Quarter-Life Crisis, But Make It Snowy

Why I traded office chairs for ski boots, and started blogging in the middle of it all.

Here comes the 25-year-old with her quarter-life crisis. Not the dramatic kind where you quit your job, shave your head, and move to Bali to find yourself. No, mine was more of a slow-burning realisation: I wanted to move to London to be closer to my siblings. And after three years of being a copywriter at Ogilvy South Africa, and many years of writing in general, I had made enormous strides in my career – more than I thought I would have in the time frame. But before I dove headfirst into another job, another city, and another conversation spent defending the humble Oxford Comma, I decided to take six months out and do something completely different. Enter: chalet hosting in Val d’Isère.

For the uninitiated, a chalet host is essentially a mix between a B&B owner, a cleaner, a part-time chef, and an underpaid therapist for skiers who don’t understand why altitude sickness is a thing. It’s a job that requires early mornings, late nights, and a level of patience I did not know I possessed. But it also comes with sunny blue-bird days, après-ski that gets out of hand, and the kind of friendships forged in the shared trauma of serving a four-course meal to 14 demanding guests on two hours of sleep.

Which brings me to the blogging. Writing has always been my thing, my way of making sense of the world (or at least making fun of myself trying to navigate it). And while my sabbatical was technically a bridge between Joburg and London, I never wanted it to be a break from storytelling. This blog is my way of proving—to myself and to future employers—that I’ve kept writing. It’s also a way to document the sheer madness of the past six months: the highs, the lows, and the occasional existential crisis on a chairlift with French strangers.

So here it is: a collection of stories from my time as a chalet host, a wedding that pulled me back to reality, and the impending return to London life. Expect self-deprecation, some questionable decision-making, and an honest attempt to answer the question: what comes next?