Reflections At The End Of A Successful Sabbatical

The End Is Nigh!☄️

Photo of a street sign with the word “End” by Call Me Fred on Unsplash

A bit of a longer post today with a lot to reflect on, feel grateful for, and celebrate from this year so far. I know how lucky I am to have had the resources and ability to step away from the need to keep earning money and explore fresh avenues of being and living.

If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend taking an extended break from the career grind and giving yourself a chance to look at life in a new light.

In this reflection on my sabbatical:

• What Sabbatical Has Given Me

• A Sabbatical By The Numbers

• Graphic Storytelling Success

• Sabbatical Made Me A Better Community Member

• Closing Thoughts

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What Sabbatical Has Given Me

Here we are in the tail end of September, and my sabbatical/career break¹ is drawing to a close after eight months of job-free serenity. I’m heading back to a regular day job again (but don’t worry, I’ll still be storytelling on the side).

As a friend put it, “Congratulations! And I’m sorry.” Haha, indeed.

All in all, it’s been a wildly successful sabbatical and such a boon to my being and my life.

I have gotten to extend myself in so many good ways:

• First and foremost was simply having the space physically and mentally to decompress and expand after many years of work and career pursuit, most recently in a rather harsh workplace. Taking this break allowed me to get space away from those pressures, live off the clock (it is positively Elysian to be able to just enjoy time with your friends without worrying about what you have to run off to next²), sleep without worrying about morning meetings or deliverables due, and eventually even lose the feeling of distinction between weekdays and weekends. I’m not the first to express this, but although we might think of our timekeeping and calendars as facts of reality, they’re not.

• With my ample new free time, I was able to dive into my creative interests, improving my artistic abilities and learning about new areas. More on this below.

• Separation from the career grind allowed me to reflect on and take on a different way of living. Partly, this is a result of personal growth and changing priorities as a result of getting older and having accumulated more miles on my soles, notches on my belt, and scars on my skin. But I also think that if I hadn’t taken this break and carved out the mental space and lifestyle room for possibility to grow, I might have stayed in the same tracks I was on. And my goals were noble, but my life is better, better rounded, more interesting, for branching out.

• Finally, I believe people are contextual, with much of our behavior dependent on circumstances. With the freedom to exist in more and different contexts than I used to, I’ve gotten to experience more modes of myself, and am glad I get to carry those forward.

And to be clear, the end of the sabbatical doesn’t mean the end of this newsletter or my storytelling, though the pace of updates may slow down.

A Sabbatical By The Numbers

And now a brief interlude with fun stats from my career break. Who doesn’t love fun stats?

• Months Taken: 8

• Coffees Taken: 0

• Siestas Taken: 568³

• Actions Taken: 239,011⁴

• Advice Taken: lots, much appreciated, from generous veterans of the comics scene

• Mis Taken: no, you!

The author holding a copy of Phased in a comic shop.

Graphic Storytelling Success

At the beginning of sabbatical, this is what I set out to do. And that’s basically what I did, with some very fruitful differences. I deepened my drawing and painting skills, but did only a little bit of cartooning, while instead taking the graphic storytelling project way further than I’d conceived at the start.

The graphic short story I intended to write and illustrate (Phased) ended up growing as a project far beyond just self-publishing my story, into exploring being an independent author and learning about the creative and business sides of the enterprise.

1. Phased has had a more positive, wider reception than I anticipated when I started the project, including from long-time comic shop owners and managers.⁵ Some people beyond just my friends seem to be buying it in local stores (thank you to whoever you are for supporting small, local, independent artists)⁶, and the UK’s Victoria & Albert Museum National Art Library even purchased a copy for their comics and magazines collection.

2. On the business side of things, I did enough learning by doing this year that my application to be an exhibitor at the Short Run Comix Festival was accepted, and I hope to see you in November if you’ll be in Seattle! Find me wherever the table for “William Chen” ends up being in the layout.

3. Going through the process of creating, publishing, and promoting the book—and enjoying it—has laid the groundwork for me to keep storytelling on the side. Because of how well this project has gone and how interesting and fun it has been to do, I feel good about my ability to keep doing it at a slower pace while holding down a day job.

Speaking of continuing to tell graphic stories, I’ve been getting all the development and planning stages of my next story done before my new job starts so that it’ll be easier for me to just jump into executing pages at that time.

Be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss when I start publishing pages!

Why Not “Go For It” Full-Time?

If I enjoyed it so much, and seem to have made a promising start, why not “go for it” full-time? This merits its own post (and actually, I’ve had the seed of a post sitting in the drafts section for months now as a marker), so look for it to come soon. Suffice it to say that the odds are not in your (my, anyone regular person’s) favor. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still worth pursuing the craft and self expression with little or no expectation of gaining a popular audience.

Sabbatical Made Me A Better Community Member

Sabbatical made me a better community member—or maybe sabbatical allowed me to be a better community member. Let me explain.

