As crazy as it is, I’ve passed the year mark for having quit my job and began the prep to travel full time. It’s been a month and a day actually as of writing this.
I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit over the last month. How much has changed since I made that decision, and what went into making it.
Obviously, there were a lot of different factors that went into my decision to travel full time. I talk on my about page about some of them and I do touch on it in some other posts about the decision too. But as is typical, a lot becomes clear when you’re looking back. There’s a reason we say “hindsight is 20/20”.
My Thoughts and Feelings
I have always loved to travel. I’ve already mentioned my first solo trip, and I think at this point if travel wasn’t for me it probably would’ve been obvious. I have my ups and downs during my adventures – but that’s to be expected as ups and downs are part of life.
But a year ago, all I could think to myself was “I’m stuck”. I looked back at my life over the previous 5 years and while I was (and am) incredibly proud of what I accomplished professionally, that was where my life ended. The only exception to that was my cat. He was my world and I miss him every day.
I spent a lot of time by myself or talking to my cat. Whenever I wasn’t at work, I was at home with him. There were some times when I went out with friends, but when you literally have 2 friends and maybe 3 acquaintances in the area to spend time with there isn’t much to do. They had their own lives, and I understood that. Plus it’s not like I don’t enjoy being by myself (thankfully or it would get interesting to be doing the long term solo travel thing – check out my post about being lonely on the road).
So my life was work and my cat. I would often spend around 10 hours on work a day, sometimes more if it was busy or we were short staffed. I loved it and I seemed thrived off it. When I was home, I would relax with my cat and either zone out to the tv (kinda rare) or would read (much more common).
After Enki passed away, I had nothing but work and that’s when my brain started to spin more. I was spending more time at work – and honestly I didn’t think that was really possible, but it was. And when I would force myself to not spend that much time at work, attempting to have (ha!) a good work/life balance, I didn’t really have anything else to do. It forced me to look at my next steps in life and it wasn’t long before “I’m stuck” became a repeated phrase in my head.
I had gotten pretty far up in libraries. Honestly, while there are still avenues of public libraries that I could explore, it would mostly be the same thing but a bigger scale and not as directly involved in the day to day (aka a larger library system). And that honestly sounded like it would make me go insane. I loved running the library, but I was bored too. It was the same thing day in and day out. Even the occasional ‘worriesome thing’ was just a variation of things I’d taken care of in the past. There was a bit of challenge in the political and diplomacy aspect of things, but create good enough relationships and those become pretty routine as well. Even a challenge would only take me at most a week to figure out, and that is probably being generous.
About 2 years before I quit, I had started to consult with other library directors, help them and their staff make changes, and I absolutely loved that work. It gave me the challenges that I needed in order to stay engaged but was short term so I could move onto the next one once that was done. I considered making that a full time thing – and I can’t deny it’s still on the list for possible jobs in the future – but ultimately I decided that I needed to distance myself from it all for a while.
Why I left
The thing is, when all you have in life is work – your entire life becomes about work. I got so sucked into working all the time that I struggled to do anything that wasn’t work. I loved the job, I love libraries, I frequently talk to people about libraries and advocate for them still. I have had multiple people ask me when I’m going to return to them as well because it’s clear that they’re still a passion for me.
But I had to step back from them for me. I had to give myself the time to get out of that stuck mindset and figure out who I was away from libraries.
I had to figure out who Holly was again.
A lot of people, even in the library world, don’t realize it but being a library director is a very political job. It’s one that is in the public eye whether you admit to it or not. How you act, who you’re friends with, your social media content and more all reflects back on your position and your library. Additionally, being a librarian means being a neutral party at work. But there was no separation. The only time I wasn’t ‘on’ was when I was at home with my cat or out of town visiting family or friends – and even then I would sometimes get called depending on the situation. If I was one to post on social media regularly, even that would need to be done through a filter, but I stopped posting anything but my travels online many years before.
When you’re a manager/supervisor there is a layer of this already in the frame of being responsible even when you’re not at work. Of being on call, or watching a little bit more. But being the head of it all adds a layer that I didn’t expect to take so much from me, and it took without me even realizing it.
Talking to other directors through the years, confirmed they almost all felt the same. A lot of my counterparts don’t work in the same town they live in for this very reason – it’s hard to go to the store after a workout and then you run into someone on your board and not only do you look like a drowned and exhausted rat but you’re also buying a lazy day mix of cookie dough, mac and cheese, and have thrown in some alcohol. And all they want to do is have an indepth conversation about some issue that you are not prepared to talk about in the aisle of the grocery store (yes this has happened to me).
I was ‘on’ at all times. I was always thinking about a million things before I did a single one. It was never about what people thought of me either, it was always “if I do x how would that impact the library or my staff?”. And I realized that along the way I had lost myself as a person. My identity was Library Director, 80% of my life was the library, 19% was spent recovering and spending time with Enk, and the last 1% was when I occasionally hung out with people or visited family. There really wasn’t even time that I felt up to meeting new people, I spent so much of my energy on work and Enk that I didn’t have anything left over for socialization. Plus, in the early days when I would try, people in the area just wanted to talk about my job or decisions the city was making, and when I would redirect or just not engage the convo fizzled out since to everyone else – I was my work. That left meeting people further out, but man did that require a level of organization and energy that I could not find outside of work.
The Decision
The more I thought about all of this, the more I knew I needed to make a change or I would continue to just spend my life by myself wasting away on my couch. And without Enki to require that I have a fixed home and income, I knew it was the perfect time to just go and see where life would take me.
And I have. I love to travel – I love being able to see new places and love doing more than just going to work and then going home. And now that I have found some of myself again, I have plans to bring libraries more into my travels – because I do love them and I do miss them. So keep an eye out for some changes on my blog coming soon!
