I’ve been planning this sabbatical alone and I mean that in the most literal, operational, unromantic sense possible.
There is no partner sitting across the table from me while we compare visa options. There is no husband asking whether I remembered to cancel the electric bill. There is no wife taking over the spreadsheet when my brain is fried. There is no second income quietly absorbing the cost of a bad decision. There is no company relocation package, no employer paying for movers, temporary housing, immigration lawyers, or plane tickets. There is no sponsor. There is no family fund. There is no inheritance. There is no mysterious passive income arriving every month while I contemplate my next move from a café somewhere warm.
There is one nursing income, and that income belongs to me.
Which means every decision about this sabbatical has to pass through the same brain that is already tired from making decisions for a living.
Every Dollar is an Extra Shift
People hear “sabbatical” and, depending on their life, imagine something soft around the edges. Maybe someone saved enough money, booked a one-way ticket, put their things in storage, and decided to see what happens. Maybe someone’s husband got transferred overseas and they tagged along. Maybe they have a pension. Maybe they have investments. Maybe they have parents with a spare room waiting if the whole experiment turns into a flaming pile of shit.
Must be fucking nice.
For me, every purchase connected to this sabbatical requires an internal audit because money is never just money. Two hundred fifty dollars for a consultation with a CPA or immigration lawyer does not register in my head as simply $250.
It registers as one extra nursing shift.
One more twelve-hour shift clocking in while the world gets ready to tuck in, receiving report at 1900H, dealing with admissions, call bells, charting, doctors, patients, family members, discharge planning, and whatever fresh hell the hospital has invented that week.
Two hundred fifty dollars is one more day spent doing the very thing I am trying to get away from.
So when I book a lawyer consultation, I think about it.
When I hire someone to help with paperwork, I think about it.
When I pay for a document, a certification, a flight, luggage, insurance, or anything else that belongs to this sabbatical, I think about whether it is worth another shift of my life.
Other people might have the luxury of making a financial mistake and brushing it off because there is another income in the household, or a pension, or investments, or a spouse, or a family member who can help them recover. I do not have that margin, so I think about everything until I’m sick of hearing my own thoughts.
I Don’t Need Permission, I Need a Second Brain
When I say I wish I had someone to consult, I don’t mean I want permission. I am not looking for a man, a best friend, a parent, or a committee to approve what I am doing. I have spent enough of my life being told what I should do that I am not particularly interested in recreating that structure voluntarily.
What I want is a sounding board.
I want another competent adult sitting across from me who can listen to the plan and say, “Yes, that makes sense,” or, “Pamela, what the fuck are you doing?”
I want somebody who understands the cost of leaving a stable life to tell me whether I am thinking clearly or just shooting for the moon because I am pissed off and tired.
Unfortunately, and this may be one of my own flaws, I am extremely selective about whose advice I value.
My friends are wonderful people, but most of them are not useful planning partners for this specific thing because none of them have really done what I am trying to do.
Many of us have migrated. That is not unusual in my circle. We are Filipinos and half our national personality is apparently built around leaving the Philippines, sending balikbayan boxes home, and explaining to relatives why the exchange rate does not mean we are suddenly rich.
I have friends who moved countries. I have friends who left nursing.
I have friends who travel. I have friends who have reinvented their lives in all kinds of ways.
But I do not have many people around me who had what most Filipinos would call swerte and then voluntarily walked away from it because, in the stupidest and most oversimplified version of the truth, hindi ako masaya.
Because that is how the plan sounds when I explain it.
I have a career. I have a car. I earn U.S. dollars. I have a stable job. I have money. I have gold jewelry. I live in America.
And I am planning to leave all of that so I can wander around countries that, to a lot of Filipinos, sound like vaguely dangerous places from a Netflix documentary.
Ecuador?
Bolivia?
Colombia?
South America in general?
A lot of Filipinos know very little about that side of the world, and honestly, I do not really blame them. We grew up looking toward America, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Australia.
