I quit my job to take a creative sabbatical

...in an historically bad job market! On redefining safety, security, and stability for myself.

I know the exact day I said it out loud for the first time.

It was July 2024. I had thrown a party where I asked each guest to share a goal for the coming year. When my turn came, I said: “I want to take a sabbatical from work.”

It felt insane to even say out loud—but that was the magic of it. It took the idea from something in my head to something in the world, in the minds of my friends: a real thing. There’s power in that. And not a little bit of terror.

That night started the clock. I began to take the idea more seriously just from the sheer act of having said it out loud. You know how people joke that you have to cosplay being asleep before you actually drift off? It was like that. The best thing I did for my sabbatical was begin moving toward it before I believed it could ever be true.

I acted like I would be quitting my job—even though I had no conviction that I would. I strategized with my company-appointed career coach. I met with a financial advisor. I took job interviews, not because I wanted a new role, but to prove to myself that I could re-enter the workforce again if it came to that. I mapped out my budget in detail, looking at monthly expenses and projecting out a realistic runway. I lowered my cost of living and maximized flexibility. I scheduled all my doctor’s appointments. I did The Artist’s Way. Twice!

Over a year, I put everything in place so I could leave my job. But I still didn’t believe I’d actually do it.

installation by Ashley Bennett-Riley

•••

I’ve written a lot here about my religious and romantic deconstructions, but not much about my relationship with the corporate world. In fact, I’ve taken pains to hide my regrettable “girlboss” era, circa 2017, and its particular brand of bootstraps feminism, but there are signs.

I’ve been working since high school when I got a job cleaning crockpots at the local body wrap spa. I don’t have the time to unpack that sentence and, trust me, neither do you. I went to college on an academic scholarship and worked part-time. After I graduated, I took my first full-time job at a nonprofit where I made $21k/year, too excited by the word “thousand” to really comprehend that it didn’t constitute a living wage, even in Texas in 2014.

From there, I made my way through various marketing jobs and Zara blazers until I somewhat unintentionally broke into the tech industry. As someone who has historically been driven by recognition and achievement, corporate culture was like catnip to me. I liked being good at something and I liked being recognized and rewarded for it.

The perks dazzled me: weekly lunches, a gym stipend, endless alcohol, an entire snack closet (I’m very food-motivated). I thrived in the end-times chaos of my first job in tech, quickly climbing the ladder and racking up promotions. When an in-seat raise gave me my first six-figure salary at age 26, I calmly stepped outside to scream.

I include a little about my finances to acknowledge that ten years of increasing salaries (even with a starting point of $21k) combined with a low cost-of-living means I was able to ferret away enough savings to even consider taking a sabbatical. There’s a long daisy-chain of privilege, luck, and work that made that possible. That’s why considering leaving it felt not just dumb, but deeply ungrateful.

Wasn’t this what I’d been striving for for a decade? Why would I give it up now?

•••

Leaving a corporate job is not unlike leaving religion. Both constitute a belief system, especially in America, where the values of Christianity and capitalism are instilled in us from a very early age. Both are a framework for making sense of the world and your role in it. Both promise safety.

But how safe did I really feel? I was perpetually tense, plagued with an anxious, jittery dread. Not surprising given the pace of the tech industry: the introduction of AI, increasing productivity demands, the hypergrowth mentality, the speed at which we all had to work to outrun the next threat. I don’t want to move fast and break things. I want to go slow and be gentle!

I felt existentially afraid: of my life slipping by, of sacrificing all my best energy to the beast of capitalism, of spending an entire lifetime dedicated to something I did not value. There was a very real sense of self-abandonment every day that I forced myself to do so. Even weighed against the material rewards, I knew it was costing me deeply.

The feeling it created in my body certainly didn’t feel like safety. It was the opposite, actually. It was primal fear kept me running on the hamster wheel, afraid that if I stepped off, everything would crumble. Real safety would feel like allowing myself to pause, slow down, and step off for some amount of time—trusting that nothing catastrophic will happen when I do.

“I just want to give myself the gift of time,” I told Carly as we kayaked down the river on a cloudy late-summer day. “I want to give myself a year.”

“Wow, an entire year? Of your own life?” she said, letting the absurdity of my own words hang there.

Really, the sabbatical question came down to purpose: What did I think my life was for? Earning, grinding, and accruing; climbing ever-upward to some imaginary finish line? Or existing, expanding, and growing in ways that can’t and shouldn’t be quantified?

I include this Diane Ackerman quote in nearly every essay, because it opened up a trapdoor for me: “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” It was the death knell for my days in the corporate world.

At first, the consequences of leaving my job felt far too risky. In a difficult job market and uncertain economy, staying seemed like the safer choice. But the consequences of staying—of failing to trust myself, abandoning what I truly care about, forcing myself to keep climbing, denying myself the opportunity to explore and expand? To fail?

