13. On Deciding to Take an Adult Gap Year

Welp, I'm off to Korea in two days

By the time you read this, I will be getting ready to leave for my Seoul Sabbatical.

I don’t know how long I’ll be there or exactly what I’m walking into, but for once in my life, I’m at peace with the ambiguity of my future. I mean, ask me again in a few months and I might be singing a different tune, but today, I am fairly namaste about it.

Friends and perceptive readers likely won’t be surprised by this announcement, as I’ve been leaving little breadcrumbs (and some chonkier croutons!) about my general burnout/desire for change/itch to live in the motherland for some time now.

As my dear pal Hyo, whom I’ve known since we were tweens, said to me on a recent call: “I’ve learned that when you say you want to do something, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

This photo was taken at a Panera Bread in Maryland days before Hyo embarked on a cross-country bike trip. Yeah, she’s pretty cool.

Blessed are they who know you so well.

Actually, blessed am I for having people like her in my life.

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I was a beauty editor for a little over a decade and for many of those years, it was as dreamy as a job could be.

My first media job was at a very grown up magazine with fancy offices that connected to Rockefeller Center. For the two years I worked there, there was seldom a day I didn’t feel awestruck by this fact (particularly during the holidays, when all of the iconic Christmas decorations would go up around us).

Looking back, I had caught the tail end of the good ‘ol days of publishing, when you’d have an entire month to work on a single story. I would spend my days obsessing over every last comma and word, and spend my evenings organizing my boss’ mountain of incoming mail, studying every brand and product I picked up with such deep focus and fascination I would often lose track of time. At around 11 p.m., after the cleaning crew had made their rounds and the building was mostly empty, I would expense a yellow cab back to my apartment, deeply energized by everything I was learning despite the physical fatigue.

When I recall that period of my life, I feel bittersweet gratitude for having the experience at all. Because of those early years as an editor, I know what it feels like to be truly immersed in your work and have the total conviction that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing.

We’ve all heard some variation of “If you do the thing you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I understand the sentiment, and I bought into it for many years.

Because of this, I found the opposite to also be true:

Doing the thing you love can be a slippery slope into working yourself to exhaustion, which is where I’d been for a while.

Tired.

Burned out.

On auto-pilot.

At first, I felt sheepish even calling it burn out.

By all objective measures, I worked way more in my 20s.

Weeknights. Weekends. At all hours. I was always working or thinking about the work I could do next to advance my career. In my 30s, I found some semblance of balance.

I told this to my best friend, who said, “It’s not that we’re feeling burned out from just this particular season of our lives. I think it’s actually an accumulation of the last decade of working so hard without ever really stopping. It’s built up over time.”

As usual, she’s right.

Since graduating, I have never taken a break.

Even when I was on medical leave, I worked in some capacity.

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Still, I have always appreciated that work has been my steady companion through all of the upheaval that seemed neverending since graduating college.

When everything else kept changing around me, my job and identity as a beauty editor remained the same. This gave me the stability I needed, both financially and emotionally, to keep pushing forward.

It kept me from ever feeling too untethered, especially when I started to lose myself in a loving, but ultimately deteriorating relationship.

Having this job as a foothold, I was able to make the cross-country move out to Los Angeles on my own, where I’ve healed in so many ways.

My friend Katie took this photo during a walk around my old neighborhood in Santa Monica earlier this summer.

Because I know all too well how precarious this life is, I know I need to go to Korea now. While I’m still physically able. While my parents are still physically able to care for themselves. Before my life becomes deliciously tangled in ways I can’t predict with people (and pups) I hope to fall deeply in love with someday.

In many ways, it’s the best time to try something new. In just as many ways, it makes no logical sense to walk away from the things I’m so lucky to have right now.

Maybe I’m not walking away from my life though.

Maybe I’m just walking towards the next chapter.

I hope you’ll continue on this journey with me, as I try to find my footing in Korea. In communing in this space more often, I hope to create something sturdy and steady together :)

See you in Seoul,
Jenny

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