On ending a sabbatical

At the start of 2025, when the idea of a sabbatical first crossed my mind, my immediate reaction was disbelief.

In this economy?

It felt indulgent. Reckless. Like something people with far more certainty than me were allowed to do.

But something was clearly off. I was burnt out in a way that rest couldn’t fix. Getting out of bed felt like a negotiation. Showing up to work required an emotional effort I was starting to lose. I was tired of rooms where disagreement was treated like intelligence and decisions never quite arrived. I knew this wasn’t a life I could keep sustaining.

So I did what I always do when things start slipping: I made a plan. A detailed one. Logical. Responsible. Reassuring on paper.

People around me encouraged the decision. They said I knew exactly what I was doing.

I didn’t.

The plan looked solid, but it relied on assumptions I hadn’t earned yet. I planned a long hike despite never having hiked before. I planned to freelance without clients. And when clients eventually did reach out, I felt nothing. No excitement. No pull. I’ve learned I’m very good at designing perfect systems with quiet fault lines. You don’t notice them until you’re already falling.

I suspected the real impact of the sabbatical would arrive after the trip ended. And it did. Not dramatically, but steadily. The structure disappeared. The confidence I had borrowed from planning wore off.

At first, things still looked promising. I rebuilt my portfolio. Conversations picked up. On paper, everything was progressing. But the same problem remained: I couldn’t get excited about any of it.

Then one conversation felt different.

A fintech company I had been a long-time user of. The founder reached out about an AI product. A role that wasn’t clearly defined, but sounded like a blend of design and engineering. For the first time in months, I felt genuine excitement about writing code.

I leaned into that feeling. I sharpened my technical skills. I spent hours building small animations, experimenting, rebuilding things. I shared my work publicly. I poured that same energy back into my own apps.

And then, slowly, the momentum faded when December arrived and people went away for the holidays.

I didn’t handle the uncertainty particularly well. I’m an anxious person, and ambiguity has a way of magnifying everything. When things started slipping, I fell back on the one thing that reliably steadies me: routine.

I gave my days a shape again. I built, I trained, I spent time with people who grounded me. Somewhere inside that structure, patterns started to surface.

I tend to chase intensity when what I actually needed was consistency. I expected clarity to arrive in bursts instead of through repetition.

So I slowed down. I started therapy. I read more. I wrote constantly. I learned how to rest without feeling like rest needed justification. I rebuilt my attention. My nervous system became calmer.

The future was still uncertain. I knew I didn’t want to return to product design in the way I had practiced it before. I knew design engineering was pulling me forward. What I didn’t know was how to stand firmly in that identity.

So I kept following my curiosity. I kept sharing my work. And over time, something shifted. Designers I deeply admired resonated with it. The kinds of roles people reached out about began to change. More conversations started orbiting around design engineering.

Eventually, I got tired of straddling two identities. So I made a decision. I pivoted completely and wrote a tweet about it.

What followed was messy. A flood of conversations. Confusion. No-shows. People who were curious about design engineering without really knowing what to do with it. It’s still an abstract role in many rooms, so that was understandable. But hidden among the noise were a few companies that felt right. Really right.

Yesterday, I signed with the one I was most excited about by far. More on that soon.

It’s official. I’m a Design Engineer. And with that, the sabbatical ends.

There’s relief in returning to work. Maybe that’s the workaholic in me. But this time feels different. I understand my relationship with work better now, what steadies me, what destabilizes me, and what happens when I mistake intensity for progress.

I don’t think I have it all figured out. But I know I’m moving with more intention than before. And for now, that feels like enough. :)))