any extra year.
At that time I was 17, I wasn't in high school anymore, I didn't want to go to college because I didn't feel that there was anything there for me and that was the phase of realizing that:
I NEED MONEY TO TRAVEL
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That was the year I started to experience some of the things I had dreamed about.
I worked in several clothing stores in Portugal, made a lot of money as a model with TV commercials and traveled to Madrid, Venice, Prague, Hamburg, Santorini, Rome, New York, London, Latvia, Los Angeles, Paris, Belgium, Poland and Berlin again.
And at the beginning of 2019 I moved to the UK to improve my ability to speak English and experience living abroad.
I got a job at a nursery working 9 hours a day, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday off to explore the city.
London was great and such a vibe, to this day it remains my favorite city in the world.
Living abroad was something I loved doing and the memories of my teenage years in London will always stay with me.
Back in Portugal at the end of the year I decided that I wanted to take my travels to the next level and try to make them my lifestyle.
I wanted to make my travels my job, I wanted to invest on social media and the travel niche and that's why I took a course at the School of Design in Lisbon on Video Editing and Post-Production.
My course ended in March 2020 and 1 week before I left, with 7 plane tickets already purchased to solo travel around Europe and start recording content, the pandemic begins and all my projects had to be paused.
I took this time to study more, take another editing course completely focused on the travel and youtube niche, earn more money for my travels and to buy video and editing equipment.
With the end of the pick of the pandemic, with the restrictions being lift and the borders opening, my way was free again for new adventures.
The world is too beautiful not to be seen and there are so many opportunities out there waiting for us.
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Traveling is not always pretty, safe or comfortable, sometimes it makes us feel exhausted and lonely, but to this day it is my favorite part of being alive.