The breaking point that led to my sabbatical (and what’s next)

This post/podcast episode is just a little peek into what’s been going on with me over the last few months, and some reflections on what’s to come.

Listen to episode 213 below,
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In case you’re new here (or you simply have other more pressing things to remember than what Angela Watson’s been up to!), I’ll recap so you know exactly what’s been happening. Here’s what I’ll share below:

• My struggle with depression and anxiety
• Professional burnout and lack of motivation
• COVID and the disillusionment of offering solutions for schools when there aren’t any good ones
• Where my train metaphorically derailed and I lost sight of the destination
• The choice to cut out non-essential obligations and go offline in December
• The response (and pushback) to my sabbatical announcement
• Why I’ve never seen stepping away from work as a weakness
• How I used my time offline in December
• Why the sabbatical was not a cure-all and coming back was harder than anticipated
• The path back: finding the spark of inspiration and nurturing it into a roaring flame

The spring and summer of 2020 were some of the darkest times of my life, personally and professionally. I’ll talk about what was going on professionally in a moment, but let’s begin with the personal stuff.

My struggle with depression and anxiety

In terms of the personal stuff, I was going to recap some of the hardships my family and I experienced since March, but you know what? A lot of it I have already shared, and it’s sort of irrelevant. I don’t really need to prove or justify my need for a break. 2020 was a tough year for everybody, and for many people, it was far worse than it was for me. Y’all know that.

And those of you who are trying to manage depression and anxiety recognize that those lows can come even if everything in your life is going well. Circumstances are really kind of secondary.

The truth is, I was having more low days than functional days by July and early August of 2020. I had trouble getting out of bed, and doing any kind of work required herculean levels of focus and energy. When I stayed home, I felt depressed, but when I left home, I felt anxious. And this was not just because of COVID — it’s something I’ve grappled with off and on for years in varying degrees.

I was hitting a breaking point, and as I shared in EP211 when I was announcing my sabbatical, I started taking Zoloft in August, and that really helped turn things around.

(I had been on similar medications years ago but went off under doctor supervision when I was trying to get pregnant. Spoiler alert, we did not get pregnant and are no longer trying, as I’m now 42, but it hadn’t occurred to me until this past summer that antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds were once again an option for me. It has been off the table for so long I forgot about it. My understanding now is that many of these meds have been approved now for pregnant women, as an aside, if you are struggling, do talk to a doctor about your options even if you’re trying to conceive.)

I remember the exact moment I realized I needed to be on medication and there was just no other alternative.

It was a beautiful warm August day, the birds were outside singing, and I was slicing tomatoes for my lunch. And I was thinking to myself, “This is all so pointless. Why am I even doing this, making lunch? I’m just going to have to do it again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. The drudgery just never ends. Why even bother?”

And I was just completely fed up with feeling that way. I was tired of waking up every day feeling like everything was pointless and boring and not even wanting to get up. I was tired of getting maybe two good days a week in which I could actually function and get things done, and exhausted from having to cram so many tasks into those two good days to compensate for laying in bed the other five.

And I just decided, right there at the kitchen counter with the tomato in my hand, that I was going to do a telemedicine appointment with some psychiatrist online and I was going to start medication that day. And I did.

I found the K Health app, connected with a doctor for $19, and  I had the bottle of $1 generic Zoloft in my hand that evening. (I just realized this sounds like a paid product placement or infomercial–it is not.) I could not believe it was that easy and was sort of in awe that I’d let myself get so accustomed to depression over the years that I hadn’t done this earlier.

I thought it might take a few months to find just the right medicine or dosage or combination of meds to help me feel better, but about a week after that, I was again standing in the kitchen slicing tomatoes for my lunch, and I remember thinking to myself, “Look at this big, juicy, red tomato. God, I love fresh summer vegetables. This is incredible — the taste and the smell of this tomato that I get to have on my sandwich.”

And I realized, nothing in my circumstances had changed. Still in a pandemic, still going through the mundane task of making lunch every day. But that person who finds delight in the small things in life, who enjoys simple pleasures and is content in her day to day life? That’s the person I really am. And that person was clearly back.

So if there are no other gifts to be found in this pandemic for me personally — and I could actually name many more — COVID gave me the gift of breaking me down so much emotionally that I went back on medication and my life is so, so much better now.  My lows are not nearly as low, and I feel peaceful and content the vast majority of the time. 

