It's been a while since I've written consistently, so there may be some stuff you've missed the past couple of years. Or maybe not; maybe we're friends on Facebook, or you know me in person, and you've slowly witnessed me becoming a hot mess over the years. Fair enough. I'm hoping writing this stuff out long-form over an extended period of time will help me process everything going on. So, about that sabbatical:
I'm on a sabbatical!
An eight week, unpaid work sabbatical. Right now I'm in the middle of week five, I think? I'll go back to work in two or three weeks.
The key word here is "unpaid." The first day of my eight-week break, I was back in San Francisco staying with my buddy, Ed. I had just deleted the work apps from my phone, guilty for letting unspecific people down, skittish not knowing what to do with myself. Ed suggested we'd walk from the Mission to Japantown, and hanging out for a little bit my sedentary Florida ass was demanding to grab a Lyft to get back to the house.
The Lyft driver was a Filipino guy my age. "How's it going?" he asks.
"I'm on sabbatical," I say to myself out loud. Poor guy, he was probably just hoping I'd say "fine," and we'd move on with our lives.
"A sabbatical? Man," the guy said in a sarcastic tone. "Must be nice to not work for eight weeks."
Bitch what?
Okay, wait, hold on. I'm self-aware (and San Franciscan!) enough to admit being able to take a couple of weeks off of work comes from a very privileged place. This feels doubly true as I work at a startup. I'm totally grateful to my coworkers for the opportunity, and the two of them reading this email newsletter right now should know that I’m appreciative and grateful. Hello, coworkers!
All of that being said, the only other time I've taken this much time off was when I was hospitalized for nineteen days when my appendix burst, developing an ileus, pneumonia in both lungs — both lungs, the medical staff made a point to emphasize — and an MRSA infection. So while I have a neat scar on my belly and disgust for orange-flavored Ensure drinks, I wouldn't count hospitalization as a fun couple of weeks off of work. (Mental note for me though, that's totally something I should write about.)
Mostly, I have burnt the fuck out.
I isolated myself from any kind of social interaction and went all-in on my work, which, as you know, works super well. I stayed with my parents for a month or so trying and failing to be the Good Asian Son, sacrificing my own physical and mental health in the process.
I was angry that this was all happening at once. I was frustrated I could see this happening in advance but helpless I didn't know how to reverse course.
Two days before I decided to go through with the idea of a sabbatical, I woke up with chest pains, had difficulty breathing, toyed with either going to urgent care or the ER. The right thing to do was go to the ER, but I went to urgent care instead, where the doctor had me do a bunch of EKGs and heart stress tests. The lab technician, an ambivalent white lady in her 50s, stared at the printouts while I walked shirtless on a treadmill with plastic suction cups attached to me and muttered, "I'm no doctor, but everything looks fine here. Do you have anxiety attacks?" And I thought, is that what an anxiety attack feels like? Because wow, that SUCKS.
So, what have I been doing?
When Kareem was in LA this past couple of weeks editing his documentary, I've been traveling solo, to Savannah and Asheville and Charleston, with its rolling hills and an audiobook about video games to keep me company.
I'm back in Miami now, and without explicitly thinking I'm doing a lot of self-help shit, I'm, well, doing a lot of self-help shit. Meditation. Therapy.
I'm trying my best to fight my assumptions that folks here are probably too busy to want to hang and to reach out to people in person instead.
I made a pretty kick-ass bolognese sauce I found through a YouTube video if I do say so myself:
And I'm doing some writing, as you can see.
But most of the time I'm spending my sabbatical just... resting. I'm okay with that.