My Sabbatical Story: Why I Started Solaris
At some point, my life became a hamster wheel—except I was the one running inside, and the speed kept turning up.
I had stopped asking the most essential question: How am I? I wasn't asking about my productivity or my goals, but in the truest sense—how I was doing as a human being.
For more than a decade in tech, I lived by an unspoken code. I first heard a version of it from my grandfather: "If you’re on time, you’re late." He meant it as a lesson in preparation and respect. I paired that with the relentless pace of tech, where the unwritten rule was: If you’re not available around the clock, someone else will be. So, I juggled brutal deadlines, took impossible calls across time zones, and convinced myself that constant motion was the only way to prove my value. I thought a weekend trip or an extra hour of sleep would cure the fatigue. It never did.
The Breaking Point
Then came the disruption I hadn’t planned for—a company restructuring that eliminated my role.
In an instant, I faced a choice: dive headfirst into the search for another position or do something I had never done in my adult life: Take an honest break.
It felt terrifying. In the silence that followed, I saw the truth of my exhaustion.
Burnout Up Close
Burnout isn't simply being tired. It is the collapse of every system that keeps you functioning: your mind clouded, your body weakened, your spirit drained.
The cruelest part is this: You often don’t grasp how depleted you are until you finally stop.
I believed I was holding everything together. My bloodwork told the truth: iron at 19, ferritin at 6, vitamin D at 12. A chemical portrait of depletion that explained why life felt like moving through water with no surface in sight. When I slowed down, I realized how estranged I had become from myself: from my body, my feelings, and any vision of a life beyond the next deadline.
An Imperfect Sabbatical
I’ll admit I had no blueprint. I overplanned some stretches, drifted through others, and learned most of it by stumbling forward.
I traveled to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Joshua Tree, and other landscapes that invited me to pause. But the deeper work happened in stillness: therapy, inner reckoning, yoga, and time in nature. Slowly, I began to separate who I was from what I produced.
What I didn't anticipate was the guilt.
Even on a quiet beach, resting in a way I desperately needed, an inner voice kept asking: Is this laziness? What about your résumé? Shouldn't you be doing something useful with this time?
That was the moment I understood how deeply hustle culture had embedded itself in me. Rest wasn't only about pausing work; it was about dismantling the belief that my worth was measured by my output.
It took patience to face those questions and to ask better ones:
What if my value isn't defined by productivity?
What if spaciousness is the foundation of clarity and strength?
What if returning with renewed vision is more powerful than never stopping at all?
Why Solaris Global Pathways Exists
When I felt ready to re-enter the professional world, I was not only rested. I was clear: about boundaries, about what I wanted, and about what I would no longer sacrifice.
I know I am not alone. We live in a culture where burnout has been recast as a badge of honor: proof of ambition, proof of drive. Yet the real courage can lie in the act of pausing for inquiry—in asking whether your current priorities and pursuits truly align with your deepest values and purpose.
Taking a sabbatical challenged everything I had been taught about career and success. But staying in the same cycle, eroding myself bit by bit, would have been far riskier.
That is why I created Solaris Global Pathways. Because stepping away shouldn't require a crisis. Because renewal shouldn't be reserved for those who have been forced to stop.
A New Way Forward
Your energy matters. Your well-being matters. And if you’ve been pushing so long you can’t recall what it feels like to be connected to your own center and purpose, perhaps it's time to step back and rediscover it.
The world will keep turning while you care for yourself. And when you re-engage with your career, more aligned with your purpose, you will do so from strength, not survival.
Solaris Global Pathways exists to help make that choice possible for you.