Well, I did a thing. I left corporate life. Again.
This isn't actually my first break from the corporate world. After the Disney/Fox merger, I was laid off, which was an unexpected interruption in a career that had been moving along pretty neatly up to that point. I took the opportunity to do some consulting, and eventually I started building Yumday (the business), which became its own full-time thing for a while. But even then, I never completely closed the door on my old career. I continued taking on communications and marketing consulting projects, and over the years, there was almost always some kind of executive work waiting in the wings.
Looking back, I think I kept one foot in the door partly because I was afraid to shut it.
There was always that little voice telling me I should have something to fall back on. That I should keep an executive gig going, just in case. Just in case Yumday didn't work out. Just in case I needed the money. Just in case I decided I wanted to go back. Just in case.
And because I knew I was good at that kind of work, it was an easy thing to keep doing. Communications and strategy had been my professional language for most of my adult life. I knew how to walk into a complicated organization, figure out what was happening, make sense of it, build a plan, and help people move forward. I had spent years getting very good at it.
The problem was that, eventually, being good at something isn't the same as wanting to keep doing it.
This time around, I had to be honest with myself. I was no longer aligned with the work I was doing or the environment I was doing it in, and I reached a point where I couldn't convince myself otherwise. The good thing is I learned something important about myself in the process: there are some things that matter more than having the right title or a steady paycheck.
Your values matter. Your boundaries matter. Your ability to look at yourself at the end of the day and feel good about the choices you've made matters.
I am grateful that, after all these years, I have enough wisdom to recognize when something isn't right for me. I'm even more grateful that I've learned to trust that feeling instead of talking myself out of it.
So I left.
And this time, I'm not immediately looking for the next executive door to keep cracked open.
Instead, I'm giving myself permission to see what happens when I put more of my energy toward the things I've been wanting to make all along.
I'm building Joy Code with Brandon, my husband and favorite creative partner, where we're bringing together our very different backgrounds in technology, design, communications, photography, product, and storytelling to make things that we find interesting and, hopefully, make other people's lives a little more joyful. I'm continuing to evolve Yumday, too, which has been part of my life for years and still has plenty of life left in it. I'm making photographs, writing, experimenting with ideas, learning new things, and saying yes to creative projects and collaborations that make me curious.
Some of these things may become businesses. Some may become stories or photographs. Some may turn into something I can't quite see yet. And I'm trying to be okay with that.
For most of my career, I've been rewarded for knowing what comes next. Build the strategy. Make the plan. Set the deadline. Get everyone aligned. Move the thing forward. I genuinely love that work, and I don't think those instincts are going anywhere. But I've started to wonder what life might look like if I spent a little less time worrying about the next step and a little more time paying attention to the thing right in front of me.
Maybe I take an afternoon to photograph something simply because the light is beautiful. Maybe I write about a place I've visited or something I've eaten or an idea I can't stop thinking about. Maybe Brandon and I spend a ridiculous amount of time tinkering with something because we want to know if we can make it work. Maybe I make something weird. Maybe I make something useful. Maybe I make something that is both.
I don't know yet.
And that is probably the strangest part of all of this. For someone who has spent so much of her career making plans, I am entering a season where I don't have one big, five-year answer for what comes next.
I just know that I want more room for curiosity, creativity, photography, writing, food, travel, making, and all the other things that make life feel interesting to me. I want to see what happens when I stop treating those things as the stuff I do around the edges of my career and start treating them as the work itself.
For a long time, I kept one foot in the door, just in case. However, this time, I'm walking through it.
I have no idea exactly where it leads, but I'm excited to find out.
