After seven years, I finally decided to take another sabbatical. This time for 10 weeks and I’m halfway through it as of now. It’s the second one I’ve ever taken.
The first happened during my final semester of college when I studied abroad in South Korea. That sabbatical was fun, exciting, and included everything I had always dreamed of doing. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
This sabbatical I’m currently on is completely different.
A creative sabbatical is an intentional pause from constant output and career pressure so you can rest, reflect, and reconnect with your creativity. For me, that didn’t mean leaving a corporate job or traveling the world. It meant removing the pressure of my career to learn how to create again.
Sabbaticals are longer than vacations. People usually take them when they need an extended amount of time off of work for all kinds of reasons.
For this sabbatical, I didn’t plan it in advance. I didn’t have money saved or the financial stability most people have when they decide to take time away from work. I took it because I felt like my life was too unbearable for me to keep going.
I spent years in survival mode, repeating the same cycles and trying to achieve my career goals by the time I turned 30. When that didn’t happen, I lost my spark. I also lost my trust in my creative voice.
I needed a break because I felt like I couldn’t figure out how to solve anything in my life. I had more questions than I had answers. I had back-to-back panic attacks and no sense of direction.
The First Time I Stepped Away Changed My Life
During my first sabbatical in 2019, I finished my final semester of college with a bang. I studied abroad in my favorite country, South Korea, and spent two months exploring a completely different environment.
For the first time, I felt free to become someone new.
Before I left, I promised myself I would get out of my comfort zone, try as many new things as possible, meet people, and build my confidence. I did exactly that and felt amazing.
I traveled across the country and kept my schedule full almost every day. I didn’t have to worry about bills, career deadlines, or the pressure to figure out my entire future. My only responsibilities were to learn, explore, and enjoy my experiences.
I had struggled with my mental health before going abroad, but those struggles felt completely manageable at that time. I was dealing with the normal uncertainty of becoming an adult and trying to figure out who I wanted to be.
That experience gave me confidence, freedom, and direction for where I wanted to go in life. It also inspired me to create The Glow Up Queen.
But after I returned home, life slowly became harder. Each year brought more pressure, disappointment, and uncertainty about where my career was going.
My Career Never Became What I Imagined
After college, I still believed I would eventually build the career I wanted. I was ambitious, willing to learn, and always looking for ways to improve my skills.
But after returning from South Korea, I went back to a job I wasn’t passionate about. The pay was low, the commute was exhausting, and I was trying to survive in one of the most expensive regions in the country.
I thought I would keep applying until I found something better. Then COVID hit, the job market became even more difficult, and I stayed in the job for too long.
Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit and started The Glow Up Queen.
For the next year, I poured all my time into creating and building the brand. I was so excited to finally have something I owned completely. They were my ideas, my articles, and my story. I finally felt excited about work again.
But I also needed money.
So I shifted my attention away from The Glow Up Queen and back to getting a job. I didn’t want to go back to my previous industry, which was nonprofits. I wanted to pursue a marketing career in tech. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, the center of innovation and opportunity.
I thought that if I worked hard enough, improved my skills, and put myself in the right rooms, something or someone would eventually open the doors for me.
It didn’t.
For five years, I kept pushing myself to apply for more and more marketing jobs and faced the same rejection over and over again. I enrolled in marketing programs, studied content marketing, improved my resume, updated my LinkedIn profile and portfolio, attended many networking events, and learned how to use AI.
Every time I thought I had nailed it, I ended up in the same place I started.
By 31, I had still never earned more than $50,000 in a year. Crazy, right?! How can someone who went to UC Berkeley and learned all the skills they needed still not get a job that meets the cost of living? Heck, I wasn’t even able to get a minimum-wage job.
I started wondering whether I would ever be able to afford my own apartment, build the life I wanted, or catch up financially. That fear leaked into every part of my life.
I began having frequent panic attacks and my energy disappeared. I would take naps throughout the day and still wake up exhausted. I wanted the stability to recover, but I also needed enough energy to keep pursuing stability.
