Coming back to work after breaks has been getting harder and harder. July was tough; December has been a killer. The amount of headspaces I need to be in, the sheer routine of what I’ve been doing lately and the pressure of keeping up my hours has led me here: I’m burned out. There. I said it. And if I could make a change, I would.
Honestly, if all of our retirement dreams come true, Darryl and I have to work less than two more years. I keep telling myself I can do anything for two more years. Except… I really don’t want to.
Whew. All of this self-honesty on a Monday morning truly feels like purging.
Now, here’s the deal: I’m not sure what “this” is. Is it burnout? It definitely feels like it but it came on like a tidal wave. I mean, I saw it out there building but as it got closer to shore, it just crashed and crashed hard. But could it also be the winter blahs? Or, it could also be that as I age, I get more tired and I want more of my time dedicated to non-work related activities. Or finally, it could be simply that I’m bored.
Again, lots of self-honesty here. I feel practically naked.
Whatever it is, I’d dearly love to make a change. I still want to work from home and I still need to earn decent money. But I want less chaos, more free time and quieter workdays. Yep… I want a unicorn. More importantly, I’m tipping over the edge into the point of no return for this job.
That leads to daydreams. First, the goal – if we truly can achieve it – is that Darryl and I will both be able to retire when his company sells. When he was hired over two years ago, that was the vision. Now, fully retiring means that whatever we earn from the sale combined with our own savings makes retirement a reality.
And then there is what to do before then. Genuinely, I’ve always just wanted to be a writer. What I do now – finance, healthcare, etc. — was just the course that life took me on. What do I love? Writing and homemaking. In the back of my mind, I started this blog to achieve exactly that. It was my dream: live my yuppie-but-granny lifestyle, share the “adventures” of my day and have it be interesting enough that others would want to read it and advertisers would want to support it. Umm, I get it. It’s really not that interesting. Sigh.
My other dream has been to finish my novel. I’ve got three chapters written but never the time to write. Said yuppie-but-granny lifestyle above gets in the way, sucking up my free time. Sigh. Again.
Ultimately and much more practically, there may be an opportunity for me within our firm to transition more to a writing role or at least a less transitory role where I work on the same project (and largely only that project) for the majority of my time. Of all of the daydreams, that one is the most likely and it’s something I could begin to work on as soon as today.
Because this time, the burnout feels real. I’ve been at my firm for over six years, which is like 42 years in real work time. I have genuinely loved a lot of what I did and still do. But I’ve lost the fire in a way I have lost the fire only once before and that was before I quit being a CEO. In part, I blame our lifestyle. There genuinely is nothing more fulfilling than being home, taking care of our family and pets and running our lives as smoothly as possible. That takes energy and focus to make it all happen smoothly and with all of the small details taken care of. But gosh, this resonates with me and work becomes a distraction that is just getting in my way. I have genuinely enjoyed nothing more and I am truly ready for home to be the focus of my life.
And sadly, I don’t want to wait until its too late to enjoy it. My sister has a scan tomorrow and we’re all aging at a pace that seems to slightly accelerate each year. And when we finally do finish these renovations, I want to be at a point in our lives where my sole focus is on home.
But here’s the deal – I get it. If I want this to happen, the self-message is clear here: I now need to make it happen. As much as I’d like to believe in fate, I also know that each time I’ve wanted something to happen, it took some planning on my end to bring it over the finish line. So today, I begin laying plans. An email here, a feeler there, a reconnection over here. I’ve done this before and it ain’t brain surgery. Letting the right people know that I’m ready for a move is always the right move.
In the meantime, I’ll also take a few moments just to daydream. At least the daydream can get me through the Monday morning blues.
The Yuppie Homesteader 