South America does not occupy much space in the average Filipino imagination unless somebody is talking about Miss Universe, boxing, cocaine, drug cartels, or some telenovela that got dubbed into Tagalog twenty years ago.
My more Americanized friends are not necessarily better because big ol’ fat America has a way of making every place outside feel like either a vacation destination or a geopolitical footnote.
So when I explain the sabbatical, there is always one question EVERYONE asks me:
Why would you leave all this?
And I understand the question.
But I just do not know how to answer it in a way that makes sense to someone who thinks having a stable life means you should automatically want to keep it.
The internet should theoretically solve this problem because there are endless expat groups, relocation groups, travel forums, retirement groups, digital nomad groups, women-traveling-alone groups, and every other possible variation of people who have left somewhere and gone somewhere else.
The problem is that I often cannot relate to them either.
I am not a retiree figuring out where my pension stretches furthest.
I am not twenty-two years old with a backpack, a hostel booking, and an Eat Pray Love fantasy.
I am not a mother evaluating school systems and neighborhoods for my children.
I am not a tech bro who can open a laptop in Bali, write three lines of code, and casually call himself location independent.
I do not have blond hair, blue eyes, and whatever invisible social lubricant comes with looking comfortably Western in parts of the world where Westerners are still treated as if they arrived carrying money and answers.
I also do not have papa’s basement waiting for me if my personal Eat Pray Love era turns into a financial disaster.
I Am the Plan B
If I go missing, there is a very real chance nobody will know immediately.
Because I am the Plan B.
That sentence sounds dramatic until you actually look at the logistics.
If I get robbed on a bus and somebody takes my passport, phone, wallet, and money, I lose the tools I would normally use to solve the problem.
Who gets me to the U.S. Consulate?
Who sends emergency money?
Who books the hotel?
Who buys the replacement plane ticket?
Who sits on the phone with the bank while I am somewhere trying to prove that I am actually me?
Who helps me reconstruct all the documents I need if I have lost access to everything?
Theoretically, yes, I can return to the United States because I am an American citizen, but there is a very big difference between having a country you can legally return to and having somebody waiting there to catch you. (Besides, have we all forgotten about ICE
My parents, you ask?
E ako nga nagpapadala ng pera sa mga ’yun until I stopped three years ago.
What is my younger brother going to do when he still occasionally asks me for money and he is in the Philippines?
What is my best friend going to do from the Philippines besides worry and try to help however she can from thousands of miles away?
My nurse friends here in the States have their own lives, marriages, children, schedules, mortgages, responsibilities, and emergencies.
I do not have a boyfriend, nor a husband.
I am no one’s emergency.
All I have is me, which is why, respectfully, I cannot “just do it” the same way other people have.
My Italian teacher, for example, has done this kind of thing, and at one point I asked him about his experience because I genuinely wanted to hear from somebody who had lived outside the conventional path. We eventually had a falling out over it because our personalities and approaches to risk are very different.
He belongs more to the “just do it and leave” school of thought.
I belong to the “if you cannot afford the $250 lawyer consultation to understand the visa pathway, just say so, because personally I would rather spend the fucking $250 and know exactly what I am walking into” school of thought.
He has the charm of extroversion and the privilege of an Italian passport. I have the caution of an INTJ and a Taurus, the cynicism of a war veteran, the funds of a career woman, and the curse of being brown, broke, and third world, all packed into a thirty-five-year-old body.
And respectfully, our risk calculations are simply not the same.
If everything went catastrophically wrong for him, he still has family infrastructure in Italy. There is a nonna. There are parents. There is a house in Milan. There is somewhere to return to.
Similarly, my Spanish teacher can travel around Georgia and Central Asia and still know that, somewhere in Ecuador, he has family and a country that is familiar to him.
Retirees living abroad often still have pensions arriving every month and a first-world country they can return to if they get tired of the experiment.
A lot of people have some version of a shore.
Me? I have a map, a calculator, and enough Quiapo street smarts to turn both into a contingency plan.
So no, I cannot “just go” in the same way they did.
If I am going to do this, I need Plans C, D, E, F, and every other fucking letter because Plan B is already me.
