I took 3 months off work to write about my family. Here's why.
We talk a lot about burnout. But have you ever crashed and burned?
For me, it happened on a Tuesday in March 2022. I hadn't slept the night before, waking up each hour to check for phone calls from across the country where my mother, 78, had gone back into the hospital for the umpteenth time. I was waiting for enough data to decide whether and when to fly out there.
And so, without any updates, I got up and went skiing. That's my Tuesday morning winter routine - 4 or 6 runs on the quad at Stowe before work. As I zipped down the front run, tucking for speed, my back went out.
I'd never had this happen before. I screamed out in excruciating pain, spent a few minutes in denial, and then somehow made my way home to cancel all meetings and lay - helpless - on my bed, for hours.
It was clear to me, even then, that my body was processing the pain my mind couldn't. If you've read The Body Keeps the Score, you understand.
I had spent 9 years watching my Mom suffer and decline from a horrendous combination of M.S., dementia, cancer, and an aortic aneurysm. I rushed to her bedside so many times to say goodbye that my brain had started to shut out the emotions related to these fire drills.
Gloria Steinem says, in her 1983 essay about her own mother's lifelong struggles, “Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.”
My heart, at that point, felt like stone. Unable or unwilling to express grief.
And so, for years and years, I addressed what I could not understand and control by throwing myself into my career. Work gave back, whereas this drawn-out loss gave me nothing.
But on that day in March, I began to realize that this was no longer working.
For many of us, the trauma we face in our childhoods, and throughout our lives, shapes our relationships to work.
It makes sense. As my therapist recently said to me, "if you grow up in a state of constant threat, or fight-or-flight, it's not surprising that you might seek out a career that has a lot of high pressure and stress. Because fight or flight feels familiar."
Where we are accustomed to overstimulation in one part of our lives, we might seek it out in others. So when I escaped my childhood home and put myself through college, I moved so fast and so constantly that I settled into a rhythm of non-stop motion that propelled me forward.
It worked, until it didn't.
And so, following the eventual death of my mother just a few weeks later, I began down a path to begin to unwind these harmful behaviors once and for all.
I found a new therapist, I began moving through life slower than I ever had before, I still took on projects but I didn't force them. That summer, I took entire days for long and strenuous hikes during which - in the silence, and the sweat - I would stop and sob and let long-buried emotions run through me.
Eventually, in all this quiet, I began to hear something new. A voice, from way deep down, asking for space. For oxygen. Room to emerge.
And here's the thing that I began to learn, about work, and burnout, and crashing in our careers: sometimes the solution is a full rewiring, not a quick fix.
Sometimes, to change these lifelong patterns of behavior that guide the way we work, we have to be willing to stop almost completely, and do a hard reset.
And so, last Fall, as my healing and grieving began to give way to new creative urges, I decided to plan a sabbatical.
Working for myself, it took 8 months of planning, saving, spousal dialogue, and internal swirling, to get there. Meanwhile, I also had to figure out what I wanted to do with this gift of time, where were these creative desires bringing me?
I completed the Artist's Way as a training program of sorts, in the Winter, and as I walked in the snow one morning, listening to jazz music, a totally new idea burst into my head.
It was audio. The writing I wanted to do, about my parents, about my past, about this extraordinary story of pain and love and tragedy and strength, it needed to be spoken, not lying dormant in a book somewhere.
And so began the path toward my final project, which is now live, the Lost and Found Audio Documentary. An exploration of grief, loss, and the complex relationships we carry.
I'd like to say the road forward from there was linear and clear, but it was the opposite. I fought my own long-held beliefs of self-worth, of productivity, of career success, as I went.
But I kept going. In March, I got started. I conducted 17 interviews, recording them all, with no idea where I was heading. I just asked the questions on my mind.
In June, I began my sabbatical, using the long and unstructured days to revisit everything, find patterns, let the material breakdown and then sort itself into themes and chapters.
I hired an audio engineer nearby to give me an "audio editing for dummies" crash course one day, then I panicked and took on a client project that distracted me for a few weeks.
In August, I came back from a vacation, and I sat down, and it just... poured out. All of it. In about two weeks straight. A story, in 6 chapters, complete with sound and audio clips, VoiceOver narrative, music, fades, and everything.
And then, I launched it.
So here is what I learned.
I'm still in the earliest days of having this project complete and moving out of my mind into the world.
But already, it has changed me. Here are a few of the things I've learned:
It's natural to want to tell your story. For most of my life, I've had a desire to find the words to talk about my own lived experience. But I also felt a little bit silly for this. Like, I'm a consultant, I can't masquerade as a writer! But telling our stories is how we connect, and to connect is human. And business is human. Let's stop feeling ashamed about that.
The scarier the task, the more people will lift you up. I spent literal months talking myself into this project, and taking the time to do it. When I look back, the people around me, mostly in my professional path, where the ones who convinced me it was worthwhile. They got me over my hurdles, validated my ideas, and helped set me free from my career-long limiting beliefs.
We are all so complex. At the core, my story is about complex relationships, experiences that defy single words or descriptions. That require deep context to understand. In taking the time to unravel these dynamics so I could share them with others, people began to share their complex pain and grief back with me. It was a reminder that every single one of us is moving through each day - whether at work, on Zoom, at home, at school drop-off - carrying these weights, and mostly, not talking about them. We know this, but it never hurts to be reminded not to assume anything about what others carry around.
Words can set you free. I knew this instinctually in my childhood, but as I grew older, I lost touch with it. Writing has always been a place for me to process and express and share. It's not just a business tool, it's a human tool. And I can now say officially, that finding the words I've long sought to explain my family and our unique set of circumstances, has released something in me. I'd like to think that, for my parents, even though they are gone, maybe it has done the same for them, too.
You can't always heal from something you're still going through. I don't know a single professional person who doesn't compartmentalize regularly. We all do it. My therapist likes to say that compartmentalizing is healthy, it's a sign of high emotional intelligence. Because you can't always heal from something you're still going through, and we still need to be able to move forward. Not every day can be that day-long hike and cry ritual I leaned into so much last summer.
Perhaps, given that my consulting work is most fundamentally about helping leaders and companies tell their stories, it is most fitting that I went about this process for myself.
But I couldn't rush it. It came when it was ready. And now, as I recharge my business, and look toward the future, I'd like to think the experience will only make me better at what I do.
More compassionate, more patient, more understanding, and more vigilant about my core mission: to help create a world where more people feel supported and valued in telling their own stories.
Because, as important as work is, we only get this one shot at this life. Let's not let careers get in the way of experiencing it - and sharing it - fully.