In the long run, those consequences would be much harder to live with.

•••

The thing that changed wasn’t my job, it was the life that surrounded it.

Yet again, I blame The Artist’s Way. I blame poetry and art and Shelby Park. I blame Audre Lorde and Elena Ferrante and Linda Gregg. I blame Melissa Febos. I blame George Saunders and Russian literature! Mostly, I blame every person in my life who nudged me along with a word of encouragement or a borrowed book.

Somewhere along the way, through these conduits, I stepped through a portal, out of the world of capital and into a universe of art and language. Now that I’d gotten a taste of it, I wanted to live here all the time.

I started fantasizing about a sabbatical. I imagined building up a nice little nest egg that would allow me to take a year or more off of work. I had co-workers who’d done it, friends, acquaintances. Their eyes lit up when they talked about it. I listened to their stories, seething with jealousy and curiosity. My question was less logistics—I had the numbers, I knew what was required—and something more like: How did you trust yourself enough to make that decision?

Almost every move I’ve ever made has been based on data and risk analysis. I would have said I’m very risk-averse, but I think the underlying truth has a lot more to do with self-trust. Being in charge of my life seemed like such a far-fetched proposition. Me? Don’t they know I’ve never done this before?

I didn’t believe I was in capable hands with myself, so I looked outward to understand what was permitted. But, of course, if you look only to what other people are doing, you’ll be confined to that set of options. I wanted something I hadn’t quite seen. I didn’t want to work a nine-to-five for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to wait until retirement age to make time for what mattered to me.

So what does a cautious, calculated girl do when she wants to change her life? Well, that’s what I’ve been documenting in this newsletter. Instead of working against my natural inclinations, I harnessed my obsession with data and experimentation to methodically push myself beyond my initial discomfort.

These experiments were building muscle, stretching the feeling of safety. With each one, I further solidified the belief that nothing terrible would happen if I listened to my inner knowing, rather than some outside voice.

Or—you know what? Something bad might still happen! Just because I was listening to my own desires didn’t mean I wouldn’t make mistakes. It just meant that I was making mistakes that were the result of my choosing, rather than not-choosing.

Those initial attempts started small, but each one gave me a boost of self-trust that allowed me to leap to the next lillypad: moving out of my house gave me the courage to sell my belongings and then to live abroad, start this Substack, publish my writing, commit to leaseless living. Now, I’d reached the final boss: quitting my job.

•••

By the middle of this year, I’d made all the necessary preparations. But how would I know when the timing was finally right?

One day this July, a full year after I’d first spoken my sabbatical dream out loud, it finally hit me. I was in a routine Zoom meeting. Nothing unusual was happening. I was doing the exact same thing I’d done for the past decade. The realization struck me like lightning from within, clear and resonant as a bell.

I expected certainty to arrive from the outside, from rationalizing or calculating my way into it. Instead, it happened in my body. It reminded me of bad dates I’d been on, when I’d tried to convince myself to keep going: They were perfectly nice! Plenty of people would love this! You’re asking for too much. Just keep trying. But a deep inner knowing, an almost physical aversion, prevented me. That’s how I felt about staying at my job: A perfectly nice place, lovely people, a wonderful team. I just couldn’t do it anymore and remain whole.

With that realization, the idea of not taking the sabbatical suddenly seemed far more ridiculous than the idea of actually doing it. What seemed impossible now felt inevitable. Luckily, I’d been building the runway for myself all along, proving over and over that I was in good hands with myself.

That deep certainty stayed with me when I told my friends and family, when I gave my notice to my team, when IT remotely wiped my laptop, when I began my first glorious week of non-employment, when I left for my first writing residency for a month of living in the world of words and art. It felt, in a word, substantiating. I was no longer waiting on someone outside of me to grant permission. I was giving it to myself.

When I was still deciding whether to quit, I talked to a friend who left his corporate career to pursue creative work. I asked him all the usual questions: How did you know it was the right choice? “I’m just following the warmth,” he said, smiling, like it was as easy as that.

The image it put in my mind was of cold hands, drawn toward the light and heat of a fire. My whole life I’d moved toward what I understood to be the “right decision” or the proper path, clinging to an outside definition of success. I thought that was safety—even when it filled my body with anxious dread.

But these past few years of experimentation have given me access to a vivid internal compass. I can close my eyes and feel something hot and bright pulling me in the direction I need to go. The more I listen to it, the better things get.

Before, I felt scared to be the one making decisions about my life. Now, there is no one else I’d trust with it. That, more than anything, feels like safety. •

Love,

Lane 💋

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What’s your relationship with work right now? How do you think about your career path and creative life over the long-term? Let me know in the comments, send me a DM, or come find me on Instagram.