Good morning!
It is a beautiful Sunday here: the sun is slowly creeping up on the lingering moon, and the cypress trees are part-olive, part-lime as day draws a line between dawn.
This is my first newsletter on the topic of my weekly escapades, and right now I am thinking I will send these out on Sundays, when your inbox is quiet and you have a few extra snuggly minutes with your favorite coffee. If you don’t have your coffee yet, I’ll wait.
Ready? Good.
Six Months to Go
On Wednesday, September 18, I had my six month anniversary of quitting my job. I spent a majority of the day reflecting on what I have learned, what I want to do with the next six months, are my daily decisions matching my goals, etc. I celebrated my past version of self - who was so scared to resign, but did it anyways - by writing poetry at a local coffee shop, going for a walk along the river, & trying a new restaurant for lunch. I ended the day with a doctor’s appointment and a new diagnosis, which I talk about below. These six months have been the best gift I could have ever given myself. If you ever have the chance to even take a 1 week break between jobs, it is so worth it.
Health is Wealth
Background
While I try not to linger on my chronic illnesses (because what a drag, amirite?), healing was the number one goal for my year off, and so my story would be incomplete without talking about it.
My health has been a large focus of August and September, and the reason I have not been traveling very much, except for 12 glorious days in a cabin in the mountains.
There have been a few lingering issues that I needed to explore this year that I didn’t have time for back when I was still working…and also weren’t necessarily the main problems, so I just lived with them the best I could. There were also a few issues that developed right around the time I quit my job in the spring that needed follow-up:
Sleep
Memory, attention, & focus
Autoimmune allergy to my platelets (which are the body’s clotting mechanism)
Ongoing allergies
Old injury to my right ankle
As anyone who has tried to see a specialist will know, it can be 3-12 months before you can see the doctor. The reason all my appointments fell in August and September…is because I made the appointments back in March - May.
And, as anyone who has tried to see a specialist will know, it’s not just one appointment. There is the first intake appointment, then the appointment(s) for testing, then the appointment to discuss the results, and then the appointment(s) to follow up on your new treatment plan. If you have chronic illness, seeing doctors can unintentionally and undesirably become your entire life. Between August and September, in the six weeks I have been home, I will have had thirty appointments:
Hematologist: 3
Sleep doctor: 3 (plus 2-day sleep study)
Psychiatrist: 2
Neuropsychiatrist: 2
Primary care physician: 1
Dermatologist: 2
Immunologist/allergist: 6
Physical therapist: 8
Energy healer: 3
The intrusion of medical appointments into my daily life is something I am actively fighting. I have decided to pause on certain doctors / treatments (such as for my Lyme disease) because I believe that by focusing on my joy, rest, and holistic health (e.g., fix my eating habits, which is still a work in progress), my immune system will come online and things will resolve themselves. If not, I will deal with it once this year is over. For now, I am just focusing on the things I had been somewhat ignoring to make sure I have all the information I need to go back to work in Spring 2025.
Onto the News
Well, that was longer than I intended, and we won’t have to talk about it again. We will just put that aside and move onto the new diagnosis I got this week. Diagnoses are a mixed bag - you finally know what’s wrong with you, but…there’s something wrong with you.
I had a 2-day sleep study in mid-September, and I found out I have (drum roll) Idiopathic Hypersomnia, which is a fancy way of saying excessive daytime sleepiness - understatement of the year! Basically, I want to nap all day long and when I do, there is zero impact on reducing tiredness.
I started a new medicine for it on Friday, and it’s been slowly kicking in. Today, I woke up for the first time in years without an alarm at 7:30 in the morning, and I was wide awake and happy. For perspective, I would sometimes cry when driving to work because I felt so terrible that I didn’t know how I would make it through the day. While it is still early, I am very optimistic that this new medicine will return my life and myself to normal.
The other good news is that the physical therapy I started at the beginning of this month has been so helpful, and for the first time in over ten years, I am living almost entirely free from pain. I am able to walk farther and live better, and I am so grateful.
After September, I am done with health stuff (hopefully!), and the rest of this year off will be travel, travel, travel!
Sabbatical Savvy
I will have this section in each newsletter and list lessons from the week that you can apply to your life, sabbatical or no:
I spent some time this week doing the unsexy work of budgeting for my remaining six months off. I discovered I am halfway through my sabbatical and also halfway through my budget - good job, me! I had put my sabbatical funds in a high-interest savings account to both isolate it from my long-term savings and also earn money on it while keeping it liquid, and I was shocked - shocked! - to see that I earned enough money on interest to completely cover my October travels to Scotland and New York. This is your sign* to get a high-yield savings account and get that ~5% interest!
*not financial advice disclaimer language blah blah
Yesterday, I took the dogs for a walk in a small shaded park with a lil’ creek running through it, and I noticed a couple sitting on a blanket, reading books and having a picnic. I immediately added this to my list of “things I want to do for fun." A big portion of this year has been re-learning how to seek joy after the 2020 fiasco and my period of illness. A question I have been asking myself, which you can ask yourself too, is: “How can I prioritize fun today?” If you’re like me & need a reminder, you can put it in your phone as an alarm to pop up every day.
Labels - who needs ‘em, right? Well, when I first resigned from my job, I felt very lost, because it turned out it was pretty much my only identity. What a thing to admit! I sat in the discomfort of that fact these last few months, and realized a few things:
Labels are completely made up by our brain / ego, and are not real
Getting rid of labels means you have the freedom to evolve every single second of your life
If you decide to self-label, choose labels that are not dependent on external things (like: researcher), but internal things (like: kind).
Goodbye for Now
Speaking of labels, one I have reclaimed for myself this week is poet. This is a story for next week, but in short, I have been working on several creative projects, and am nearly finished with a poetry book (!!!). I have been prioritizing writing every day this week, and for the first time, I shared a poem on social media, which was kind of scary, but this year is all about moving through fear. As a perfectionist, I have a tendency to “workshop” my writing endlessly, but I am pushing myself to clean it up and then let it go.
I wrote another poem this morning while waiting for the microwave to ding, which I am sharing here first:
And so, my darlings, I will sign off for now. Feel free to send feedback - was this too long? Do you want to see other content? Is once a week the right frequency? Feel free to message me. Be sure to prioritize fun today & do one thing that makes you giggle.
Life is short - have fun! xoxo
Alicia