When my plane touched down in Croatia last week, I felt nothing but an incredible sense of peace and calm. I had no butterflies in my stomach, no nerves, no second thoughts.. I knew immediately that I was in the place I was meant to be.
What was less clear is exactly where this feeling was coming from:
A) Was it the fact that this was the end goal towards which I have been working for months?
B) Was it that I wasn’t immediately counting down the number of days before I had to go home to my “real life?”
C) Was I feeling a specific locational connection to Dubrovnik based on the planets in my natal chart (while I’m still a beginner, I am incredibly drawn to astrocartography, which is the theory that certain places have certain energies)?
D) Was it the fact that this was the start of the next chapter of my life and that anything is possible from here?
How can it not be E) all of the above?
While a lot of people only learned of my plans in March, my arrival in Croatia was the culmination of over 5 months of planning and preparation.
My reasons why are numerous – some concrete and tangible, some esoteric and existential. There are several versions of the “how did it come to this” story that I tell and none of them are wrong – but often they were only some of the story. I didn’t have (nor did most people want to give) 25 minutes to unpack each individual grievance about the Sysiphusean nature of living in our late-stage capitalist society, where we spend hours a day on calls that could have been emails, with inboxes full of well intentioned HR initiatives designed to help us “set healthy boundaries” while simultaneously being chided for not billing enough hours, or for not responding to a 12am email in a 7:30am follow up email. Where remote work means that when you’re sick you can now “stay off camera today” and throw up in between meetings rather than take a day off, because if you don’t do the work today, there will be twice as much of it to do tomorrow. God forbid you have the audacity to “unplug” on the long weekend you manage to sneak onto the calendar, so you feel guilted into leaving your cell number in your coverage email for “anything urgent” and check your teams messages 2x a day.
I swear, someone could have a heart attack at their desk and someone from finance will call their hospital room asking them to please make sure their timesheets are up to date until the moment the pain in the left arm started, because if we don’t hit our numbers, we won’t get entered into the chance to maybe possibly get an extra 72 hours between Christmas and New Years to stare blankly into the void and forget everything we ever knew – including our names, what day it is and the laptop password we need to start it all over again on January 2.
[The preceding rant is entirely a work of fiction. The situations, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental 😈]
Plus, it was usually too early in the day to start drinking after “the girl you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with at the party” got off her soapbox (I persevere in embodying every word of that nickname since Cecily Strong first graced Weekend Update with the character in 2012).
Ultimately, what it came down to was that the way I was spending the majority of my waking hours was no longer in service of my values and what I deemed important in the context of everything going on in America and the world. It felt insincere to pretend otherwise – I was the little boy who felt compelled to point out that the Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. I also knew that it wasn’t about this specific job, or agency. I would feel the same way doing the same thing somewhere else.
In true breakup fashion, it wasn’t them, it was me.
Admittedly, I have a very comfortable and enjoyable life in Richmond; it’s a great little city and I love my house, living so close to my sister and the fact that there are more things to do than there are hours in the day. I am incredibly fortunate and privileged in countless ways. But it didn’t feel like the big life I always imagined I could have. And there was no reason why I couldn’t try to figure out what that looked like. After all, I’m not married, I don’t have kids – I’m not saving for someone’s college education, I don’t need to put down roots in a safe neighborhood with a good school district so that my children can have a the stability needed for healthy prefrontal cortex development. I looked up and realized I was following the roadmap of “what an adult should be doing at 40:” owning a house, complaining about property taxes, weeding my backyard on a Saturday morning – but if that stuff wasn’t making me happy, why was I doing it?
It was hard to find the answer to that question – or the logical next question: what do you want to do instead? – in the cortisol-saturated state in which my brain existed. I needed time and space to let it heal – go back to homeostasis. Thus – the idea of a sabbatical was born (I’m not joking when I say the above is truly the tl;dr).
After initially conceiving of taking a lengthy break, I nurtured it carefully for a few weeks, turning it around in my mind, pressure testing the weak points and thinking through what would need to be true in order to make it happen. I started to broach the subject with my closest friends and family around the holidays; I was pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming support and excitement from the people whose opinions are most important to me. It gave me the push I needed to get the wheels in motion.
Obviously there was a lot that needed to be done in order to make an April departure happen.. the to-do lists were long and numerous and I got a lot of help along the way – from friends, family, and the universe (more on the universe later because I’ve never been particularly woowoo, but once I said “yes” to this, it feels like the universe has guided me every step of the way). And while there were certainly moments when I panicked about “what comes next,” or the wisdom of leaving a stable job in what is becoming an increasingly unstable economy, I never truly had second thoughts or doubts that this was the right decision.
So – here I am:
j/k so far so good. Here are some pics from week 1:
The Hannahlogues 
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