Ever thought about throwing in the towel on your day job? Recklessly pursuing passion instead of duty? Extricating yourself from the confines of lifestyle for the possibilities of dreams?

If you’re like me, you’ve spent years nearly pulling the trigger, and just as many years cowering in the face of certain uncertainty. You might have a family, a mortgage, an important career, or some sort of combination thereof. Or, you just might be afraid that your dreams might not ever work out well enough to pay your bills.

In 2006, I’d spent nearly a decade working as a banker, although I’d never intended it to last that long. My first year on the job, I promised myself I’d leave by the time I’d saved ‘that’ amount of money. You know what I mean, the Freedom Number, the one that is going to let you off the hook of deadlines and obligations, even for just a little while, so that you can pursue something a little closer to your heart. However, every year, that number inched forward, always just out of my reach. Think of that famous answer to the question, ‘How much is enough?’

The answer? ‘Always at least a single dollar more than you have.’

Anyway, with the obligation of a mortgage, I wasn’t exactly free to leave the prison I’d created for myself, which, incidentally, was my dream home in my dream city. Ever since I’d been a kid, I’d always wanted to live in Manhattan. A-room-with-a-view sort of place. Finally, I had what I’d always wanted, and I was going to throw it away? For something I wasn’t at all sure about?

But that’s exactly what I did, resigning one morning to temporarily move to Mongolia. Weeks earlier, I’d applied for an internship at the country’s national TV station, hoping to test the waters of my dream to become a foreign correspondent. And just a few months later, freshly unemployed and completely uncertain of anything at all, I arrived in Ulaanbaatar and moved in with a Mongolian family, commuting daily from their home to Mongol Televit, the state-owned TV station located in the capital.

I’d like to tell you how it all turned out, but that would spoil the fun of the book I’m writing about my journey. Don’t get me wrong: this is not the incredible success story of a self-made young woman rising quickly through the ranks to correspond from Tehran on the eve of their elections. Not at all. This is a real-life experience of ups and downs, complete with wildly unexpected triumphs, and many fatuous failures. Fact is, despite what happened in Mongolia, I’m still not there yet, wherever ‘there’ is going to be. But I’m confidently on my journey, and while I’m on it, I’d like to invite you along for the ride.

Several times weekly, I’ll be blogging about this experience, and I’d love to hear back from you. Maybe you, too, have followed your own dream, or at least asked yourself, ‘What if?’