Plans C Through Z
This is where my particular brand of insanity becomes useful because I built an emergency fund whose sole purpose is getting me back to the United States and allowing me to start over if the sabbatical fails.
That fund covers rent, food, transportation, utilities, and basic living expenses for more than six months because I understand that this sabbatical is still an experiment. I can romanticize it all I want, but experiments can fail.
I hate nursing. I would love never to return to bedside nursing again, but hatred does not erase the fact that nursing is still the most reliable money-making skill I have, so I built enough money around myself that, if the whole thing collapses, I can return to the thing I hate with some dignity.
That matters to me because I don’t want failure to look like landing in Houston with forty-three dollars, no housing, and desperation forcing me into the first shitty job willing to hire me.
If I have to go back, I want to go back on my own terms.
I even built what I call my Financial Abort Guidelines, because apparently I cannot simply have an emergency fund like a normal person. I need a fucking protocol.
There are specific alarms that tell me when the experiment is no longer financially viable.
The first is tied to my main bank account. If it drops below a certain amount, I do not immediately panic and book a flight home. I shrink the cost of living first. I look at cheaper regions. Ecuador already stretches my dollars further than the United States, but there are other places in South America where those same dollars can stretch even further.
The second alarm is tied to my online teaching income.
If the teaching does not produce enough to cover my minimum daily living costs, then I audit my availability, look at how many hours I am teaching, recalculate my actual average income, and drop my lifestyle burn rate to match reality. That means if I am truly making only $22 a day, then apparently we are living on $20 a day now.
That sounds severe until you remember that I am brown, broke, and third world.
I have been poor before.
Going back to poor does not psychologically destroy me in the way it might destroy somebody who has never had to count coins.
I am not above cooking every meal, chopping ingredients finely so they stretch across multiple dishes, eating rice, eggs, beans, leftovers, cheap vegetables, and making one chicken somehow survive three different reincarnations before I finally throw the bones away.
But there is also a point where frugality defeats the purpose.
If I have cut the budget so far that I am trapped inside an apartment eating beans, rice, and eggs every day because I cannot afford a coffee, a museum, a bus ticket, or one fucking weekend somewhere else, then I am no longer on sabbatical. I have simply created a cheaper prison.
This is when the glass case gets broken, the flight back to Houston gets booked, and the scrubs come out. And before I even land, I would have an RN job offer waiting for me.
The sequence is already in my head: secure the job, coordinate a few nights of couch surfing with a friend if needed, fly back, get whatever documents and practical things I need sorted, and then clock in at 0700 to receive report in my new nursing job.
See? Fourteen years of cleaning other people’s shit might still be useful after all.
I also built non-financial abort guidelines because money is not the only way this experiment can fail.
One of those is what I call the Laptop Dread.
If opening my laptop to teach starts creating the exact same misery I feel walking into a twelve-hour nursing shift, then what the fuck am I doing?
I might as well return to nursing, where at least the dread is paid at a premium.
Another one is the Apartment Prisoner Metric.
If I can technically afford to continue but the only way to do it is to sit inside an apartment every day and deny myself every small pleasure that makes being somewhere worthwhile, then I am done.
There is a difference between living simply and existing miserably. And again, not to sound classist, but I am not a 20-year old backpacker, existing on hostel free breakfast and busking for tonight’s meal. That is simply not the purpose of my sabbatical.
The whole point of this sabbatical is rest.
If I rebuild the exact same misery in another country but with cheaper groceries and prettier mountains, congratulations to me, I guess. I have successfully relocated the problem.
On top of the emergency fund, I also have assets I can liquidate, which brings me to gold.
When I wrote in my journal that I had “no partner, no sponsor, no company relocation package, just balls, gold, and anger,” I meant gold literally.
Actual gold jewelry.
A friend influenced me to start buying gold jewelry from Dubai, and there was a period where I was buying gold almost every day— which now feels slightly unhinged in retrospect— but those pieces have become investments and liquid cash. I have sold some of them already, and they are funding the sabbatical.
