African kids

African signs

Email excerpt, unedited

My sabbatical is not working yet. I feel bored, frustrated and panicked. The whole thing started on Monday and has been much more difficult than I imagined. I constantly felt the urge to get up and go to c5 to do some work. I’m trying to expand the company and I spent my time on that the first two days. After that I couldn’t do anything for that project (I’m waiting for city hall to give me an approval after which I can continue my negotiations with the realtor, but city hall will probably shoot down my proposal, because they only want new stores in the area, no new offices, so I’m already trying to figure out what Plan B is going to be) so I went back home to figure out what to do next. People around me think it’s a bit funny that I’m feeling so restless for being able to rest, but for me all this free time has been stressing. I need to get something to do and while I’m waiting for my project to develop further, I’m on edge. I went to C5 every day and felt better there. Even when I was doing nothing at all. Just being there felt good. There are people there that I like to be with and the whole atmosphere makes me feel much more myself. I think I hugely underestimated how much of this company constitutes me. If that is a sentence.

I have been working for six months to make it possible for this company to survive without me, but I overlooked the work I need to do to make me survive without the company. And whenever I think that, I wonder why on earth I need to do that? Why would I? Why don’t I just keep working? So it’s the outrage that keeps grabbing me and all these questions I ask myself, where instead I should be writing or doing something else useful. I haven’t been doing anything like that up till now, I’ve done all these stupid things at home. Two weeks ago, I realized my life has never been better and I still think that (which is really cool, don’t get me wrong), but right now I feel like I’m isolated from what I love most and I need to find a new kind of balance which is stupid and time-consuming and unnecessary, so why the hell did I ever decide to do this?