Week sixteen: is it a wrap yet? Reflections of my career break and next steps
It’s Friday the 23 of September, 2022. Last time I wrote something in this blog was sixteen weeks ago, in a post where I described how I spent my first week of a career break. When reading that post, I see that a lot of the emotions are still the same, but others have faded away.
For example, I am still uncertain about the future as I don’t know what my next job will be. That is both scary and exciting. However, unlike that week, I have a lot more clarity about the path in which I want to continue and I know now that some things should just be hobbies :0)
Let me share with you a bit of how my weeks have gone and what I’ve learned thus far. And perhaps even a little of what I look forward to next.
Learning (for the fun of it)
In these past sixteen weeks I dedicated myself to learning and reconnecting. I learned woodwork and I will probably stick with it as a hobby. After building a couple of custom pieces to organize things around the house including a footrest I am using under my desk as I type this, I realized I want to be able to carry on with a hobby that does not take that much physical space and that I can practice at home. I also realized that while I enjoy woodwork, this world of arts and crafts is very lonely, and I need my dosis of people if I am going to be doing something full time. So woodwork is not a candidate for my next career move. Next up I will try wood carving (as a hobby, that is).
I also spent time learning how to drive. In fact, I am still learning. While I’m not a big fan of using personal cars unless necessary (because of pollution), I found the skill to be both fun and useful for certain situations. One of the needs that motivated me to learn was me going to the hardware store to get tools and wood to work on my ideas, and it was a bit of an annoyance to have to do it with a taxi or to depend on my husband to drive me around. So I hope to get my driver’s license in a few months after I accumulate more hours of experience behind the wheel. Not that this need justifies the pollution my driving would create, but I could drive in the future if I needed to. After all, I did get to go to the hardware store and to build things without a license :0) I still can’t wait for a future where all the driving will be done by robots. No humans behind the wheel except for fun in dedicated fields for it. In the meantime, I’ll keep on practicing those yield turns…
Anyhow, those learnings apart from teaching me specific skills (working with wood or driving a car) also taught me the importance of designing my life so I can have time and energy for hobbies while I am at work. I always struggle with this because I dedicate myself to work in body and soul, so I barely have energy left after work hours or on weekends for anything other than walking around and touring cafeterias in town. I am fascinated by people who are able to commit to hobbies to what seems an almost professional level, perform at work and keep their relationships healthy. I ask myself if they’ve been blessed with an extra powerful battery or if they’re hiding something I do not see. I also know how harmful it is for one’s health to compare yourself with others, so I keep on tuning my own world to make it function in a way that works for me and my capacity. I do really hope to keep this close to mind when starting whatever next job I will so that I can do more than walking around and touring cafeterias outside work hours.
Reconnecting
A very big part of this break was spent reconnecting with family. First, I spent a week in Germany seeing my nephews. As my sister and brother-in-law battled with CoVID during my visit I managed to espace from it and just gave myself time to cook for them, walk around nature and play with the kids. Next, I got to welcome a new niece into the family. Alessandra, born here in Tallinn, will be the first family baby I get to see grow. I have already spent a few hours holding her while she’s still a baby and I look forward to seeing her learn how to talk, walk and face the world. Next, we went to Portugal for almost a month and reunited with other family members we had not seen in almost three years! It was beautiful, fun, and refreshing. In fact, I have a hard time accepting that this time is gone already. These are the things you want to extend forever, and it gets especially hard to do when we are all spread around the globe in, literally, different countries and continents. I do have the luck of having some family members in the same city, but there is always that annoying impossibility of having everyone you love together in one place. My soul had been yearning for some of those reconnections especially after the two years that the pandemic took from us. And while my soul still hurts from not having seen everyone I’d like to see, this reunion oiled my heart to keep it rolling for a while.
We have also reconnected strongly as a couple. During two of the four months I have been off, Luis has also been away from work on a sabbatical of his own. This is the first time we time our breaks to overlap with each other. He and I have both taken months from work in the past, but always independently. While we recommend those, having this one together also had its benefits. It gave us time to work on projects together we had been discussing for a while and it also gave us room to fool around and get bored together, making us love each other just a bit more. We already had a strong relationship, but I feel this period will give us an extra boost that will keep us healthy for the times when we get back to being busier with work and personal projects. Funnily enough, our relationship has always been built around projects. So much that we were both dreading the time in Lisbon “just chilling”, so we both agreed to look for things to do there besides spending time with family and exploring the city. He would find a piano teacher and I would find a wood workshop in which to continue developing our skills in our newly found hobbies. Unfortunately we didn’t know everything and everyone in Lisbon is at the beach vacationing during August, so we had to give up on those plans after failed attempts contacting places without response or getting offered dates outside our visit period. So in the end we pretty much visited museums, cinemas and cafeterias, met with old friends and hanged out with family. And unlike everyone else, we concluded going to the beach and sunbathing like a lizard is not among our preferred hobbies so we skipped all beach days :0)
All in all, reconnecting has a value that I don’t think I have to explain for you to see. We are emotionally recharged, happy to have spent time with people we love, and this energy will help us move forward.
