Notes from a month of stopping, noticing, and slowly coming back to myself.

June was supposed to be the first proper month of my sabbatical. When I used to imagine it, I pictured something calmer and more graceful than the reality. I thought there might be long walks, clear notebooks, tidy thoughts, maybe even the odd profound insight arriving with a cup of coffee. Instead, it began because my body finally said what I had been refusing to say: I cannot keep doing this.

Just after Christmas, following a severe viral infection, I became mentally and physically exhausted. Not tired. Not run down. Not “I’ll be fine after the weekend.” It was deeper than that. I remember feeling as if something inside me had simply gone offline. My body was not hinting any more. It was not asking nicely. It had taken the keys away.

I took a month off work after Christmas and hoped it would be enough. I wanted it to be a blip, something I could recover from and then neatly return to normal. But by April I knew, quietly and reluctantly, that normal was part of the problem. The break I had vaguely imagined for “one day” had become something more urgent. Something my system had already decided for me.

June, Mostly Horizontal

So June has been very small. I have done almost nothing. I have sat down with great commitment. I have stared out of windows as if I were gathering data. I have made cups of coffee and then forgotten about them. I have pottered from one room to another with the quiet seriousness of someone undertaking an important expedition, only to arrive and wonder what I came in for.

But the nothing has not felt empty. Some days it has felt uncomfortable, almost itchy, because I am so used to measuring a day by what it produces. June has been full of quieter things: reflection, meditation, noticing my own pace, noticing how often I reach for usefulness as a way of feeling safe. I have had to meet myself without the usual scaffolding of work, deadlines and being needed. That has been tender. And, at times, a bit inconvenient.

There is a kind of doing nothing that is actually very active, although it would look deeply unimpressive on a timesheet. “Lay on bed. Breathed. Had feelings.” It does not sound like progress. But something has been happening. My system has started to unclench. My body has begun, very cautiously, to believe that the next demand is not about to arrive. My mind is still suspicious, but it is softening.

What I Can See Now

Looking back, I think my system knew over a year ago. That was when I first started thinking about reducing my workload and taking an extended break from client work. The thought kept appearing, not loudly, but persistently. I would notice it, feel the truth of it for a second, and then tuck it away because there was always something else to do. There is always something else to do, if you are determined enough not to stop.

I can see now that I was unconsciously normalising what was happening. I was minimising it, rationalising it, explaining it away. “It’s just a busy patch.” “Everyone is tired.” “I’ll sort it after this next thing.” There was always a next thing. I was very good at sounding reasonable while ignoring myself completely.

There has also been a slightly uncomfortable professional irony in all of this. I am very good at gently suggesting to my clients that they might consider slowing down, resting, reflecting, listening to their bodies, making space for what is underneath the busyness. I can say these things with warmth and sincerity because I believe them. I know they matter. And yet, when it came to myself, I seem to have treated this wisdom as information intended for other people. A generous resource I could distribute freely, while quietly exempting myself from the terms and conditions.

Perhaps one of the deeper realisations of June is that I am finally learning, slowly and rather late, to take my own advice. Not as a concept. Not as something I can recommend beautifully in a room with someone else. But as a lived practice. In my own body. In my own days. Until now, apparently, I had been more of a theoretical expert in rest.

By last September, I was physically unwell, but I still put it down to tiredness. Tiredness had become the label I used for everything because it was easier than admitting I was in trouble. Symptoms, low mood, irritability, poor recovery, that hollowed-out feeling in the morning before the day had even started – all of it went into the tiredness drawer. The drawer was overflowing. I just kept leaning against it.

The Holiday Question

At some point in all this, I asked myself a very simple question: when was the last time I had a proper holiday?

The answer was over thirteen years ago.

That answer landed heavily. I do take time off work, technically, but I usually fill it with courses, training, professional development, or the bare minimum recovery required to get back to work again. I had been calling that rest. It was not rest. It was maintenance. It was keeping the machine going. And I am not a machine, however convincingly I may have behaved like one.

There has been no real replenishment. No nourishment. No space where I was not trying to improve, recover, learn, prepare, or become a better therapist. Just enough recovery to function. Not the kind of restorative rest that lets you remember you are a person with a body, a heart, a spirit, a life.

My Body Made the Decision

In the end, my body made the decision. It did what I had not been able to do. It interrupted the pattern. It took the option of carrying on away from me, which felt frightening and, if I am honest, also a little relieving. There is a strange relief in no longer having to pretend you can keep going.

I do not want to romanticise being unwell. There is nothing poetic about fatigue, brain fog, viral aftermath, or the grief of not being able to do what you used to do. But I am trying to listen to what it has shown me. My body told the truth before my mind was ready to admit it. I think it had been telling the truth for a long time.

June has been the beginning of listening. Not perfectly. I still catch myself trying to turn rest into a project, preferably with milestones and a nice pen. I still wonder if I am “doing this properly,” which is ridiculous because the whole point may be to stop performing even this. But something in me is loosening. I can feel it.

A Small Rhythm

By the end of June, a small rhythm had started to appear. Not a strict routine. I am not currently available for strict. More a gentle shape to the days. A little exercise. Rest. Healthy food. Meditation. Reflection. Some exploring of spirituality. Nothing dramatic. Nothing Instagrammable. Just small things that seem to help me feel more here.

Some days I follow the rhythm. Some days I drift away from it and come back later. That feels important too. I do not want to build another system I can fail at. I want something softer than that. More like stepping stones than rules. Some days I cross them. Some days I sit beside them with a cup of tea and call that enough.

I am beginning to understand that this break is not necessarily an adventure away from my life. It may be a way back into it. Or into a different one. Maybe the work now is not to add more meaning, but to remove enough noise to hear what has been trying to get my attention for a very long time.

So that was June. A quiet month. A strange month. A month of doing almost nothing and discovering that almost nothing can still ask a lot of you. A month of not forcing, not fixing, not optimising. A month of letting my system settle. A month where stillness began to feel less like failure and more like honesty.

And perhaps the biggest shift is this: I have decided I am not really on a sabbatical. Sabbatical sounds too tidy, too professional, too easy to fold back into development plans and future productivity. This is an extended break. A major life change. A period of travel, deep personal reset and honest reimagining. I may return to client work. I may not. I am trying not to rush that answer. For now, I want to give myself enough space to hear it when it comes.