Okay, I’m she. She is me. I’ve come undone.
It’s fabulous.
I started working the grill at McDonald’s when I was 16 years old. In fact, the day I turned 16, I begged my parents take me to McDonald’s so I could apply. I wanted a job, my own money and all the independence that implied. I never looked back. After school, every college break and within a week of graduating from college, I was working. During the build-my-career phase, I worked 60-70 hours a week for years including working on Christmas three years in a row. In one year, I also managed to work every single holiday. In truth, I didn’t mind that much. That’s what you had to do when you’re building a professional reputation. We even had a phrase for it: giving up the body. It was a basketball phrase and it meant to be willing to get a little beaten up under the basket to get that all-important rebound. Yep, I was willing to give up the body and I was rewarded. I hit the pinnacle of my career in becoming a CEO at age 37.
Slowly over the last seven years, a weird exhaustion set in. I had spent 12 years as a CEO and took a struggling organization into a successful organization with unprecedented growth, high staff satisfaction and excellent quality scores. If there was a challenge, my team met it head on and mastered it. I was so incredibly proud to be their leader. Until, well, all of the challenges were gone. It became rote and tedious. And I had seen way too many CEOs hang on too long and start phoning it in. I knew it was time. I was fatigued. Anyone who has read this blog knows that it was a combination of a yoga Nidra class and a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I left my role for a consulting gig. That gig was 80% of an FTE and I would slowly reduce myself from 80% down to 60% before finally leaving this past March. After a busy summer working for myself, I had always intended that I would significantly pull back for the final three months of the year. While I intend to work a few hours, this is my sabbatical. Nearly a full month in and I have never been this relaxed.
I’ve unwound, unplugged and come undone. Little has ever felt this good.
Now, that’s not to say I’m not busy. But I’m busy with home and family things, allowing me to fulfill a piece of myself that I had largely ignored for nearly 40 years. This is fun. (And yes, I’m even referring to the house and yardwork.) There is something so incredibly soothing about just focusing on one key element of my life. Life has slowed and I feel like I have time to breathe and time to take care of us. I’m making good meals, reducing our compost waste by making use of what we have, keeping the house cleaner than we’re frankly used to it being (😊), and still managing to enjoy some quiet time with just my thoughts.
At this point, I’m just about one month into my sabbatical. Thankfully, I still have a little over 10 weeks left. It occurs to me that as the time gets shorter, I may have a massive case of the Sunday blues when I prepare to go back to work in January. In all honesty, I probably won’t do this again. The next step is to retire in a few years. In the meantime, I still plan on a month off in July and December each year, but there won’t be a three-month total letdown like I have now. Yet, I can’t believe how much I needed this. The transformation has been wild.
When I first went on sabbatical on September 28th, it just felt like a few days off to catch up. In fact, the impact hadn’t hit me. Instead, I spent a solid week cleaning, washing, dusting, mowing, trimming, etc., just to get our lives back in order after a wild summer of a LOT of work. When I finally could begin to relax that following week, it still didn’t hit me. Then, it just felt like vacation. I read, I shopped, I decorated… the “slowdown” didn’t feel real. Today? It feels real.
This weekend, I have a 10K out of town and Darryl has a half-marathon locally. At first, I was regretting signing up. Yes, it’s with my sisters and I knew I’d have fun, but we had just had a fabulous weekend with friends in town and celebrating another friend’s wedding. It would have been better to have a weekend off, I told myself. A good night’s sleep later brought about a whole new perspective: I’m on sabbatical. Yes, I may lose a weekend of working on my house and yard, but the following week? I’ll have time to clean again. And in the meantime, the house is nowhere near its cleanliness nadir that I really have to worry. That’s the sabbatical talking. After a lifetime of working those extra hours, squirreling away that extra completed work for a time when I could potentially need it, I could finally let go a little bit. The sky is not going to fall, the yard won’t be overgrown, the house will not be dirty and the work won’t pile up if I take a few days off. Is it lost time? Yes. Can I afford it? Finally, yes.
And that’s what it means for me to finally come undone. I have one work call today which will likely last all of 15 minutes. I need to pick up the furniture for Iris to vacuum. At some point over the next two days, I’d like to wash and line dry my sheets and clean all of our bathrooms. That’s it. When I get home on Monday we can work on leaves again.
The point is that this weekend off isn’t going to cost me more than it should. I won’t pay for a weekend away with a massive catchup effort that will leave me feeling more exhausted than when I started. For the first time in 40 years, I also don’t have to “prepay” for time off by frantically doing as much as I can before I leave. Instead, I can just do my normal routine and then go away. This is so incredibly novel to me. I have to admit, it’s even a little uncomfortable. And yet? Well, I guess I can get used to it.
Yep… I’ve come undone.
The Yuppie Homesteader 