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By the time I submitted my tenure dossier, I was so burned out that I seriously considered quitting my job. It was August 2021 and, with two young children, we were still in the thick of COVID uncertainty. While some of the world had moved on, intermittent day-care and school closures continued to loom large. On top of that, my mother had received a very unexpected terminal cancer diagnosis earlier in the year. Everything felt uncertain and overwhelming.
When I was officially awarded tenure in July 2022, it felt only mildly celebratory. I was mired in grief over the loss of my mother in January; she died just 10 days after the unexpected passing of my mother-in-law. To say our family was just barely hanging on is not an understatement.
I recount all this not because I seek sympathy, but to make clear just how tired I was by the time I started to work on my sabbatical application in August 2022. After all our family had been through, my sabbatical shone like a beacon. I do education research in Tanzania, and I had been anticipating sabbatical for a long time. I saw it as an opportunity to spend an extended period of time working with colleagues in East Africa, something that isn’t possible in a regular semester.
Without much consideration, I set to work on a Fulbright application. Working with colleagues in Tanzania, I developed a proposal for a yearlong sabbatical involving the launch of an ambitious new project. I researched apartments in Dar es Salaam and inquired about schooling options for my children, who would be in kindergarten and fourth grade during my sabbatical year. I submitted my Fulbright and sabbatical applications feeling self-assured and confident about my plan.
Almost as soon as I hit “send,” I began to question whether my decision to spend my sabbatical in Tanzania was the right one. I was still so exhausted, and I had so many projects already going in Tanzania; did I really want to start a new one? Spending a year in Tanzania would provide a unique opportunity to deepen existing relationships and build new ones, but would that help me overcome burnout and the constant overwhelm I felt? My husband’s job was somewhat flexible, but he probably wouldn’t be able to stay in Tanzania for the whole year. Did I really want to be on my own with the kids for half of my sabbatical? When I was being honest with myself, that didn’t feel like the sabbatical I wanted.
A few days later, I was listening to a colleague’s presentation about his sabbatical when it dawned on me: The sabbatical I had worked so hard to plan was not the one I needed or wanted. I had been so focused on planning a sabbatical that felt like the next logical step in my career—the one I should take—that I had not considered what I needed from my sabbatical.
This realization changed my thinking completely. I began to explore a different set of priorities for my sabbatical, asking myself questions like: What would it look like to prioritize having an adventure as a family? What would it look like to prioritize my husband’s career during sabbatical? What would it look like to have a sabbatical focused on finishing projects instead of starting new ones? Asking a different set of questions about what my sabbatical could be opened new possibilities for where I could spend my sabbatical and how I could focus my energy during that time. In writing my Fulbright application, I had plunged headfirst into making my sabbatical plan without first taking the time to identify its purpose. What I needed to do was start with the purpose and let the plan follow.
After quite a bit of reflection and conversations with colleagues about their sabbaticals, I eventually realized that what I needed most from my sabbatical was an opportunity to rest and reset. I wouldn’t be useful to my family or my institution if I didn’t overcome my burnout. I also realized that I needed to use my sabbatical to finish projects (rather than start new ones), let go of projects that were no longer aligned with my professional goals and determine what I wanted to focus on in this next phase of my career. I also wanted sabbatical to be a time when I could be more present with my family and have a bit of an adventure with them.
I have permanent wanderlust, so I knew I wanted to live abroad for at least part of my sabbatical. Once I decoupled sabbatical from Tanzania, I was suddenly overwhelmed with possibilities for where my sabbatical could be geographically located. Costa Rica? Spain? Portugal? France? The options seemed endless.
I eventually settled on Bordeaux, France, for a variety of reasons. My husband and I wanted to live in a small city with good public transportation, and Bordeaux seemed to be the right size. I determined that we could afford an apartment near the city center, and I found a bilingual school that was both affordable and open to taking our kids for just one semester. Finally, we were able to obtain long-stay visas for France on our own with minimal hassle.
Spending the first semester of my sabbatical in Bordeaux was just what I needed to get over my burnout and get interested in my scholarly work again. I embraced living in a new place and spent time doing the things that I too often push to the side during a regular academic year: I got back into running, explored Bordeaux, spent more time with my husband and kids, made new friends, and traveled with my family.
In fact, the first half of my sabbatical was so incredible that I began to worry about being at home for the second semester. I was rested and ready to engage with my research again, but what if I went back home and slipped right back into the habits and routines that had left me burned out in the first place? (I wish Christine Tulley’s article about taking a successful semester-long sabbatical had been published about six months earlier or that I had seen Erin Marie Furtak’s article about her hybrid sabbatical! Both would have helped me immensely.)
To ensure the at-home portion of my sabbatical still felt like a sabbatical, I focused on creating new daily and weekly rhythms. I enrolled in a pottery class, planned for rest days each week, registered for a half marathon so I would stay motivated to keep running and prioritized seeing friends regularly. Intentionally setting a different pace enabled me to carry the sense of peace and rejuvenation I achieved in Bordeaux through to the end of my sabbatical.
It may sound trite (feel free to judge me if you’d like), but I had a truly life-changing sabbatical. It changed the way I think about my career, my family, what I prioritize and how I spend my time. As I noticed these transformations while on sabbatical, and reflected on them as I navigated re-entry last fall, I’m convinced that the reason my sabbatical was so impactful was because, as I began to plan, I paused and spent some time thinking about what I needed from my sabbatical and how best to achieve that, rather than simply forging ahead with the plan that seemed like what I should do or what my department or institution might expect of me. I could have spent the year in Tanzania starting new projects (and some might say I should have), but I don’t think that would have helped me overcome my burnout. By taking the sabbatical I needed, I was able to think more clearly about my research, plan more effectively for the next phase of my career and come back to work with more energy and enthusiasm than I could have ever anticipated.
At many institutions there is little support for thinking about how to spend a sabbatical, aside from a set of guidelines for what must be included in a sabbatical application and how to report on what was accomplished. This can lead to a focus during sabbatical planning on the products that will come from a sabbatical. However, it’s worth remembering, as Annmarie Caño and Hanna Tervanotko each wrote recently, that sabbaticals have important benefits for health, wellness and creativity; sabbatical success should not be measured only by funding secured or articles published. As you begin to think about an upcoming sabbatical, you might consider pausing for a moment to ask yourself what you really need from your time away, and to make that your starting point for developing a sabbatical plan. You may end up having a sabbatical that is very different from the one you first envisioned, and it may even be life-changing.