Taking a Break From Work: How I Finally Made the Decision
- Pause to Play
- 20 hours ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
For a long time, I was afraid to take a break from work — but even more afraid of having to explain why.
Even the idea of saying it out loud felt uncomfortable. I imagined people wondering what was wrong, whether I was giving up, whether I was no longer ambitious enough. I had spent so much time being reliable, productive, and available that stepping away felt almost impossible to justify, even to myself.
At the beginning, whenever I heard that someone was taking a break from work, I honestly did not understand it. I would wonder what they did all day. I assumed you had to plan everything perfectly to make it worthwhile. I thought maybe you had to travel, and travel a lot, to somehow prove that your break had a purpose. I saw it as something that needed to look impressive from the outside, not something that could simply be necessary.
I was also afraid of losing the title I had worked so hard to reach. Even though I never truly identified with my director title, it still meant something. It represented years of effort, discipline, and sacrifice. Letting go of it, even temporarily, felt like risking a version of myself I had spent a long time building. It is strange how we can feel attached to things that do not fully reflect who we are, simply because we fought so hard to earn them.
And then there was the money.
I was afraid of losing part of the savings I had worked so hard for, money that was supposed to protect me in the future. I had always seen those savings as security, as proof that all the hard work had led to something solid. Spending them on time off felt irresponsible. It felt like undoing part of what I had built. Even when I knew I was exhausted, I still struggled with the idea that I might use my own hard-earned safety net to support myself in the present.
| Meanwhile, my everyday life was quietly shrinking.
By the time evening came, I had no energy left for anything. And instead of seeing that as a warning sign, I blamed myself. I told myself I was lazy. I judged myself for not doing more, for not reading more, creating more, moving more, living more. But the truth was that I was depleted. Most nights, the only things I still had the energy for were mindless scrolling or another film on Netflix. That was not rest. That was numbness. It was what was left when I had already given everything to work.
For a while, I kept telling myself this phase would pass. I thought maybe I just needed a weekend, a holiday, better discipline, more resilience. I believed I could push through it if I tried hard enough.
| Then came the first real turning point.
I started waking up night after night, unable to sleep, trapped in endless thoughts. My mind would not stop. Over and over again, I kept thinking the same thing: I cannot do this anymore. I do not want to live like this anymore. Those nights stripped away all the excuses I had been making during the day. In the silence, I could no longer pretend that I was just stressed or temporarily tired. Something deeper was wrong.
Around that time, my relationship — which we once believed would last a lifetime — came to an end. Deep down I knew that stress and constant tension had left no room to keep fighting for us or to continue the relationship in a healthy way. I was too overwhelmed, too exhausted, and too disconnected from myself to hold on to something that had once meant everything to me. It was not a pause, not a temporary break, but a definitive ending.
The second turning point came when I got very sick.
By then, I knew I had ignored my body for too long. Stress had taken control of me in ways I had not wanted to admit. My body had been trying to warn me for a long time, and I kept overriding it, minimizing it, postponing it. I treated my limits as an inconvenience instead of a message. Getting sick forced me to confront the reality that I was not managing stress anymore. Stress was managing me.
And then something happened in my personal life that changed everything.
My mother fractured her spine.
That was the moment when everything became painfully clear to me. One moment, one fall, one piece of bad luck can shape the rest of your life and change it completely. We live as if we have endless time to postpone ourselves, to delay rest, to ignore what our body is telling us, to keep waiting for the “right” moment. But sometimes life interrupts that illusion in an instant.
When that happened, I realized how fragile everything really is.
I understood that I could keep postponing the decision, keep explaining away my exhaustion, keep telling myself I would rest later, when work was calmer, when I felt more secure, when the timing looked better from the outside. But later is never guaranteed. Health is not guaranteed. Time is not guaranteed.
That was when I made the decision.
Taking a break from work was not a dramatic escape. It was not a glamorous reinvention. It was not a perfectly planned journey filled with meaningful, beautiful moments every day. It was a necessary choice. A human choice. A decision to finally listen to what I had been trying so hard not to hear.
|What took me so long was not just the workload. It was fear.
Fear of being judged.
Fear of losing status.
Fear of spending money I had worked hard to save.
Fear of not using the time “well enough.”
Fear that without work, I would have to face myself more honestly.
But in the end, what scared me even more was the idea of continuing exactly as I was.
I did not want to keep living in a way that left me empty by evening, unable to enjoy my own life. I did not want to keep calling myself lazy when I was actually exhausted. I did not want to wait until my body forced me to stop completely. And I did not want to keep acting as though life would always give me more time.
Taking a break did not solve everything overnight. But it marked the moment when I stopped abandoning myself in the name of being strong, successful, and dependable.
Sometimes the bravest decision is not to keep going.
Sometimes it is to stop.
To listen.
To accept that your life is happening now, not later.
Continue the Pause to Play journey.
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