The road not taken
The plan was simple. Eighteen years at the same company, then a proper break — the kind you keep promising yourself and never actually take. Travel for a bit. Clear the head. Then get back to work by July.
July is close now. And the plan is considerably less simple than it was.
What the break actually did
I did not expect travel to feel different this time. I have travelled plenty over the years — holidays, work trips, the occasional extended weekend in a city I had always meant to visit properly. But travelling without a return-to-work date hanging over you is a different thing entirely.
There is a particular quality to time when you are not measuring it against a Monday morning. Days do not compress the same way. You notice more. You sit in places longer than you normally would. You have conversations that go somewhere because you are not half-thinking about something else.
I am not going to pretend this was some profound spiritual awakening. It was not. But it did something quieter and more useful — it reminded me what it feels like to be genuinely present somewhere, in something. That feeling had been in short supply for a while.
The thing I did not plan for
Somewhere in between trips, I started building things.
Not because I had a business plan or a grand vision. More because I had time, curiosity, and access to tools that have changed what one person can actually produce on their own. One project led to another. Some serious, some just interesting to make.
What surprised me was not the output. It was how it felt to work on them. Absorbed in a way I had not been in years. Losing track of time in the good direction rather than the grinding one.
I did not go into this break expecting to discover that I wanted to build my own thing. That was not the narrative I had written for myself. The narrative was: rest, recharge, re-enter.
Where July now stands
The original deadline made sense when I set it. By July, the savings runway starts to matter. By July, the CV gap becomes a question in interviews. By July, the responsible thing is to have a plan that involves a salary.
All of that is still true. But there is now a second thing that is also true — that the last two months have shown me something I cannot easily unknow. That I am capable of more than I gave myself credit for. That the right kind of work does not feel like work in the same way. That maybe July does not have to mean what I originally thought it meant.
I have not made a decision. I want to be honest about that. I am not writing this as someone who has figured it out — I am writing it as someone sitting with a question that got more complicated than expected.
The break was supposed to be a pause before the next chapter. It may have turned into the first page of it instead.
I will know more by July.
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