As I type this, I’m enjoying coffee and an amazing breakfast sandwich at Kitchen Sink Food + Drink in Portland, OR (shout out to women owned businesses!). On my to do list today was:
- Sleep in
- Walk the dogs
- Yoga with Adriene
- Breakfast: Chorizo egg sando, coffee and most importantly, a stout with a miso brown butter cookie
It has been one of the best days I’ve had in a long time. I do intend on working for probably 4-5 hours, but still, I’m doing it on my own terms.
Welcome to semi-retirement
After my burnout epiphany, I made the decision to cut back on work at the end of 2017. I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable, so it was time to take charge.
The overachiever that I am, I had it all planned out – I was going to take every other Wednesday off, starting February 14th, Valentine’s day. What a great act of self love! I would transition into semi-retirement – down to an average of 40 hours a week from 55-60.
It was going to be amazing… in 6 weeks.
In the meantime, the cold and flu season heightened. I was seeing more and more patients a day, one of whom died from the flu. The paperwork started to mount PLUS prior authorizations for medications started to roll in. If you don’t know what a prior authorization is, consider yourself lucky. It’s the bane of all doctors’ existence.
I became more and more fragmented. I couldn’t stop myself from procrastinating, and instead watched awkward puppy videos to take mental health breaks in between patients. Of course, there is no reward in procrastination, so I ended up paying for it at the end of the work day.
It continued circling the drain until finally last week, I started to implode inward from utter dread while looking at the next day’s schedule. I thought to myself, “What if I just called in tomorrow?? I can pretend to be sick… enough people have coughed in my face to make that story convincing.”
As I was fantasizing about how I would do that (texting vs actually calling in with a really bad fake cough?), I realized how silly that was. I knew what needed to be done, but had been stalling because I wouldn’t allow myself to commit. Before I could stop myself, I marched into my office manager’s office and declared,
“I need to start my every other Wednesday off next week. I need to cut back now.”
She looked at me for a second that felt like an eternity and said, “OK. Let me block off your schedule.”
No push back, no questions asked. It was just done.
What was holding me back?
I could have done this much sooner. I should have done this starting the beginning of the year. But I didn’t.
Why?
Was it because I had to overachieve and over-plan the crap out of my exit strategy to make it a perfectly epic ending to my burnout story? I mean, how great would that have been to be my act of self-love on Valentine’s day? But, in the meantime I completely ignored the fact that my situation was becoming more and more dire – the actual opposite of self-love.
Was it because I just “couldn’t”? There were so many excuses. They’d have to reschedule my patients. The medical assistants’ schedule was already set – I couldn’t mess that up. I had already committed to my epic plan as previously stated and told people about it! I couldn’t change that now!
The truth is, it was ME
I was holding myself back, pure and simple. No one was asking me to work more. In fact, my partners at work actually told me not to increase my hours because I was going to burn out. And, they had been telling me repeatedly over the holiday season to take time off for Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s, which of course I didn’t do. My last real vacation in which I didn’t log in to work to check in on things for a couple of hours a day hasn’t been since March last year, almost 11 months ago. J told me to cut back after the beginning of the year, but I wanted to hold out.
I wanted this picture perfect finish that I then could hold up as a personal triumph.
Stupid.
What I ended up doing was backing myself into a corner until I wanted to crawl into a hole and not emerge until someone told me I didn’t have to work anymore.
It turns out that someone was me.
Just say no
I’ll be honest… I’m saying no to a lot of money by cutting back. A lot of money that can go toward paying off my $150,000 left in student loans, toward a new car that doesn’t have the upholstery falling off of it or even toward my next dream vacation to Australia.
But this allows me to say yes to cooking dinner at the end of the day with J because I’ll get home at a reasonable hour, yes to hangouts on the weekends with friends because I won’t be spending them catching up on work, and finally, yes to spending time on my health and well-being.
Saying no to things that don’t serve me opens up opportunities to say yes to things that do.
Time is the currency of life
But, once you spend it, you don’t get it back. I have the rest of my life to earn money.
In the long run, burning out now is not going to help me in the future. I won’t have the youth of my 30’s to spend when I’m 70, all alone because I’ve alienated the people in my life due to being miserable over those 40 years. My able body today won’t carry me over mountainous ridges in the Pacific Northwest, walk down European cobblestone streets or paddle into an underground river in the Philippines when I’m 80. All the money in the world won’t buy health or youth.
I won’t be able to pay my way out of end of life regrets.
Embrace the burnout
As I’m scrambling my way out of the hole I’ve dug for myself, I’m actually starting to feel grateful for this experience. The discomfort has snapped my focus back to what’s important. It’s forcing a brutally honest self assessment to call myself out on my bullshit.
Today, that involves admitting saying I can’t really meant I won’t.
I can’t because [insert excuse here] has been a mantra that has been holding me back from making important changes in my life. We’re really good at making excuses – they even seem reasonable! But really, when things are under your control and you say I can’t, really what you’re saying is I won’t.
A beautiful thing happens when you realize you’re saying I won’t. It allows you to break through all the excuses and assess if you’re still comfortable with your situation as it stands.
- I can’t cut back on work vs I won’t cut back on work.
- I can’t find the time to exercise vs I won’t find the time to exercise.
- I can’t stop eating junk vs I won’t stop eating junk
- I can’t stop wasting time on puppy videos vs I won’t stop wasting time on puppy videos
I won’t puts the ball back in your court, and now it’s on you to decide if you’re going to just leave it that way or do something. I wasn’t willing to forfeit control over my life, so here I am in my semi-retirement, enjoying my stout and the best damn cookie of my life on a Wednesday.
What will you say no to, in order to say yes to something that serves you?
How will changing I can’t to I won’t allow you to take control?
As someone that enjoys taking a “sabbatical” (aka 3 month vacation from work) every few years, a lot of folks need to realize it never hurts to ask. When my friends ask me how is it possible for me to take vacations like that, I just reply “I asked”. If you need to reduce your hours at a job, or get extended time off, just ask. More often than not you’ll be surprised when your boss says “sure, no problem.” And if your boss says no, well you haven’t lost anything and at least know where you stand.
I think we just don’t even realize that’s an option! We’re pretty much all told we’re going to work a 9-5 job until we retire at 70, so we totally buy into that schedule. Except it’s never just 9-5, and when we get to retirement age, it’ll probably be 75 at that point. You are obviously an outside of the box thinker.. maybe you should start hosting Youtube videos on Life Lessons with Vacationer =)