Professional burnout and lack of motivation

However, it took about a month to adjust and work through side effects, and the Zoloft kind of zapped my motivation. I don’t notice any side effects now, but I realize that a lot of my motivation to work was anxiety-driven, and without the anxiety, I was not driven to be productive.

So it was a huge adjustment period this fall — learning who I am without a chemical imbalance, and what I want to spend my time doing if it’s not working.

Because in addition to the sort of mental/emotional breaking, I was also hitting a breaking point professionally. I’ve experienced professional burnout before, several times, (I talked about that in Season 3, Episode 4, about quitting my teaching job twice), but it had been many years since I felt burned out, probably close to a decade.

So that was another crisis coming to a head this summer — in addition to COVID and our family stuff and health issues and the death of my mother-in-law and my husband being out of work and my depression worsening — was that I was experiencing severe professional burnout. 

When I say I’ve spent every day of my adult life thinking about teaching and learning even on vacation, I really mean it. I remember as a teacher checking out stacks of professional development books from the library and reading them poolside in the summer over my break and creating new activities to do with my kids.

Even after I left the classroom and started doing instructional coaching, teaching was still my hobby. I kept spending my evenings making games and activities, because what else do people do while they watch TV? I just gave them to the teachers I was coaching and shared them on my blog or put them on TpT, and it became part of how I made a living and supported my family, but making curriculum resources still felt like a hobby. I would spend hours and hours a day on it, and I loved it.

I’ve attended dozens of education conferences. I’ve spent my free time socializing with other educators and participating in Twitter chats and Facebook groups about teaching. So much of my free time involved doing things related to K-12 education that I enjoyed.

Over the last few years, I felt a small tug away from that, and I’m sure that long-time listeners of the podcast can feel, as my podcast topics have ventured further and further away from the nitty-gritty of instruction and more into the mindset and being intentional with your time and living a fulfilling meaningful life. My focus became broader, I guess.

So I’d been going in that direction anyway — where I knew that there were other things that I was meant to do besides just focusing on classroom practices — but I just wasn’t sure what it was, because I’ve never had a hobby that wasn’t education-related.

Sure, I have other things I like to do, and I don’t work all the time. But stuff related to teaching was my main go-to.

The disillusionment of offering solutions when there aren’t any good ones

COVID hastened the demise of my enthusiasm for doing teaching stuff as a hobby, because suddenly — literally overnight — teaching had become a source of stress and frustration and exhaustion to a level that most of us have never experienced before.

Morale within the profession has obviously been on a decline as teachers’ autonomy and ability to be creative decreased, and as participating in the educational system requires more moral compromise, and giving in on things that we know are not best for teachers and kids.

But when COVID hit, well, this was no longer teaching at all — what we were calling “school” was nothing that I recognized, nothing any of us had been trained for or prepared for or saw as a way to do the kind of best practices we know.

And it was not fun to work on teaching things this past spring — not for me, not for most of you, I think. It was frustrating and confusing and so much work for so little impact.

So what do you do when the main thing you do in your free time is tied to a profession that has completely changed and had almost all the joy completely sucked out of it?

Interacting with teachers was no longer something fun, where I could gather with like-minded folks and talk about things we are passionate about and geek out on pedagogy. Everything to do with schools just felt really depressing and overwhelming and upsetting.

And when I lost that passion for education, I felt like I lost a part of myself. I know I’m not the only one, because I’ve heard from so many teachers who feel like they are not only burned out — they are disillusioned.

You’re suddenly doing a job that you don’t recognize anymore, and you never signed up to do, that you’re not trained to do, that you’re not able to do well … but suddenly it’s become your whole life, and everything revolves around it.

So to be completely transparent, in the summer of 2020, I felt like I lost sight of what I’m doing in this field. I had a lot of professional moments like that time I was slicing tomatoes in my kitchen — what is the purpose of this? Why bother? What is it all for?

Now during that time, the July 2020 cohort of the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek program was kicking off. If you’re not familiar, this is a yearlong PD that I run which begins every summer. I had already planned to completely revamp the program, anyway, because it’s now five years old and I wanted to do a major update.

So, when COVID hit and I realized teaching was going to look very different, I was prepared to adjust for that. My team and I worked really hard all spring and summer doing everything we could to give teachers answers when their school districts were not.

But the whole time — and 40 Hour members know this — I was really hoping school would be back to “normal” by fall 2020 in the U.S. as it had been in many other countries.

