Meaningful work — and we are all allowed to define this in a way that makes sense to us individually — is very important. I had to think about and reconcile what it meant to leave a career that I had worked so hard to achieve, and that had so much of my identity wrapped in it.
I had to come to terms with how my identity as a writer was coming in second to my life as a VP, even though writing felt more significant to me. While I left the company I was working at for seven years on good terms, the truth was that I was ready to move on. The brand I helped build was ready for a fresh eye, and I also increasingly felt that I was not aligned with senior leadership.
What I had to figure out for myself was if I finally wanted to pivot away from a tech gig or go out on the market and find something new in professional or cloud services.
Over time, I found a way to manage both my day job and writing on the side. I said no to everything that was non-essential. I built a barrier around my personal time that was impenetrable by family events, the need to exercise, household chores, and friends.
I'm embarrassed to admit that, at the peak, I was spending $800 a month on outsourcing things like house cleaning and laundry, and that does not even include my Instacart, GrubHub, and Drizly bills. My husband, who also works in tech, traveled over 130,000 miles last year on close to 100 flights, so he was not available to help out much with these chores.
Money was something that had become easy for us, at a certain point.
What I need was time to pursue my writing. There was the time I protected, and there was time I could buy. In a way, it worked: I did get those three books done and landed a promotion to SVP. Yet, I also had to force myself to ask if the status quo of balancing all of this — and hanging on by a thread emotionally — was really worth it in the long term.