It’s been almost a week since my last day at work before my sabbatical, and now I’m torn. Between thousands of thoughts. Did I make the right decision? Before diving deeper into this, here’s the song playing right now on my YouTube:
Back to the purpose of this blog article. My sabbaticalabba. 😀 4 years ago, I was talking with some friends about how cool it would be to take a sabbatical. And honestly, I thought it would never happen to me. Did I manifest a sabbatical back then? Whaaaaaat?!
Probably. Or improbably. Not sure. Nevertheless, here I am, on my family’s terrace, writing this blog post on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s my fourth day of sabbatical, and I can’t wait for the remaining 361 days until I’ll be back (or not) to my job.
How do I feel about this change?
I have a good feeling. Hopeful that I’ll be able to create something I’m proud of. I have a volunteering project coming up in October (I’ll talk more about it when we get closer). Aaand apart from that, I just want to use this time to enjoy my family, my friends, and of course… myself.
What made me take this decision?
This past year was especially hard. Both as a professional and… as an immigrant. I’ve been the subject of bullying at work (even if nobody wants to acknowledge it). But I know it happened. Some of my friends and close colleagues know it too. I already talked about this in another article, here.
At the same time, everything happening in the world had a huge impact on my mental stability. I started questioning my purpose in this space, and I realised that… everything around me feels so superficial. Of course, we can’t just stop our lives because somewhere else things are hard. But still… have we lost our humanity? Have we lost our empathy? Is money the only thing that drives the world now?
Somewhere along the way, I lost my own sense of purpose. My direction. Over the past year I’ve been struggling with an identity and meaning crisis, and… I realised I want to move towards a career that’s more social, more purpose-driven. And to get there, I need to stop. Reset. And build new things from scratch.
I’ll be talking more about this in future articles.