I was creating resources for virtual and hybrid teaching, but hoping I wouldn’t have to much longer. I hoped schools could just delay their start dates for the 2020-2021 school year for a few weeks, we’d get community transmission levels under control, and the nightmare scenarios of emergency pandemic teaching would be behind us.

But by mid-July, COVID cases were rising in the US exponentially, and it was clear that what I was hoping for — what we were all hoping for — just wasn’t going to happen.

There were no good solutions. There just weren’t.

There was no path forward for schools that I felt was good for teachers and kids.

And when I heard this new “brilliant’ idea of forcing teachers to teach in unsafe classrooms while simultaneously teaching students at home who were watching via live video, it just stunned me. I could not believe that anyone would ever think this was an effective way for kids to learn or an appropriate expectation of teachers.

Concurrent hybrid learning was a new low in our profession at a time when I didn’t think the expectations on teachers could get any more outrageous.

And like many — if not most, if not all — leaders in the education space this past summer, I was really struggling to have a clear, comprehensive vision for the future of teaching and learning. Again — there were no options that I felt good about promoting.

Where my train metaphorically derailed and how I lost sight of the destination

One thing to understand about me is that I am a person who is completely motivated by the “why.” If I don’t understand the importance of doing something, I have no motivation to get it done. That’s just my personality type. I don’t do anything just because — just because other people are doing it, just because it’s always been done, just because I’m told to it. I have to dig deep and find a clear and compelling reason for me personally — a worthwhile cause for following through.

And as someone that others look to for leadership, I HAVE to have a really clear vision of where I want people to follow me. (I have more to say about that minefield in a moment, because I discovered when I announced my sabbatical that some folks have put me up on some kind of pedestal that I really, really don’t want to be on.)

I feel like I was doing well in the spring when we were still in emergency pandemic teaching. I’m really proud of the podcast episodes I did during that time, and the support I offered to teachers.

But over the summer, when I realized schools were going to try to get back to normal standards for the following school year like nothing at all had changed … I felt like the child-centered, grace-filled, humanity-first train I was aboard had become derailed. 

And I wasn’t sure yet which of the other tracks I wanted to put my train back on. I did not like any of the possible destinations.

I had people looking to me for leadership, and I was not willing to lead them to a place that I was not confident about going.

It’s like my train had been going full speed ahead, but I was no longer connected to the destination. This past summer, I felt like I wasn’t clear on where we were going or why or who was even with me.

And so I felt a responsibility to stop and look at the map, and figure out where it is I’m trying to go. That way I can get myself back on the right track, and invite along the people who want to be on board for that destination.

This is what my sabbatical has been about. It was a chance for me to not just take a break from work, but to take a break from leading, and uncover a vision for the future of my work. 

The choice to cut out non-essential obligations and go offline in December

There was no other option for me — if I didn’t take the time to regroup, I was never going to get myself in the headspace that teachers need me to be.

I am not an employee of any company — I do not get any vacation time, sick days, or holiday leave. I have no summer break (that’s actually the busiest, most stressful time of the year due to the 40 Hour launch and PD requests for back-to-school). I work for myself, so if I don’t choose to take time off, I will work 365 days a year.

For many years now, I have self-selected my time off. And this past fall, I knew it was going to have to be a longer period of time.

I already split the podcast into 2 seasons, with a break in Nov/Dec and June/July, and usually, I have 20 new podcast episodes outlined before the new season even starts because there’s so much I want to talk about.

But this time, in August, I didn’t even think I was going to make it to that normal podcast break. I truly had nothing to say that would be inspiring or encouraging. I just didn’t have it in me.

I followed along on social media as Tricia Hersey from The Nap Ministry experimented with month-long sabbatical for November and it got me thinking. (She’s since made it an annual tradition.)

I basically cut out any tasks that weren’t absolutely required, and then worked ahead in October and November on everything that WAS necessary to get everything done before December.

I then spent as much time offline in December as I possibly could. That ended up being like 99% of the time, especially in the second half of the month once schools were closed for the holidays and most other people were not really focusing on work, either. 

I announced this time off via email and my podcast. I also told 40 Hour Members and graduates so they would know nothing in the program would be affected, I was simply batching and working ahead to get their December and January materials ready and the rest of the 40 Hour team would keep everything running smoothly while I was offline.

