I am coming up on a year in two days, quest-type sabbatical.
I was extremely burnt out when I was laid off, and while I had done a lot of work on myself, a lot had piled up and I knew I couldn't job hunt in good faith. I'm autistic as well so it would completely exhaust me on a good day.
I took six months to even just start doing 'normal'-ish things. I spent over a thousand hours processing long-overdue unprocessed emotions (i.e. decades old, for some of them), and working on accepting certain parts of myself that I hid behind the noise of work.
I was able to come to terms with accepting my own autism. I was able to drop a mental health diagnosis after much personal work. I made a side project that got a lot of good attention and that I have great hopes for. And after just a year, I'm finally able to just start doing little social step things -- like going to a bar for 20-30 minutes just to take in the ambiance. Noise for me is maybe 5-8x impactful compared to the average person due to the sensory sensitivity of autism (could be 10, but building a good estimate is hard), so even with nothing else on the schedule it takes me a good few hours to amp up to (and a day or two to cool down from and decompress/process).
I would never have been able to do that with work and all of the demands. In fact, I had to bury the hypersensitivity so deep as a survival mechanism that I didn't think I felt anything sensorially too strongly, but I also felt constantly panicked and dead inside.
Now that I'm more in tune with myself, I'll just sometimes, not always, and even more rarely look at some things, even small negative things, and just feel a leap of joy that I even get the chance to be alive to experience it. For me, it was the beauty of all of the red lights in a merging traffic jam on the freeway. That euphoria is hard to capture.
It's a lot of work and my retirement account is chomped, but I know the kind of work I want to do that lets me use my autism as a strength and gives me enough time on the side to learn how to keep innoculating against normally overstimulating environments -- it gets better with exposure and time as the brain starts deciding that certain things are no longer "new information".
The thing that people forget is that there's an opportunity cost with _not_ taking 3 months 6, or a year+ to work on yourself.
It's an exponentially impactful thing.
Investing now means you have the rest of your life to reap the benefits from what you learn. It can drastically shape the course of your life.
It's all work in the end, but good and uncomfortable work on self. I still am work-addicted at heart, but as I keep working on the trauma bonds that hold me into that particular coping mechanism, I can watch, almost entirely live, the future that I'm likely to attempt to head towards.
I've made a lot of progress as a person but there's no reason to work in a holding pattern forever. I have so much to learn and constantly feel like I'm wasting my time and at the beginning of my journey. And I still suffer a lot, too, but that's a work in progress for now. That said, I wouldn't trade how I _feel_ right now for a consistent pattern of misery.
I never, ever want to go back to that again, if I can help it. And I'd like to avoid having values to at draw me towards that way of living again.
I know this had a few purple prosey leanings at points, it's been a good journey. Thank you for reading this far if you did, and please feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
