How I spent my summer sabbatical

Sabbaticals are about becoming

Sabbaticals were always meant to be about becoming, not escaping. Vacations help you forget work for a week or two, but sabbaticals should help you remember who you are beyond it. According to a 2022 study of working professionals, there are three types of sabbaticals:

• Working holidays are “intense periods of work and dedicated breaks to rest and rekindle long-neglected relationships.”

• Free dives look like “leaping out of work and diving straight into intense exploration.”

• Quests would “push personal limits to discover themselves.”

I’d categorize mine as a combination of a free dive and a quest. It largely was a leap into exploring various aspects of my life with a fresh eye combined with pushing my skills with a new discipline (as you’ll read below).

After two years of agency life, I felt my curiosity and fire to learn… dwindling. The constant cranking out of client work — the trend-chasing, the demand of mechanized insights, the endless decks — actually dulls the strategic mind it claims to sharpen. You get good at pattern-matching, but lose the ability to see anything genuinely new. You become a highly efficient machine for producing expected answers. The very muscles that make you valuable as a strategist start to atrophy when all you do is optimize someone else’s metrics.

While professors might spend their sabbaticals teaching at foreign universities, finishing book manuscripts, or conducting field research in far-flung archives, creative professionals like us have to DIY our renewal — piecing together workshops, residencies, and wandering into something that refills the well rather than draining it.

The markers of my sabbatical weren’t publications or research papers, but something less tangible: connecting with purpose, revisiting old relationships, being spontaneous, and exploring a completely different creative lens (spatial investigation). My summer sabbatical helped me remember who I was, reignited my curiosity, and most of all reminded me how important human and community connection is to feeling content.

Everything I did this summer

Starting in mid-May, I knew that I had just a few weeks in D.C. before I took off for the summer. So, I made a concerted effort to get out of my neighborhood and explore the city on foot. I wanted to see more of its nooks and crannies. I went to artist pop-ups, outdoor galleries, courtyards, experimented with street photography, and cafes I’d never tried before.

Then, in late May, I decided to spontaneously go up to New York to attend a panel featuring folks from Mouthwash Studio and Chandelier Creative. There, I also got to learn about other studios and also loved the facilitator Emma Apple Chozick’s perspective. As always, I made time to see a friend and also do a quick drop by at the Whitney to see Christine Sun Kim’s featured exhibit.

Before I knew it, June was here! I flew to San Francisco to surprise my grandma for her birthday. She’s been battling breast cancer for years now. On a day she seemed strong enough, we took her to an outdoor park. Unfortunately, the next few days she was in incredible pain. It broke my heart into a million pieces to see that and also seeing my mom and the toll full-time caretaking was having on her. My brother and I got my grandma a comfortable chair that she could sit in. Thankfully, it seemed she was on the recovery again before I left.

Driving down to Southern California, I came home and then spent the next month there. There’s always a few rituals and activities I do when I’m back home to fill my cup: going to the beach, hiking, seeing old friends, etc.

I did all of the above, of course! I even made an effort to explore Long Beach (something I’d never done oddly) and spent a day at the Huntington Beach Public Library. I had no idea that Richard Neutra had designed the library. A childhood friend also had her bridal shower so it was fun attending that as well.

Not wanting to spend all my time in the suburbs, I decided to use my last week in California to stay in LA “like a local.” My very first job out of college was in the DTLA area, but I never actually have lived in the city. So, I booked a place to stay in the Highland Park neighborhood and cos-played as a resident. I went to yoga classes and hung out a lot at Comet over Delphi and worked on some creative work at Meadow Fig.

Luckily, my stay overlapped with quite a few events. There was a casual panel led by Swike Design featuring photographer Justin Chung and furniture and spatial designer Willett. I also hung out in the Chinatown Mandarin Plaza where I went to Mouthwash Studio’s beautiful office and attended an interesting talk about curation led by the folks from Marta LA. One of the highlights was going to Mahjong Underground hosted by a good friend, learning how to play, and winning! (Thanks Christine and Jaimie for teaching me.)

