How to Sabbatical, Pt. 3: Re-Entry + What I Learned
This is the third and final part in a series of How to Sabbatical, Pt 1: Jump Off the Train and How to Sabbatical, Pt. 2: F*ck It, I’m Going Around the World.
It’s now 3 years after the sabbatical and re-entry to workforce, and it continues to be vocationally the best thing I’ve ever done.
I was wide open upon return. Legs strong, synapses cleared, and ready for my first female President and a new professional start.
We all know that one of those things did not happen, and a very real part of my autumnal return was that I became depressed for months after the U.S. Election. It put lead in my shoes and stopped me in my tracks in a way I can’t deny this narrative.
Hiking the coastal path recently in Cornwall, England. The only way over is through.
By early spring, I was filled with a vigor and determination to return to work and an income, to lean into design and beauty and good and smart people — heels blazing. From my journey, I was clear on: I want to shift to environmental design, defined as beyond screens, about people in physical spaces and allll the senses. Ideally… international, global somehow. Because TRAVEL. Ok, go!
Where to start? I know how to look for tech jobs, but reinventing myself for another context would be a challenge. Design firms, agencies, event or experiential design… something? It was scary but I was game. Short story shorter: As it turned out, in a delightful case of student-becomes-the-teacher, a former mentee of mine reached out of the sky with a potential role in Amazon’s physical stores group — an “omnichannel” role across offline and online shopping, and what sure-as-hell sounded like a bridge to another side.
Death to glowing rectangles!
Long live glowing rectangles!
I applied for and got that job. I was NOT planning to return to Amazon, and yet here I was, a “boomerang” as they say. Terra firma where I could be quickly productive, but also out of my comfort zone.
It ended up being not the challenge I wanted, and within 9 months I’d flown to my new professional home: Voice design at Alexa, International no less.
<sound of airplane wheels hitting the tarmac>
Wait… what?? I worked in visual design so long that I almost forgot I am all about language, visual and otherwise. Here was a new home that was a return to my original superpower: writing, and the opportunity to combine it with my UX expertise in experience design, navigation, workflows, core to edge cases. Just in new ways. All the usabilities. All the accessibilities. All the discoverabilities.
I spent so many years proving myself as a UX designer, given no formal degrees, that it was a habit to downplay — if not outright cache — my past lives as a copywriter, marketing writer, UI writer, poet, book editor, technical writer, and most essentially a lifelong student of literature and linguistics.
Out of the closet and into the streets!
Now that voice that piped up in that Paris café could sing out in full register. Now I could use all 3 of my spoken languages, including my first language Spanish, at work. Now the lyric and musical training from my ballet and flamenco days could inform a new cadence and world of sounds to be spoken and heard by humans moving about their spaces.
What did I learn?
Here’s what the lasting payoff is:
Room to breathe. Expansive identity. I am not only this paid work. I am as much and concurrently other whole beings.
A moment of rest and soul-fueling beauty on that same trail.
Boldness. I am inspired by own risk-taking (yes! own it, my friends) to have taken that initial terrifying leap, and emboldened by it as I face daily challenges. I take more professional risks, and in so doing have accelerated my growth and influence. This includes everything from hard-negotiating a salary for the first time (!) to more vocal authenticity (dissent, vulnerability) to initiating experiments to public speaking in technical and design communities.
Appetite. I’ve always been an avid autodidact, teaching myself life and technical skills. But after so many years of lockstep tunnel-visioned workaday life, the dryer filters had gotten full of lint. There had been a narrowing of focus, where I reactively tended to only seek out learning that immediately and directly benefitted my job. The sabbatical blew those filters clean, and reminded me of what the fully hearty and open appetite feels like.
Trust. Trust in my choices and instincts. As an extension of the point above: Now instead of working backwards from a limited cost-benefit analysis of what’s worth doing or learning, I’ve successfully flipped the habit: I trust and feed what energizes and excites me — no questions asked (ok, a few) and let that add vision, dimension, and sparkling energies to the dayjob and related trajectories. No attachment to outcome. A sampling from this year, all of which have fueled professional and personal benefits: learning Japanese language and cooking, natural language processing / understanding (NLP/NLU), making ink, building a simple Raspberry Pi camera, taking Python classes for no reason, dabbling in sound engineering, and more. (Right at this moment I am REALLY into crows, their languages and our interactions with them in urban spaces.) I fully lean into the passion and fire and then move on to the next, light of step. In every case, I come out the other side happier, sharper, and with a cool new friend or two.
Refuel. As a 40something left-handed Latina queer woman in tech, I see very few faces like mine in meetings and in this male- and youth-driven industry, and where that could result in fear, the risk I took with the sabbatical has served to recenter me face-forward and strong of voice and footing. I am more excited than ever for my career and the life I build alongside it.
Hair. For the first time in 20 years, I’ve started to wear my hair in its naturally curly state. It tastes like freedom and power… and a lot more product. :)
Now… What about YOU?
These days many colleagues reach out to me on the downlow…
“I’m burned out / professionally dead inside / over it. Should I do this?”
YES.
“How do I do it?”
Read this: Reboot Your Life: Energize Your Career and Life by Taking a Break
Watch this: Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off
Take that one-year, one-month, one-week, or one-weekend sabbatical.
You’re worth it.