A year ago yesterday I logged off a seven-year freelance contract and started planning a different life – a healthier one with a better work-life balance preferably, and maybe a change of work focus, and maybe take some time to explore all those things I’d been stacking up on the backburner, fancy stuff like learning Indonesian and skating backwards and the more mundane, like sorting out all my crap and finances.
I’ve spent much of the past year, getting fit – through walking, swimming, Scottish dancing and tai chi – but the biggest health difference has been the ability to leave my screen and just potter. The second biggest revelation was that shorter hours meant less stress-based eating and drinking. I’ve lost a stone. I barely drink. I feel calmer. My neck and shoulders rarely ache and my arms have even redeveloped some muscles.
The big project, the thing I thought I would do was write some kind of memoir based on my travel diaries. That failed fairly quickly. I just couldn’t seem to settle into the slog of a book-length writing project while long solitary screen-based hours were the very thing I was trying to escape. I decided to just explore instead.
One year on, I’ve reinvented this project into a much more fun thing – different ways to mine a diary. Every morning I sit down and carve out something fresh from the diaries, whether that is a code-generated poem or a reworked story in a literary style or a haiku distilled from old travel emails or a vertical date slice juxtaposed with a historical event. I actively look forward to sitting down to work now.
The other big project resulted from the first book I read after stopping full-time work – The Snowden Files on Day Five. I immediately signed up for an OU/Futurelean course on cybersecurity basics, then spent the next year following its advice, from setting up a password manager to sorting out my backups to learning about privacy settings, file and disk encryption, two-factor authentication, PGP, email encryption, Tor browswer and so on. I go to everything I can on infosec to learn more – then I blog it and also share the 101 basics with others in a local café. It’s a fascinating and scary world out there but I’m aiming for practical rather than paranoid.
All this effort has led to something quite exciting…
Yesterday on the anniversary of stopping work I had a phone interview and got the ‘job’ of an Ingenius at the forthcoming tech/art pop-up event, The Glass Room London. Training begins soon and I am very excited to be part of this dystopian tech store where data privacy is the stock in trade. It signals a new beginning, of something, and hopefully something that I can bring back home to Birmingham
So yes, all the big things have changed. I’m earning a fraction of what I used to but I’m healthier and happier for it – I needed to buy time not stuff at this point in life. I’ve also done some mentoring and digital/tech/infosec help sessions and campaigning and protesting, and generally tried to give a little back. I did some long-distance travel, to Eastern Europe by train. I sorted out finances and clutter (ongoing that one). And I met a lot of people in coffee shops to ask their advice.
No, I didn’t write a book, hit my Indonesian 2000-word target (I got to 500 words on my app), invent a moveable maze for rabbits or learn to skate backwards. But I’m ok with that and, besides, there’s still time.
Still my favourite phrase of last year is ‘Everything does change, something is happening’ – it’s still changing and happening now. The sabbatical was slow to start in some ways but it has had a deep impact. The idea of nicking back some of your retirement and living it now is a good one if you can manage it. Because as my hero Ferris Bueller always says:
All my Sabbatical posts are rounded up here.
Hire/commission me: fiona [at] fionacullinan.com
I've also enjoyed seeing you more in the week! Am very glad you've done this sabbatical so you get to experience so much more, and also from a very selfish viewpoint it's been good for those of us around you too. ☺️