Back in June, I nearly lost my mind. I was burnt. The fuck. Out.
We had been running Women in America since July 2022 while I was also working full-time in global reproductive health, and that alone would have been plenty. Then the rest of my life started falling apart. My health began to fail. My dog got sick. The roof of my house sprung a massive leak. H&R Block had mangled my taxes so badly that the IRS came after me. I gained twenty pounds. My family stopped hearing from me. I was repeatedly getting guilt tripped from friends that I was never around. I was giving away everything I had and keeping almost none of it for myself.
I was miserable.
This is an unfortunately common refrain in activism. You care deeply about a cause, so you sacrifice everything for it, and then you start treating the sacrifice as proof that you care. I resisted admitting I had fallen into that trap for a long time. It took five friends, including my Women in America co-founder Pari, staging what was essentially an intervention to save me from myself. Every one of them said a version of the same thing: you are going to have nothing left to give this cause if you run yourself into the ground.
So I took a sabbatical.
Not from the 9-to-5, obviously, given the medical bills and my house that was actively raining inside. But I stepped away from Women in America for a few months to get some breathing room, to deal with the parts of my life I had been putting off, and to remember that I was a person before I was an activist. Eventually, to figure out whether I could come back to this work without destroying myself in the process.
Every one of them said a version of the same thing: you are going to have nothing left to give this cause if you run yourself into the ground.
The first Saturday of my sabbatical, I woke up without an alarm. I walked my dog, went to boxing for an hour, and answered a handful of emails to the new accountant untangling my IRS mess and the general contractor fixing my house. I walked to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop for lunch. Then I came home and read my book club book, “The Rose Code,” for a few hours. I went to bed at 9:30pm. I slept for eleven hours that night. It was, by any reasonable measure, an ordinary weekend in the life of a functional adult, and my body responded to it like I had been rescued from the depths of Hell.
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