Why are you quitting your reliable jobs and throwing it all to the wind?

For nearly fifteen years I leaned in, listened, consoled, affirmed, redirected, and reconciled countless patients and providers alike. I’ve supported end of life care, beginning of life care, and everything in between. How lucky that I can honestly say that I could keep going like this for the foreseeable future. In the scheme of having to work (I’d much rather haunt an old library and write poetry), I think I’ve got a good thing going. My teammates are terrific, my manager is fair and reliable, the work itself is meaningful. To spell it out plainly: this is not a running-away story. I’ve got a good thing going, and it’s because of this truth that I have the confidence to do something unusual: take a radical sabbatical.

At this point in my research and planning, I’ve come to understand most people jump into this lane because of a need to leave a toxic workplace, get away from a career they’ve grown to hate, hit pause so they can figure out how to move forward. I respect and champion those folks – staying somewhere unfulfilling and draining is a poor use of free will.

You know what’s an awesome use of free will? Looking at your good-enough life and asking the universe for more. More aliveness, more adventure, more weird, wild, and wonderful. More. I am doing this because I want more. I am a glutton for life – for crossing paths with people of all kinds, eating their foods, admiring their arts, asking them intrusive questions. In the year to come I want to fill up my love cup and dump the energy from it into my own creative processes.

…you didn’t really come here for the why, though. You came here for the HOW. The why is the easy part, a lot of people could come up with a compelling WHY to take a break from their regularly scheduled lives. The HOW is what stops people.

So HOW did a poor, southern, rural-raised figure it out to be able to do this? First and foremost, a good amount of the HOW is luck and privilege and I want to acknowledge that fact. Some of this would have been a lot harder if certain connections didn’t exist or if I was say…not a middle-age, white, master’s educated cis-gender woman. The ways I have known oppression are largely invisible and maskable. I’m bi, but in a long term relationship with a man (Andrew! <3). I grew up poor, but the kind where I never went to bed without dinner or to school without clean shoes (thanks, mom). Also, I have escaped poverty as an adult (phew, that was exactly as hard as you might guess). I’m neurodivergent but taking meds has radically improved that part of my life.

Proudly, I am a first-generation college graduate. I am the first woman in my bloodline to have the freedom to truly do anything and so I absolutely should do anything I have the courage to try.

In future posts, I’ll detail these steps but the HOW went something like this:

1. Decide you must do it. Not that you want to. That you must. Think: this will work because I am insane.
2. Have a why. This is important because when the next steps get hard it will keep you going.
3. Research. Like a lot. We are in the age of information: read the blogs of other radical sabbaticals, hang out in the /digitalnomads subreddit. Use the myriad of internet things to learn everything you might need to know. I am still researching things like: health insurance matters, medication management, what tech I might need to change before we go, budget hacks, the list goes on.
4. Budget. This is the most complicated step because despite step 3, there will be things you didn’t predict. Sometimes we all pay the newbie-tax. Get a number for your target daily spend. I’m looking for our number to be about $3000/month. Remember, details later.
5. Save. I pay my investment savings, then I pay the adventure fund, then I pay my bills. Lately, that doesn’t leave much for anything else, but I’m okay with it because the WHY means so much to me. We eat at home, we wear the clothes we have, we choose cheap thrills. I don’t feel deprived.
6. Pick a launch date. We’re still working on this but hope to nail it down by Jan 2027.

– Julia