My Sabbatical Story: Why I Started Solaris

At some point, I stopped asking myself the most important question. Not how is my project tracker looking or did I hit my KPIs, but genuinely, how am I. As an actual human being with a body that occasionally needed things like food and sleep and a reason to get out of bed that had nothing to do with a deliverable.

For more than a decade in tech, I lived by an unspoken code. My grandad used to say, if you are on time you are late. He meant it as a lesson in preparation and respect. Somewhere along the way I merged that wisdom with Silicon Valley's greatest export: if you are not available around the clock, someone else will be. So I took calls at 2 AM because someone in another time zone needed an answer right now. I genuinely believed that constant motion was the only way to prove I mattered. I thought a weekend away or an extra hour of sleep would fix the bone-deep exhaustion. It never did.

The plot twist

Then came the company restructuring that eliminated my role. One surreal Thursday morning, I faced a choice I had never faced before. I could immediately start hunting for the next position, the way I always had, or I could do something I had literally never done in my adult life. Actually stop.

It felt terrifying. What kind of ambitious person just pauses? But in the silence that followed, I finally saw how exhausted I actually was. Not tired. Exhausted. There is a difference and I had spent years confusing the two.

What burnout actually looks like

Here is the thing about burnout that nobody tells you until it is too late. It is not dramatic. It does not arrive with a warning. It is your entire operating system crashing quietly, over a long period of time, while you keep insisting you are fine.

Your brain gets foggy. Your body starts staging a rebellion. Your spirit checks out entirely. And the cruelest part is that you often do not realize how depleted you are until you finally stop moving.

I thought I was holding it together. Then my bloodwork came back. Iron at 19. Ferritin at 6. Vitamin D at 12. My doctor looked at the results and said, how are you even standing? It was a chemical receipt for a decade of running on empty. It explained why life had started to feel like swimming through peanut butter with no shore in sight.

What I actually did

I will be honest. I had no idea what I was doing. I overplanned some parts, completely winged others, and learned most of it by trial and error, heavy on the error. I traveled to Scottsdale, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Sedona, Maui, and Joshua Tree. Places that practically forced me to slow down. But the real work happened in the quiet moments. Therapy sessions where I ugly cried. Long walks where I was not optimizing anything. The gradual, uncomfortable process of untangling who I was from what I produced.

Nobody tells you about the guilt. Even lying on a beautiful beach, doing exactly what my depleted body needed, a voice kept whispering: is this just laziness? What about your résumé gap? Shouldn't you be doing something productive right now?

That voice was hustle culture, and it had set up camp in my brain rent free.

Rest turned out to be about dismantling a deeply embedded belief, that my worth as a human being was determined by my output as a worker. Those are not the same thing. I know that now. It took me most of a year to really feel it.

What I learned, place by place

In Scottsdale, I learned that sometimes falling apart is the only way healing can begin. That real rest looks like a full system shutdown, not a spa day.

In Nicaragua, I remembered how to breathe. I also noticed, for the first time, how automatically I made myself smaller to keep other people comfortable. Old habits in new jungles.

In Costa Rica, I got sick on my birthday and laughed harder than I had in months at something I will not fully explain here. My body knew what it needed better than my plans did.

In Sedona, I started trusting myself again. Making small decisions based on what felt right rather than what looked right.

In Maui, I gave myself permission to want things again. To seek joy instead of just avoiding pain.

In Joshua Tree, I found clarity about what I wanted to build next. I was ready to go home.

Why this exists

When I finally felt ready to re-enter the world, I was clear about my boundaries, about what I wanted, and about what I would never sacrifice again. And I realized I could not be the only one feeling this way.

We live in a culture where burnout has become a status symbol, proof you are ambitious, proof you are committed. But real courage is asking whether your current path actually aligns with your values, or whether you are just very good at ignoring the warning signs.

Stepping away should not require a crisis. Renewal should not be something you only get to experience after you have completely fallen apart.

If you have been pushing so hard for so long that you cannot remember what it feels like to be connected to yourself, you are not alone. And you do not have to wait until the bloodwork forces the conversation.

That is what Solaris Global Pathways is here for.