I’ve heard people say, “New York is great to visit and hard to live in. LA is great to live in, but hard to visit.” I think this statement is very true. For all the time I’ve lived in California and hung out in LA, staying for just a few days made a huge difference in how the city felt.

My stay in LA was concluded by a pick-up at LAX to bring my mom home for awhile. My uncle was taking over care-taking duty while she got some much needed rest. I drove her home and the very next day I flew to Arizona.

Being in Arizona was by far the highlight of my summer. I went to Sedona in July to participate in The School of Architecture’s summer immersion program (formerly known as the Taliesen Fellowship and founded by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright). It was a bucket list of mine for quite some time and I couldn’t believe I was actually doing it!

For one whole week, the architect and dean of the school Stephanie led us through workshops and site field trips in the Sedona area. (You might recognize her work Taffy, a Coachella installation last year.) I learned how to create my first architectural drawing, hiked beautiful trails, and encountered everything from scorpions to coyotes. We visited artist studios such as the Waddell family studio and the otherworldly Arcosanti. Of course, the Chapel of the Holy Cross and Taliesen West were additional noteworthy places I got to see.

I even did a final project presentation of my first model! I was a complete beginner at it so I felt embarrassed at first by how far behind I was in my skills. Most of the other students were much younger and were already architecture students or civic engineers. By the last day, however, I realized how proud of myself I was for willing to be a complete beginner at something.

I’ve been working in branding and marketing for nearly 12 years now. While I enjoy what I do, I’ve long been itching to evolve my career into something more hands-on and experiential. Essentially, I hope to become a designer that specializes in environments and interiors. Attending this immersion was part of a larger identity shift I was looking to spark within myself. I’d say it was a success in that aspect!

From Sedona, I flew back to Washington, D.C. to reunite with my partner (just as the president began unleashing the National Guard onto the streets). The timing was uncanny as this happened the very same week it was time for us to head off to O’ahu. A close childhood friend was getting married (N+J)! I hadn’t been to Honolulu since I was a child, so I was excited to both celebrate my friends and also spend some time there in “vacation mode.”

I wanted to keep up my sabbatical theme of spatial exploration and investigation, but wasn’t sure how I would do that on the islands. I flipped through a travel guide from Magazine B and to my delight learned about tropical modernism. (Coming from Southern California, it felt kindred to the desert modernism you’ll often see in the Palm Springs area.) The Liljestrand House had a few spots left for a private educational tour during our trip, so it became one of the first stops after arriving. Well worth the visit!

My journey started to slow as I then made my way back to the east coast. Up in New Haven, Connecticut, we attended a second wedding (M+D). At this wedding, I saw a handful of friends from the Hawaii wedding again (N+J). It was amusing to see the same group of people in a completely different setting only a week after. There, I was met by high school friends I hadn’t seen in nearly 15 years since graduating! It was actually a bit of an out-of-body experience as I hadn’t been expecting it. It felt like my past and present lives were colliding, blurring the lines of the different versions of myself. It all became one suddenly.

A few weeks later, I actually found myself in the northeast region again in Providence, Rhode Island. I have an oddly heartwarming feeling about the country’s smallest state as it was my fifth grade project in elementary school. I don’t know why it was always so memorable to me (honestly), but I’d always been curious about it since then. I was there to meet up with a guide who gave a group a tour of the famed Rhode Island School of Design. It felt like its own microcosm where every detail was considered and designed so elegantly. I was looking to experience their graduate thesis archives — specifically for interior architecture — at the gorgeous Fleet Library. What I found there is now at the top of my fall reading list.

This concluded my whirlwind of a summer. Whew, did you make it to the end with me?

What’s next

If the summer was all about in-take and opening up, my fall season will be about applying everything I’ve digested. I’ll be sharing more on this in the next newsletter, but until then, I’m aiming to be as intentional as possible with my attention and focus.

(I had to delete Instagram off my phone to finally publish this! I don’t know how long I’ll last… but for now, this is working!)