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The response — and pushback — to my sabbatical announcement

In response, I received over 1,500 emails, DMs, and private messages of support — and I think I replied personally to every one of them. Seriously, I did, because they were so incredibly kind. It took me about a week to do it, but I was so touched by the number of you who supported and encouraged me.

But around email 200, I was really surprised to see some pushback. And that email was not the only one. There were a handful of messages — maybe 6 or 7, in contrast with the 1500 supportive ones —from people who, as it turned out, were BIG mad about my choice to take a sabbatical.

I was completely unprepared for people to question that decision because, first of all, it’s an extremely personal decision and people who only know me through the Internet do not have the context needed to make a judgment about whether or not I should be doing that or how it should happen. It takes a lot of nerve to email someone who doesn’t know you and try to shame them for taking a break from podcasting and sending a weekly email to a list. I’m not a brain surgeon bailing out on scheduled surgeries here, friends.

I am not an essential worker, and folks can surely live without my online monologues for a couple of weeks.

At least, that’s what I had assumed.

But there were people who were frankly outraged that I dared to take a break when classroom teachers can’t. I mean, I understand the frustration, and that’s sort of true, even though teachers do have a good portion of December off (which is a major part of why I chose that month for my own break).

But the vitriol and nastiness in some of these messages was really shocking, and unfortunately, I have not been able to shake their words from my head. I had people tell me they didn’t want to hear about my pity party, that they’d lost all respect for me, that this was the most unprofessional thing they’d ever heard, that I should never, ever admit that I’m tired, and to not expect anyone in my audience to still be here when I come back.

All of this hurt me deeply because I had confused followers with friends. And that response reinforced my decision to go offline, because frankly, there are some folks out there who do not realize I am an actual human being and I really need them to see me as one.

I do not exist solely to be a role model for teachers any more than you all exist solely to be a role model for students. We are all allowed to fall short, disappoint, do less.

I’ve been saying since day one of this pandemic: this is a time for reimagining, for slowing down, for doing fewer things better, for simplifying, for going inward. Nearly every email and podcast episode since that time has touched on that theme. And the fact that this period of going inward is not possible for many people due to their jobs does not make it any less necessary.

But more than that, people presumably follow me because they appreciate my relentless emphasis on self-care, work/life balance, and breaking free from the status quo and unreasonable expectations.

These are not just things that I say. I actually live that. I actually do all the things I tell you to do. I refuse to martyr myself for this profession. 

Why I’ve never seen stepping away from work as a weakness 

This is not the first time I’ve had to step away from work.

In my third year of teaching, I had a major depressive episode where there was basically nothing wrong in my life, yet I could not stop crying or get out of bed. I was so weepy all the time and it took so much out of me to put on a happy face for my PreK students that my doctor suggested a medical leave of absence.

I had a substitute cover my class — a good friend, who kept me in the loop about my little ones and sent messages to them from me frequently — for about six weeks in the middle of the school year while I healed and recovered. And then I returned.

That incident was actually the impetus for me to start sharing my teaching resources online, because when I came back, my principal said, “I couldn’t even tell you were gone. The kids knew exactly what to do, and kept up all the routines you taught them.”

I realized that there was something about the way I had structured my classroom to be self-running that was unique — the kids didn’t need me there in order to keep learning, and that’s when I started offering support to other teachers in online message board forums and such to help then create effective routines and procedures.

That entire experience was not the end of my career but rather a stepping stone to the next part of it. 

So, I don’t see it as a weakness or betrayal to take a break, to quit, to walk away temporarily or permanently from an obligation in order to prioritize your own mental health and wellbeing.

My sabbatical in December was a pretty simple choice given that I don’t have students depending on me, but even when I did, I don’t see myself as so important that others cannot possibly go on without me.

If teachers are overworked and exhausted and burning out, it does not help THEM for ME to be overworked and exhausted and burned out, too. That made perfect sense in my mind.

It truly did not occur to me that any of you who heard my sabbatical announcement would be hurt or disappointed or mad about it, and for that, I apologize. That’s something I could have been more sensitive to.

A lot of teachers are drowning right now, and looking for any kind of support or voice of reason. I understand that.

It’s also hard to hear that someone else is taking a break when you yourself cannot, and I don’t think I worded that email about my sabbatical well enough to convey that.

I wasn’t doing anything very well at that time, frankly. I did not have the mental bandwidth or energy to put the necessary effort into communicating carefully and clearly with my audience, hence why I was stepping away.

