Sabbatical Diaries #1: The Decision Wasn't Dramatic
Nothing was wrong enough to leave. Everything was wrong enough to stay.
The Life I Was Supposed to Want
People often assume that major life changes begin with dramatic moments.
A breakup.
A medical emergency.
Getting fired.
A screaming match with a boss.
Some explosive, cinematic event that forces a person to change course.
That wasn’t my story.
The truth is far less exciting.
Before the sabbatical, my life looked good on paper.
I had a stable nursing job in a stable industry. I lived in the United States. I had my own apartment, my own car, and enough disposable income to afford occasional travel and a few luxuries. I had recently become a U.S. citizen, which meant I finally a strong passport that allows me to travel more easily than before.
To many people—especially those back home in the Philippines—I was living the dream.
And that was part of the problem.
Because when your life looks successful from the outside, it becomes much harder to admit that something isn’t working on the inside.
The Cracks Beneath the Surface
Looking back, the earliest warning sign was simple: I was always miserable.
I spent years trying to fix it.
I went to therapy.
I traveled.
I bought nice things.
I studied languages.
I worked out.
I meal planned.
I read books.
I played video games.
Every few months, I would discover a new solution that promised to make life feel lighter. And every few months, it failed. The misery would return.
Learning to Live for the Next Escape
Then there was the travel.
Whenever I came back from a trip, I would sink into a sadness that felt disproportionate to the situation. At first, I dismissed it as post-travel blues. But eventually I noticed the pattern.
Why was I always trying to escape?
And if I constantly wanted to escape my life, what did that say about the life I was escaping from?
Another realization arrived in smaller moments.
I began noticing how little control I had over my own time.
Something as simple as sleeping in was subject to another person’s approval because work started at a certain hour. Taking a trip required negotiation, requests, approvals, and waiting. The older I got, the stranger that felt.
Because what do you mean some dude behind a desk has the power to tell me when I can take a break?
Work isn’t inherently evil. Not all of us are born with a silver spoon and Papa’s trust fund. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was spending enormous amounts of energy maintaining a life I didn’t actually want.
Burnout wasn’t a single thing either.
It showed up physically through weight gain, hair loss, alcohol use, pre-diabetes, and hypothyroidism.
Emotionally, it showed up as irritability, depressive episodes, anger, and a persistent inability to enjoy things I used to enjoy.
Socially, it left me with plenty of acquaintances but very few people I felt I could truly lean on.
Mentally, it dulled parts of me I once valued. I used to read voraciously. I used to write more easily. I used to be curious. Now, I must admit, I can’t even start a blog post without some assistance from AI.
The version of myself that existed before nursing felt increasingly distant.
Yet despite all of this, I kept telling myself the same things.
“Everyone is tired.”
“I just need a vacation.”
“I should be grateful.”
“Maybe the answer isn’t to love the job. Maybe I just need to love the money the job provides.”
For a long time, those explanations worked.
Until Ecuador.
Ecuador Changes the Question
What made Ecuador different wasn’t the scenery.
It was the distance.
For the first time in a long time, I was far enough away from my daily routine to look at my life like an outsider.
While I was there, I received an invoice from a recent hospitalization and found myself checking work notifications and emails. Looking at those messages from thousands of miles away, I suddenly saw something I had normalized for years.
My life depended on someone else’s approval.
A manager could decide when I traveled, how long I traveled, and whether I traveled at all.
That realization hit me harder than I expected.
When I returned home, I felt the usual sadness. But this time, there was clarity underneath it.
I remember uploading photos from the trip and looking through older travel albums. What struck me wasn’t where I had gone.
It was how much time existed between those trips.
Months.
Sometimes years.
And I realized something: I didn’t want travel to be an occasional escape from life.
I wanted exploration to be part of life.
I wanted the mountain hike to be part of a weekend.
I wanted wandering through a market to be an ordinary morning.
That was the moment I understood that a vacation wasn’t enough anymore.
Ironically, I didn’t call it a sabbatical. I just knew I couldn’t continue exactly as I was. And I knew that it needed to happen now or it never will.
There Was No Breaking Point
People sometimes ask what the breaking point was.
Honestly, there wasn’t one. Just hundreds of micro-shits accumulating over years.
Work emails.
Management reminders.
Another year passing.
Looking at travel photos.
Watching friends build lives that seemed bigger than the one I was living.
Putting on my scrubs again.
And again.
And again.
The decision wasn’t made in a single day.
It was made every time I put on my scrubs.
From Fantasy to Planning
Eventually, the fantasy became research.
Research became planning.
Planning became action.
At first, I just plugged the best countries for solo female travelers. Then countries in Latin America.
Then digital nomad destinations.
Then cost-of-living calculations.
Then visa requirements.
Then housing.
At some point, I realized I wasn’t daydreaming anymore. I was building a plan.
The first real step was creating a teaching profile on Preply. In 2024, I got my TEFL certificate. At that time, I just wanted a “back-up plan”. Well, I guess I’ve always known in my gut that I will be leaving Nursing in the future. So I took the first step out last November.
And it was stressful.
But also, liberating.
And exciting.
And definitely terrifying. It still is. But now I can see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, and that gives me hope.
For the first time, I wasn’t just imagining another life. I was attempting to build one.
Why I Couldn’t Keep Going
If someone asks why I didn’t simply keep going, my answer is straightforward.
Because I was afraid that if I kept going, I would lose myself.
I had already lost pieces of my health, my energy, my curiosity, and my sense of wonder.
I wasn’t trying to find a new version of myself.
I was trying to recover the old one. The old me.
The Pamela who laughed more.
The Pamela who dreamed more.
The Pamela who still believed that life was something to experience, not merely endure.
The sabbatical began not because everything fell apart.
It began because everything stayed together for so long that I almost forgot who I was.