Tired of vacationing
Apart from not being a big fan of the beach, I also learned that wanderlust is not among the descriptors I’d use to talk about myself. I already knew that from the two years spent at home between early 2020 and mid 2022. Don’t get me wrong. I like to visit new places and get to see new cultures and try different food, but in small manageable batches of 1–2 weeks at a time every few months or so. After three weeks in Lisbon we had another week awaiting for us in Paris. Many would have loved being in my position. Yet I had to force myself to get in the mood of exploring one of the most popular cities in the world. And I definitely got to do it. I mean, Paris is an open air museum. You don’t even have to plan and you’ll bump into amazing history, architecture, food, music, views. But we had been doing a lot of that already in Lisbon and we just wanted to get to do something useful and familiar after a while. So merci Paris, for treating us so well in the end and for giving me the opportunity to see an old cousing after 15 years! But lord, was I happy to be back in Tallinn when I did.
Housekeeping and investing
A big chunk of these past few weeks has gone into literal housekeeping. We moved to a new place, so there has been a lot of packing, unpacking, furniture buying and whatnot. This was one of those projects we had been after motivated by, yet again, the pandemic: finding a larger place to accommodate the life we had been designing for ourselves. And so we did. Almost as soon as we landed in Tallinn we were getting the keys to the new place and starting the process of turning it into a space that felt like home. And so we did. Again! We’ve been in it for the past 2 weeks and even Lumi, our dog, is loving it.
Investing has been another project that’s been keeping me busy. As one of the authors I’m reading says: “you can read and read until your eyes turn blue, but you won’t start to see progress towards your results until you take action”. And it’s true. Investing is such an emotional activity. You can learn and read all you can, but making the decision to invest, taking real action, requires overcoming the fear of failure. So I have been revisiting a lot of basics and setting clearer goals to push myself harder on the investment front. I have also taken real action, and while it is easier for me than it was, let’s say, 10 years ago, I still have a lot of work to do to keep the emotions in check and move faster with my decisions. The world keeps spinning, after all. These are the kind of topics that I would have a much harder time keeping up with at work because the energy would have been drained, so I really appreciate having the time and brain space in this sabbatical to dedicate to topics like this.
What else, you ask?
There is just so much more you can do when you have free time. I don’t really understand people who fear taking time off. There is endless opportunity! And when you use it, you get loaded with a lot of good energy that you bring back into whatever you decide to do next professionally. As a matter of fact, not getting busy is my opposite problem. I did fall into the trap at one point during these weeks of having way too many things to do, towards my second month. I was stressed about the many things I wanted to achieve and anxious about the future I could not see. And I got myself in that situation. There was no boss, no debts, no company quarterly goals pushing me there. It was me doing it to myself. That was a good slap in the face, and that helped me get comfortable with the idea of not having a clear end date to my sabbatical. I planned for 6–7 months and I assumed I would be bored by the third one. I never got bored. If anything, I am starting to worry about not being a fully functional member of society in which I am contributing not just by having a balanced personal life (which is a big win in my opinion), but by purposefully bringing some of that magic to teams and topics around me. So yes, I think I am ready to get back to work!
Actually, just two days ago in the middle of assembling our new bed, I decided to start looking again at the world around me from a professional perspective. I feel that the approach to exploration I have taken with my hobbies will help me out in finding a new job. I am not exactly sure what job title I will have or what product I will be working on, but I realized that product management is a career that still has a lot to offer me simply because of the endless product categories I could be working with. I now just need to explore the products and teams out there and see where there is a match. One things is for sure: I am hungry for new knowledge. I want to learn new things. The only way in which I can feel excited about bringing my experience into a team is if I get the energy back by learning new things from them, and there are so many things going on out there that my biggest challenge in the weeks ahead might be falling victim to the paradox of choice. To avoid it, I will need to have a system to filter out the options out there and start reaching out and having conversations with the ones that bring me joy, as Marie Kondo would say.
So here I go, world. Wish me luck!
And Happy Friday,
Maria 🌺
Originally published at https://marialasprilla.wordpress.com on September 23, 2022.
