Always on
even on leave... perhaps even more
I’m on parental leave right now. Which means I’m supposed to be off. Not working. Being with baby.
And I’m... terrible at it...
Not the baby part. The baby part I love. The being-off part. The “time off” part. That’s the one I don’t know how to do
Here’s the thing about me and vacations. In five years of running my startup I took two. Two one-week vacations. In five years. And even those weren’t really vacations, because I used them to go deep on building something new.
2021, one of those weeks, I went down the rabbit hole of NFT art, built a whole collection. Came back and we got the whole team pivoting toward that. 2023, another week “off,” I disappeared into AI land, and that’s the trip that turned us into an AI-native company when I came back lol. See the pattern?
So when I say I took time off, what I mean is I found a quieter moment to work in. The vacation was work without meetings. That was my version of rest... get obsessed with a new thing, build.
Writing this out loud... it sounds unhealthy/toxic... I know. But is it? It felt great at the time. It still kind of does.
And now here I am... again, with time off. Real leave. And the difference is there’s no pivot at the end of it. No project. The point is my kid. To be here, present, and figure out this tiny person.
And I want that. I really do.
But my brain won’t shut up.
It keeps whispering these stupid things... what if they forget about me at work. What if the team just keeps moving and there’s no gap where I used to be... they realize I wasn’t needed after all!!... What if I come back and I’ve forgotten how to do the thing, like the skill leaks out of my hands if I don’t use it for a few weeks.
What if I’m getting paid to do nothing and someone notices???
I know how that sounds. I’m lucky. Blessed, honestly, to work somewhere that gives me this time. Most people never get it. And here I am, given it, and my brain is doing fear and fomo instead of just being here.
That’s the part I can’t figure out
Because somewhere along the way I wired myself so value only comes from output. From making. From pushing. If I’m not producing something, if there’s no deploy, no draft, no thing I can point at and say look, I made that!... then what am I doing?
And under all of it there’s this void. A black hole in my chest. I’ve spent years feeding it with work. Code, projects, launches, doodles, pivots, more, more. And it eats everything and it’s never full… the beast is always hungy
You’d think at some point it says okay, that’s enough
lol… it never does
My baby doesn’t care about any of that. Doesn’t care if I shipped today. No prs, no prototypes, no launch. Just a small person who needs me here. Slow. Present.
And most of the time that’s enough. She’s next to me right now actually, chewing on a toy, judging my life choices. But I still catch myself reaching for my laptop to check if that thing I was doing is still running...
I’m still on. I don’t really know how to be off. And I don’t fully know why that’s so hard, or what it says about me that it is... am I the worst dad? fuck...
Still trying to disconnect and be there for Elena
Pabs