I didn’t know how to escape that loop.
I Kept Changing Paths Because I Needed Something to Work
When content marketing in tech didn’t work out, I expanded my search to almost any marketing role in tech.
And when that didn’t work out either, I looked at roles adjacent to marketing. Then freelancing. Then other ways I might be able to turn my skills into income.
I thought with each new direction, I had finally found my path. But that was not the case.
The final straw was when I started considering becoming a workshop host. I felt overwhelmed by the idea of starting something new from scratch again.
I stopped myself and thought, “I need a break.”
I had spent so much time jumping around that I could no longer sit and reflect on my direction. I just kept carrying more stress from the previous disappointments. I felt scattered and my mind was cloudy. I had lost the plot.
That was when I knew I needed to stop searching for another career direction and go internal instead. I needed to clean up what was going on in my head.
I decided to return my focus to The Glow Up Queen as well. It was the one path that had consistently brought me joy and that I felt like I had a meaningful contribution to before all the pressure.
Related Article:
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Returning to The Glow Up Queen Wasn’t as Easy as I Expected
Once I decided to focus on The Glow Up Queen again, I thought the hard part was over.
I thought I could just sit down, create a content plan, and start publishing articles left and right. I had so many ideas that I thought I could just do it.
But every time I scheduled a writing session, the words wouldn’t come out.
Instead, years of thoughts and regrets rushed in at once. I knew I had something to say, but I couldn’t organize my thoughts clearly enough for my readers. The more I struggled to write, the more overwhelmed and ashamed I felt.
I kept thinking about how much time I had spent pursuing other paths that never worked out. And also how far The Glow Up Queen would’ve been if I had never been inconsistent.
That regret made it even harder to begin.
I decided to just push through it. I wrote article after article, but rarely finished them. I felt like I had to make up for all the years of my inconsistency. That was too much pressure for one article.
The longer I spent without publishing, the more pressure I put on myself over my return. Eventually, I stopped trusting my creative voice.
I questioned whether I was capable of scaling The Glow Up Queen to be my full-time job and whether my content would help me gain followers. I spent so much time focusing on stability in other things that I no longer knew how to build my own platform.
I also felt guilty for disappearing from my audience.
I wondered whether they would still trust me and if I could reconnect with them. Or if I had to rebuild everything from scratch.
But writing wasn’t the only thing I was avoiding.
The part that scared me the most was showing up on camera again. Video is one of the top ways you grow as a Content Creator these days, but being highly visible makes me feel vulnerable.
I had gone through so many difficult experiences that talking about them on camera would be incredibly difficult. Would they see the sadness in my eyes? Is it okay if I’m not like the picture-perfect YouTuber / TikToker who lives in a high-rise apartment, is always doing something fun, shops too much, and is super bubbly?
Showing up on camera meant letting other people hear my voice, see my face, and ask questions about my life. I still don’t know how I’m going to get over my fear of being on video, but I know it’s important for me to overcome this.
There needs to be more people showing realistic glow ups for those who feel behind in life and are not financially well off. My life right now is closer to my audience than most creators. That is my unique advantage.
This is one of the reasons why I needed this creative sabbatical. I’m trying to learn how to feel safe expressing myself again. Not just as a writer, but on all platforms.
I Tried to Solve a Creative Problem with Productivity
At first, I thought the issue was that I needed create a better system.
I created content plans, scheduled writing sessions, and pushed myself to produce more. I believed that if I became super disciplined like all the Content Creators were saying, I could make up for all the years that I had lost.
That didn’t work. It only added more pressure.
It wasn’t until recently that I learned my problem is not productivity. It’s that I had spent so long treating everything like it had to be a complete transformation. I needed to grow my audience, make money and prove that I hadn’t wasted my time.
Creativity is meant to be how you express yourself, not only about performance. I focused too much on the results that I was not focusing on enjoying the process.
I didn’t need to time-block, automate things, or organize everything. I needed to rebuild trust in myself.