There is something strangely satisfying about that to me. Things I bought while working the life I am leaving are now being converted into the money that helps me leave it.
I also have a managed brokerage account that I can access if it ever gets to that point, although I would prefer to leave it alone unless things really go to shit.
Then there is the rest of the paranoia, which is probably what happens when you know nobody is coming to save you.
I have what I call my If I Go Missing binder, both physical and electronic, which contains the information someone would need if I disappeared or became unable to communicate. Select friends and family will have access to it.
I have embassy addresses and phone numbers saved in my phone and planners.
I am getting travel insurance.
I have a backup phone.
I will have cash hidden in different parts of my luggage and gear so one stolen wallet does not turn me into an idiot crying on social media in a foreign country.
I am also creating a Google Photos album that I can update regularly so people I trust have some idea where I have been, what I have been doing, and what the last known version of Pamela looked like before she wandered somewhere else.
This is apparently what freedom looks like when you are your own emergency contact.
Doing It Alone Since 1991
And the funny thing is that none of this actually started with the sabbatical. I have been figuring shit out by myself since 1991.
Hence the title.
I was the eldest daughter, which in a Filipino family can sometimes mean you are born a child and then immediately promoted into unpaid middle management.
I was parentified.
I was raised to be the golden calf.
Why are your brothers crying?
I could not say, “I don’t know, I am also a child.” So I learned how to make sure there was nothing for them to cry about.
I bathed them.
Fed them.
Clothed them.
Sat them in front of the TV so they were clean, plump, and entertained.
Why is the house dirty? Because I wanted to play outside with my friends.
Except that answer does not work when rice has not been cooked yet, your father is coming home in an hour, you still have homework, and your mother said to do it because she said so.
So I cleaned the house, cooked the rice, did the homework later, and learned very early that wanting something means… you can’t want it until other people’s wants and needs are met.
Then adolescence and adulthood arrive and the same lesson simply puts on different clothes.
My phone got stolen because I had to commute and walk through a dangerous eskinita in Morayta? Too bad.
There was no money for another phone, so I had to figure out another way to contact my classmates because I still had a school project to finish in the Nursing course that I didn’t even want to study in the first place.
I needed an ID to apply for a job?
Fine. I was an adult now, which apparently meant everybody stopped explaining things and started acting surprised when I did not already know them.
Go ride the jeepney, find the right office, talk to the right person, fill out the right form, and make sure I did not incur any extra charges because the money in my pocket was exactly enough for the fare.
Lose one peso and I was walking home.
Later, the scale gets bigger.
My aunt said America is better, so go there.
I was in Eastbourne, broke, with no savings because I had been sending money home to feed grown adults and help send younger brothers to school, and now I cannot afford the fare to Houston?
Oh well.
Just trust God. He will find a way.
Funny how God kept delegating the logistics to me.
And His instructions aren’t even written with a bold, red marker across the sky. Shoot, not even a burning bush appeared at my doorstep.
Maybe that is why I am so difficult about advice now. I had been told to “just trust” and “just go” and “it will work out” enough times to know that it won’t. That I am still usually the one who ends up solving the fucking problem.
So yes, I need numbers. I need options. I want contingency plans.
I need somebody to tell me exactly where the weakness in the plan is because “just trust” has historically meant I still end up being the person to do the work.
This is also why I do not romanticize independence.
People love independence when it photographs well.
Solo woman.
Solo traveler.
Independent.
Strong.
Fearless.
Sure.
But independence looks very different when you strip the branding off it and admit that sometimes, it simply means doing everything by yourself and that if you fuck up, you fix it by yourself too.
And yes, I know, there is strength in that. I have proof that I am capable because I have spent my entire life collecting proof.
But I am fucking tired of strength being the only option available to me, because competence stops feeling like a compliment when it becomes the reason people assume you can absorb everything.
Which brings me to the last two things in that journal note: balls and anger.
The Anger
The anger is easier to explain.
Anger is what finally pushed me into saying, Fuck this life. I don’t want any part of this anymore.
