Hello dear blog, it has been a minute. Today is my first official day of my next phase. The past 9 years I’ve been pretty caught up with work. I’ve thought about you a lot, but rarely acted on it. We’ll see how things go from here.

See, over the years, I prioritized work and slowly wore down my health. Early last year, I was able to take a 5-week sabbatical to try to reset, but I found that it took me 3 weeks to come down, I got about a week of peace, and then I started thinking about my return. I scheduled my first day back for a Friday, so I’d have time to catch up rather quietly, yet all the stress seemed to come bearing down immediately despite that.

I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong — I didn’t think I was burnt out since I still had interest in the work, yet I found myself utterly exhausted every single day. Weekends, holidays, and vacations were but brief gasps of air as I was wearing down. They were not sustained enough to truly offer a reprieve, or any lasting effects. I went to the doctor (which I never do!) and my bloodwork was all normal.

I decided I had malaise — but what do you do with symptoms that cannot be measured? I had persistent fatigue, did not feel rested from sleep (despite sleeping “enough” and through the night), started developing brain fog and headaches daily… but those don’t show up in tests. Less frequently, I would get other random symptoms like heart palpitations, difficulty breathing, spontaneous rashes or other inflammation, and even an ocular migraine (I went partially blind for a day). All of these were enough to drastically reduce my quality of life, but none were enough to say I’m ill per se.

I tried eating better, sleeping better, and being more active. I talked to therapists and career coaches. I pushed myself less at work and rarely worked overtime anymore. Yet all these felt like a drop in the bucket, barely affecting my overall situation. Since nothing was working, I started to come to the conclusion that I needed a more drastic change. I contemplated working parttime, being project-based, or asking for medical leave. But ultimately I think I needed the most extreme option, to completely leave not just this job, but the workforce entirely.

For how long? I don’t know. My body will have to let me know. I intend to give myself at least a year without having to worry about rejoining the workforce, but maybe that won’t be quite enough, or maybe I heal much faster than my current brokenness would allow me to imagine. I’m fortunate that I have the opportunity to give myself that time to figure things out and experiment a bit.

So here we go! I have now concluded my employment and jumped into the unknown with no plan. I don’t have a next career move, I don’t know what I’ll do with my time, and I don’t know how long it will be for. I just want to listen to my body and firstly find healing, then start seeking peace and then perhaps build up goals again. I think that I have trouble letting go of the stresses of work and that is the source of what makes me unwell. I’m hoping that by stepping out of that realm, my body will naturally adjust itself.

This new phase I am dubbing my “liminal” — I like this term because it is about transitioning, a point of change, being on a journey… with uncertainty about what lies on the other side. I know it’s meant to be an adjective, but if you know me, you know how I love to play with language, so I’ve decided to use it as a noun. I like that liminal infers neither here nor there, as that’s how it feels to me. I’m neither employed and working in the way I’ve known for so long, nor at the next step of whatever I might do. I’m taking a pause to do things very differently, to try to get in touch with my heart, as I don’t really know what it wants.

I find it a nice, fitting start that today is also my dad’s birthday, a little marker for us as I embark on my adventure. I’m curious to see how things pan out and how long it takes for me to start feeling a change. For the first month or so, I want to have no obligations (including not having to plan for the rest of my time). People would ask me what I want to do, but if you ask a drowning person what they want to eat when they get to shore… I’d say they just want to get to shore first. Similarly, I don’t know what I want to do yet; that’s not the point. I need that reprieve first, and then I can start thinking about all the cool things I can do with my liminal.

There’s a lot more I’m hoping to unpack in the coming months, but my fatigue and brain fog have caught up to me and I’m having trouble proofreading this, so it’s time to go rest.

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