Because I felt I wasn't really myself anymore, and I don't like it when I'm not myself for too long.
Because for years now I've wanted to go on this long, long walk in Japan. I'd been waiting for the right time, the right season, the right circumstances. Then it hit me that creating them was probably better than waiting.
Because for six years I'd devoted my life to one particular writing project, and it was suddenly out of my hands, in a way that was humbling and terrifying and strange. I have a new story to write, something I've been waiting years to write, but I need time and space to think about it, to construct what I want it to be, to let the characters and setting and plot find its shape.
Because I had a great conversation with a friend on sabbatical who advised me not to work for three months and see who I am without it. After he said that, I couldn't get it out of my head.
Because I had a great conversation with another friend on sabbatical who said, "I realized my time is so precious, Isabel." I wanted to see what it was like to believe that.
Because a third friend who'd taken a sabbatical and then safely reentered the workforce said it hadn't been hard to explain really. People get it. People are even jealous over it.
Because at that point I'd talked, in detail, with these friends about their sabbaticals, and read/listened to a bunch more stories, and it was very clearly a thing you could do and the world wouldn't explode if you did.
Because actually I'd been on sabbatical myself, for six months, in 2018, before B-School. And the world didn't explode when I did it. It was fine. It was a very different set of circumstances—for one thing, this time there would be no clear August start date to the next phase of my life. But still, I'd actually done it myself. Strangely, despite my own lived evidence, it was difficult to make that leap again.
Because one of the best parts of that 2018 break was working on a rural farm in Kyoto. On my last night I looked up at the stars and reminded myself that life was more than tech and grad degrees and the constant, gaping, busy-ness of my life as it was then. I was so terrified about money, the future, never making it as a writer. I planted crops I wouldn't get to eat and I pulled weeds and I cleaned a kitchen covered in years of dust with a garden hose. And I worked with my hands and made coffee in the mornings and that, too, was good and meaningful.
Because a year ago I started getting gray hairs. The kind that made me go oh! hmm! when it started. They're a constant now. I don't feel as old these days as I did at twenty-five (hah!), but I also want to honor the part of me that feels this age is truly precious.
Because I wasn't reading as much as I wanted to. My brain felt fragmented. I wanted to fix that. I need reading to feel like myself, and to write properly.
Because I wasn't learning at the velocity I wanted anymore, or I was learning about things I didn't care deeply about.
Because I can afford to. Because I'm teaching myself to recognize that some of this IS just math. Sometimes living in New York has felt like one long exercise in wrenching myself out of the bonedeep, inexplicable scarcity mindset I've had since I was a kid. I've made a lot of progress fixing my relationship with money, and this is another thing that helps.
Because I don't have a partner or a mortgage or a kid. Which I maybe did not expect at this age, but that's what happened. Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with me. Sometimes I wonder about the degrees to which I want these things. This is not another thinkpiece about having a female body and being in my mid-30s and contemplating what it means, that I've missed those specific life markers, but I do know—it's a gift to have this flexibility, and I do like so much of my life, how I spend my days. I can do this, because I have no other responsibilities, and that truly is lucky, even if I don't have the other things.
Because sometimes you're in a situation where you've exhausted every avenue. You've tried your hardest to do the right thing, to make a decision that's reasonable and considered and fair. And then you reach a point where you can't see the way forward, and you realize it's not worth your energy to keep slamming against the same wall over and over.
Because I didn't know what I wanted to do next, but every time I looked my brain slid away, going no, no, please don't do this to me. It was shaking its head. Please no.
Because I'd conducted interviews where it felt like the person on the other side didn't seem all that interested. And I didn't want to show up that way, exhausted and pushing through. I get it! I get it. It's a tough market out there. People are doing what they have to. But I didn't want to rush into another job, hollow-eyed and deflated. I want to show up like someone still excited about technology, still curious and alive with what the future might look like.
Because basically every PM I know is going through it, regardless of where they're at. Because part of me was yelling at myself this is a terrible idea, you're doing this in a terrible market, what if you can't find a job when this is over, what if you end up washed 'cause you missed the boat on how this thing evolves?
But then I thought: I can't do great work from a place of fear.
I thought: I'm a good PM. The people I've worked closely with know that. Can't I trust in that, enough to give myself a few months off?
I thought: I like product. I want to go back at the end of my break. I hope someplace will want me to do this for them. But if that doesn't happen, well, I'm a person that likes to learn things, a person with high agency. I can figure it out if I need to, right?
Because I do on some level believe that everything you want is on the other side of fear.
Because I love the city I live in and I wanted to see more of it, at ease.
Because I have the rest of my life to work.
Because I was tired. It's been six weeks and I'm still tired. Sometimes I think about how one of my devs said, when I was telling him how I felt, ah, classic signs of burnout. I wasn't sure if I was burnt out but still being exhausted at six weeks tells me yeah, probably, I was, I have been, I am.
Because no one will be hurt if I do this, but I might hurt myself if I don't. It does seem like the kind of thing I'd regret not doing, looking back on it—though we'll never know, right? Because in the end I did do it.
Because I have a long and exciting to-do list, some of which you'll learn about through this site.
Because I wanted to. And I've been learning, over the last few years, that sometimes that's answer enough.