I am angry at the life I built because somewhere along the way, saka na, sa day off na stopped meaning later and started meaning never.
I am angry that work depletes me so much that basic activities of daily living have become math. If I work three night shifts in a row, when do I grocery shop?
If I wash my hair tonight, do I still have enough energy to cook?
If I clean the apartment after work, what gets sacrificed tomorrow?
If I go somewhere on my day off, when exactly do I recover enough to go back to work?
Every small act of living has to be fitted around the giant object sitting in the center of the week.
I am angry at nursing because it has taken things from me that I do not know how to get back.
My hair.
My weight.
My skin.
My creativity.
My whimsy.
My words.
My voice.
My energy.
My youth.
My time.
And I didn’t even want to become a nurse!
I know nursing has given me things too. It gave me income, mobility, skills, legal pathways, and the ability to build a life in countries I was not born in. I am not pretending otherwise.
Pero putangina, it collected a lot on the way.
I am angry at my parents and family for conditioning me so thoroughly into becoming the perfect Filipino daughter that sometimes I do not know where they end and I begin.
Do I actually like reading books, or did I learn early that being smart was the only acceptable way?
Do I believe A because I genuinely believe A, or because nobody ever put B, C, and D in front of me long enough for me to compare them?
How much of my personality is actually mine, and how much of it was built around being useful, responsible, intelligent, obedient, and good?
I am angry some damn guy with alphabet soup after their name can decide when I am allowed to sleep in.
I am angry that vacations require permission and that how long I can disappear depends on somebody approving a request in a scheduling system.
I am angry that apparently, sick calls in a rolling calendar year is totally acceptable.
I am angry that productivity in nursing gets reduced into metrics even though so much of nursing cannot be meaningfully quantified.
And yes, I am angry that I am thirty-five and only now asking some of these questions while other people get to ask them at twenty-two, fail at twenty-five, recover at twenty-seven, try something else at thirty, and accumulate multiple versions of themselves before I even reached the starting line.
I am angry that I am brown, broke, and third world.
Some of that anger is fair and some of it is probably irrational. But when is anger ever rational, anyway?
At this point, I don’t care anymore because it moved me, and movement is useful.
The Balls
Then there are the balls.
By balls, I mean courage with just enough recklessness mixed in.
The image in my head is that collected hitman in a movie who has listened to the target beg and bargain long enough, sighs, pulls the gun out, presses the nozzle against the guy’s head, and ends the conversation.
No speech.
No grand declaration.
Just the point where you know the talking is over.
That is what this decision feels like to me. I have always been afraid of failure, and I have every right to be.
When you are the Plan B, failure has consequences.
There is no family money smoothing out the landing, no partner quietly carrying the bills while you reinvent yourself, no safe childhood bedroom preserved exactly as you left it, waiting for you to come home and regroup.
But this time I am willing to pull the trigger on the life I built even if I am the one standing at the other end of the gun, because this time, I am the one pressing it.
That matters more to me than I can explain.
For so much of my life, choices were made around me and then handed to me as responsibility: Take care of your brothers. Cook the rice. Be the good daughter. Study nursing. Find the job. Send the money. Move here. Work harder. Be grateful. Trust God.
Figure it out.
I figured all of it out.
Now, I am using the same skill that kept me alive inside that life to build a way out of it.
There is no rescue team.
There is me, the money I earned, the gold I can sell, the systems I built, the emergency fund, the backup phone, the missing-person binder, the brokerage account, the Financial Abort Guidelines, the scrubs sitting somewhere in reserve, and enough anger to finally stop treating exhaustion like a personality.
I am still doing it alone. I have been doing it alone since 1991.
The difference is that this may be the first time all that effort is going toward something I actually want.
And I am tired.
I am tired in every possible way a person can be tired. I am tired of being the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the person who knows what to do, the person who can stretch the money, solve the paperwork, work another shift, find another route, absorb another disappointment, and somehow land on her feet because apparently that has been my fucking job since 1991.
The sabbatical is my rest.
And if I die doing it, at least I die rested.