Why I Needed a Creative Sabbatical
I needed this creative sabbatical because I could no longer hear myself clearly.
For years, I kept reacting to every problem in my life like everything was urgent. Find a job, make more money, learn another high in-demand skill, try a different path, or create more content. Everything had to be solved as quickly as possible.
I was always in survival mode that any time I had briefly stopped to think, I realized wow I abandoned some things that I used to love.
I knew it was time to stop searching for the next solution and become comfortable not immediately jumping in to solve a crisis. I needed to calm my nervous system so my problems don’t run me.
Once I was able to calm my nervous system, that’s when I could start focusing on my creativity and questioning my real direction.
What kind of creator do I want to become? What kind life values do I want to have?
What does The Glow Up Queen look like when it reflects my real life instead of like those Content Creators with the most aesthetic videos/articles?
During this Creative Sabbatical, I’m not abandoning The Glow Up Queen. I’m actually working on the behind-the-scenes practicing how to create content again. I’m not focusing on money. I’m focusing on having fun creating again.
I’m changing the way I relate to my work. Before I’m a marketer, a content creator, worker, whatever…I’m an artist. I approach life with excitement to create. Performance and results are after I experience life to the fullest.
I realized that if the first thing I think about in the morning is work, then work has become my identity. I don’t want work to be my identity.
I’m letting myself explore ideas without immediately seeing how I can make more money, grow my followers, or improve metrics.
I experience life first and work follows after. I don’t live to work.
I still want to become a successful full-time Content Creator, but I don’t want to build it out of desperation.
I want to build it on a softer life even when everything is falling apart outside and I have no control. The thing I have control over is my emotions and how I handle things.
I don’t try to solve every problem at once anymore. I take it one day at a time.
What I Hope to Rebuild During This Time
The biggest thing I want to rebuild is trust in my creative voice.
I want to stop questioning everything before getting started. I want to write what I’m passionate about instead of wondering how I’m going to make money off of it to improve my stability.
I’ll still write about trends, but I want to create more content on what’s happening in my life and advice I have for people going through the same thing.
Another thing is I need to learn how to stop being overly ambitious and start finishing my projects. I have to scale down with the amount of things that I want to do.
It really was built on fear that I’m missing out from years of being behind. But if I continue with what I was doing, I will just add more years of being behind.
Publishing one article is not going to change my life. But it is going to make me feel more joy because I created something that is mine.
The third thing I hope to build is becoming comfortable being seen again. I want to show up on camera before I’m fully confident about showing up on camera. A lot of glow up content is showing quick transformations.
I need to show what a glow up looks like over the course of several years because most people go through this kind of thing and feel alone. It’s not “oh let me go to the beauty salon and get my hair done, do my nails, get a facial, and start shopping for a new wardrobe” like many creators show.
A glow up is a character transformation. It’s not only external and it’s not quick.
I want to show up creating content even while I’m still figuring things out just like my audience. I want to show them that I don’t have it all together and that I’m trying as well.
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I’m Learning That Pausing is Not the Same as Giving Up
I felt late to everything in life. I was late to financial stability, living on my own, building my dream career, dating, traveling the world, and having a solid friend group.
So I felt like taking a break was a bad idea. There was so much I wanted to catch up on.
I thought if I just put in more work, I could have all these things. But even with all that work, nothing changed. Everyone else was still moving forward.
That made me realize that hard work doesn’t mean it’s going to accelerate your life and that it’s okay to pause.
I’m learning I don’t have to work on every single thing in my life at the same time to hit all my goals as fast as possible. I can just focus on one or two main things for the season and leave it at that.
I couldn’t even tell you what’s going to happen next month, but I’m learning how to enjoy small experiences in my life when my future feels uncertain.
I don’t know how slow or fast The Glow Up Queen will grow after this Creative Sabbatical. I’m just going to focus on things I’m passionate about.
Look out for part 2 after I’m done with this sabbatical.