So if I botched that first announcement of the sabbatical for you, I am sincerely sorry for that.

I would simply ask that we refocus together on bringing humanity back to how our society operates. Workers are not machines: they are human beings with real needs and feelings. This truth is frequently not honored for you as a teacher, and you deserve better.

I want to always extend that compassion to teachers — that permission to be fully human, not just a “professional” at all times — and I sincerely thank those of you who have extended that same consideration back to me. It’s the only way forward.

I believe that we have an obligation to make sure we are healthy and strong so we can be there for the folks who are depending on us. Everything can’t be “do it for the children” all the time. You matter, too. I matter, too. Self-care is not selfish.

I know from your messages that the vast majority of you saw my sabbatical as an act of leading by example, of practicing what I preach, and/or an inspiration for you to carve out your own break from work over the holidays.

It made me SO happy to hear that lots of you were inspired to unplug over your holiday break, and I plan to do a better job of inviting you into the process and carving out your own time away from work next December. I would love for this to be an annual tradition which those in my online community do in some form or another each year.

Leading by example is always my intention. I don’t adhere to expectations and norms about how I should be using my time. I am able to teach you all how to be free from those expectations because I myself am closer and closer to free. I can teach you how to question the status quo because my entire life is living outside of the status quo.

And moving forward, I’m about to step even further outside the box. If you thought a sabbatical was too wild of an idea, you may not be on board with the things I have planned next! Some of them have to do with education, and some of them don’t.

But when I talk about reimagining education, reimagining our systems, reimagining our society, reimagining our world, that’s not hyperbole. “Reimagining” has become a word that people have thrown around a lot since the start of the pandemic, but I actually mean it, and I actually spend large amounts of time “freedom dreaming” about what it would look like for all people to be liberated. I always have. And it’s really hard to free and liberate other people when you’re not free yourself.

The freer that I can be, the more I can help others be free. I have to get closer to the goal so I can come back and show others the way.

How I used my time offline

So, once I decided back in October that I was going to take the December sabbatical, I began using any time that I wasn’t working to begin figuring out what other things I might like or be interested in that did not involve screen time or the teaching profession.

I discovered moss gardening and moss art, making homemade kombucha and candles, doing puzzles, and getting deeper into yoga and hiking. I started painting and wood-burning and using alcohol inks on tile.

And while I was doing all of this, I listened to at least 30 audiobooks and who knows how many podcasts on history and politics and social justice. (I’ll share some of them on my Instagram in a bit, if you’re interested.)

Looking back, I realize a lot of these activities were things I’d done before but hadn’t prioritized time for recently. (I was a double major in college actually — early childhood education and art, with a minor in women’s studies — that all fits the trajectory of my journey, right?)

I had always been interested in art and nature and better understanding our world, but my passion for education overshadowed everything else, pushed it all to the back burner.

And so in those few short weeks, I feel like I reconnected to parts of myself I hadn’t explored much in decades, and learned new things about myself as well.

And now that I am back to work, I continue to prioritize those things. I try to shut the laptop in the afternoon and not look at or think about any of it again until morning. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t, but that’s the goal.

This leaves me the rest of the afternoon and evening to pursue other interests. I don’t have much of a life right now — I’m one of those folks who really doesn’t leave home for very much beyond the grocery store due to COVID — so I have the time to pursue hobbies at home.

It was just a matter of finding those hobbies and prioritizing them. I’m not sure that would have happened if I hadn’t reached that breaking point.

The thing that I realized, though, is that a sabbatical is not a guaranteed solution to burnout.

The sabbatical was not a cure-all, and coming back was harder than I anticipated

I will be totally honest and say I was not excited to come back online at first. I actually cried on New Years Eve, because I knew that was my last day “off” and I was going to have to show in January with something to say to you all, and I still had no idea what I wanted to say.

I was feeling more balanced and content personally, but I had zero vision of what value I could bring to education or what I could contribute to teachers and kids in the year ahead. 

I also knew that more time away from work was not what I needed. After all, schools aren’t going to look much different in February or March or April as they do now, so if I’m waiting for the circumstances to get more inspiring, it was going to be a long time until I had anything to say.

And, I had people depending on me — folks on my team, and you all. I’d said I would be back in January, and I was determined to find my inspiration again.

It was a slow process over the course of the month of January — mapping out the podcast season, working on the February materials for 40 Hour, planning out some stuff to share via email and social media.