I noted above that sabbatical gave me the freedom to experience more modes of myself. Not having a regular full-time job, especially one that was intellectually very involved with mental responsibility that followed me after hours, and intentionally being in a career break (I’m making this distinction since I basically had the job of “independent author/artist” during my sabbatical, but wasn’t going after it with the intensity of needing it to provide a living wage), freed me from feeling like I needed to prioritize work above all.

Between a busy job and having to do all my own food prep and cooking (allergies), much of my time day to day was “spoken for” and it was difficult to trade convenience for more time due to my inability to rely on prepared foods when needed or desired. (And there are other “life maintenance” activities (cleaning, errands, personal finance) and taking care of body and mind (exercise, reading, making art, sleeping)).

I’m guessing this is also true for others, as found in this well-known psych study, but being “busy” tends to make me feel like what I’m doing is important and I need to focus on what I need to do. It also makes me protective of what free time I do have around those spoken-for blocks.

On the other hand, during my career break, when my days were largely unscheduled and I was free to push on my creative projects when I wanted and break when I wanted, I noticed several things changed for me:

1. With much more time and leisure on my hands, I became more interested in the people around me. With more mental space, I felt more continuity with the world and beings and things around me.

2. No longer having the 8a-5p or 6p hours taken up by work, plus needing to get home and cook to refuel feed myself, I felt freer to attend that interesting talk across town or volunteer at that event.

3. My friends noticed that my spirits were lighter (“Sabbatical looks good on you,” as one friend told me), and it seemed to me that clerks in stores were also more positive with me. I’m sure I looked happier and spoke in a lighter tone, which tends to invite positive interaction more.

4. I, too, noticed that my spirits were lighter and that I evolved to a softer stance toward other people. Though, I think partly this is also due to getting older and how that tends to come with a change in one’s orientation from building up your own experience and accomplishments outward toward community, as I wrote a little about in this post. But another part of it is getting a view outside the career grind that I was in, and having the room to see a different vision for myself.⁷

With the return of a full-time day job, my schedule will fill up again and I won’t be able to be so free as I’ve been during this break. But I’ve gotten to change and grow during sabbatical, too, and am also in a new phase of my life with a different balance and priorities, so I won’t just be going back to the way things were.

Closing Thoughts

The way that our societal system works, putting people constantly on the edge of survival and forcing them to stick to jobs despite poor work conditions enables bad behavior by those with power and results in worse outcomes for everyone since it makes it harder for people to push back.

It also means that most people don’t have much opportunity to imagine and explore a better way of living.

I am very fortunate that I had the resources saved up to step out of the well-worn grooves and take this break. (Sadly not forever.) I recognize that taking a break from the grind is difficult for most of us, and the constant feeling of precarity makes it hard to take the leap even for those with the means.

But if you ever have or can create the opportunity to take a break from the career, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so.

The final image from Phased, showing the protagonist on a park bench, looking at clouds.

Post-Credits Scene

What would an “unsuccessful” sabbatical look like? I paused a bit using the word “successful” since I’ve taken a step away from the cult of productivity that pervades our culture. I’m still someone who loves learning things, doing and creating, training and improving, but am more balanced with relaxing and down time without feeling like I “should” be doing something else.

I think an unsuccessful sabbatical would be one where you failed to actually break out of/away from your job and career groove. I remember hearing about an acquaintance who didn’t even get one month into their sabbatical before cutting it short and heading back to work. A former coworker of mine joked that I wouldn’t last a week (boy were they wrong).

I used to think that I was someone who’d probably never retire and always be interested in working on the problems that my career focused on. That was probably true of who I was back then, but most of us change over time, and this sabbatical has shown me that I would thrive in “retirement” with plenty of projects I want to pursue.

1. “Sabbatical” seems like it describes career breaks that are supported in some way by your employer (maybe paid, maybe just health care, but you keep your job at the end in any case). So “career break” is probably more accurate in my case, but “sabbatical” sounds nice and “career break” sounds like you’re piecing together words to describe something?

Also maybe it’s just me, but I feel like people often take sabbaticals to pursue different projects, versus “just” relaxing and taking a “break”?

2. Actually, this is kind of what The Good Place’s vision of heaven was. I kind of agree.

3. Ok, I didn’t take more than one siesta every day of this sabbatical (but I did on some days! and none on other days). But we really need to import the siesta custom to America.

4. Ok, I made this number up, too. There’s no methodology, but wow there was a lot to do to upskill myself for the creative work and the business work and then doing the things.

5. I thought I was going to publish my story to the sound of crickets, and that I’d end up having to give away copies of my first small print run to get people to read it. Well, it is free on the website.

6. Also, huge thanks to my friends and family, who’ve been so supportive of my creative work.

7. My experience from this sabbatical shows me that I will definitely not be one of those people who flounder in retirement, not knowing what to do.