And little by little, I found that I did have some things to share.

The path back: finding a spark of inspiration and nurturing it into a roaring flame

That might be a takeaway for you if you are experiencing a bit of burnout right now (and I think most teachers are).

I found when I reconnect with things I care about, it got me more excited to work, even when those things weren’t directly tied to the work.

One of the things that really has me fired up right now is combatting the amount of misinformation and harmful propaganda being spread online. Part of why our country is so divided right now is because we have a group of people who are working with alternative facts that are not connected to the reality the rest of us are living in. (For clarity, I am speaking of the Q-Anon folks and other far-right extremists.)

I don’t know if I’m considered by those folks as part of the dreaded “mainstream media” or not, but I do have a platform. My voice is heard by many thousands of teachers. I have the ability to help create the change I want to see in the world.

I have the ability to speak truth — facts, reason, science, evidence, real stuff — to the people listening to me, and that is a powerful way to create ripples of forward progress. (And you have the same, with your own powerful sphere of influence.)

I used that little spark of inspiration to help push me to take action and ease back into work. I found a little bit of my WHY for 2021. I don’t know all the stops on this train, but I’m headed in the right direction, and the train is moving down the track. 

This next phase of my work involves using my platform to help create the change that I want to see in the world.

I will continue to focus on supporting teachers in having the right mindset and staying focused on what’s most important. I’ll focus on teaching self-care and collective self-care (or community care) because these are equity issues. When teachers are stressed and out, they do not respond to students with empathy and care. If you are not in a good headspace and your working conditions are oppressive, you’re just not going to do a great job for kids.

That’s what I’m deeply passionate about — helping teachers show up in the classroom as the best possible version of themselves — and this is going to continue to be my focus. 

I was hoping to come back from my sabbatical with a brand new and very exciting vision for the future, and I did not … not at first.

But the more I dove into the work, the more I thought of other things I wanted to do, and now a couple of weeks into the routines again, I find some really good ideas taking shape.

You might not sense a huge difference in topic or tone of the podcast from last season to this one. But there’s something inside me that has shifted, and as I shared last week, I’m going to stay focused on the destination and no longer concerned about folks who don’t want to board the train. Anyone who has the same or similar vision as I do (or wants to get there) can come along. 

Each time I show up online — be it on social media, or a podcast, or an email, or whatever), there’s a lot of pressure to SAY SOMETHING NEW, ORIGINAL, AND EARTH-SHATTERING.

To keep from running out of things to say, I HAVE to keep growing, learning, and evolving, both as a person and educator.

And that’s actually the fun part. The stuff I share with you is a reflection of what I’m thinking and feeling, and what’s important to me at any given moment.  I love bringing you along with what I’m learning, and talking about things that make us better humans, not just better at classroom instruction.

Everything you read from me is written BY me, from the heart. And I’m a human with a wide range of feelings and interests.

I’m not trying to be happy and positive and an encourager of teachers 24/7.

I’m trying to be real and self-actualized. I’m trying to be fully human.

I really like the person I’ve grown into over the years. The world’s changing, education’s changing, and I’m changing, too. I am not the same person I was in 2003, or 2010, or 2015, and the person I’ll be a few years from now will be different, too. I hope to like future Angela even more than current Angela, as I let go of the expectations other people place on me and show up more as my authentic self.

So if you’ve been following my work for a while, there’s a good chance that the place my head is at won’t be the same place as yours during some point in our journey together.

Maybe you’ll get tired of me harping on work/life balance, productivity, mindset, and self-care, and grow frustrated when those topics keep recurring.

Maybe you’ll only like the individualistic ideas and be annoyed by the systemic and collective changes I’m advocating for a little more now.

Or maybe you’ll be okay with all of those things, but feel like you’ve already gotten the core message of what you need from me, and be ready to move on and follow other folks online.

All of these things are okay.

It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you OR me. It doesn’t mean either of us needs to change a thing.

I can’t promise to offer exactly what you need, but I CAN promise to keep showing up, keep being myself, and keep sharing ideas with anyone who wants to join me in the journey.

Thank you for allowing me these weeks to heal, breathe, regroup, and clarify my vision for the year ahead. 

Thank you for your messages, and for encouraging me even though I did not have the strength to encourage you.

Thank you for believing in me and my work. I may have taken a pause, but this work does not end.

The next phase of our journey together starts now. Let’s move forward boldly.