Sabbatical as (Me)search

I am stubborn in a holistic way.

I will challenge my own thoughts and perceptions with a desire to connect to something beyond me. In part because I can’t help but be curious about what else is alive that I cannot conceptualize within my own limiting human, lizard brain. Mostly because when I must face the unknown, I stretch and reach for meaning that will keep me present to continue on my journey, even when I can feel my entire being longing for a simple answer or solution.

That said, I am constantly creating and questioning language. The funny thing about the language of life is that it has its own dialect, tone, and subtext, and it speaks to each of us differently. In 2025, I fully realized how important it is for each of us to stay attuned to what life is teaching us, so that we can share our meanings and witness one another’s celebrations and meltdowns with equal care and attention.

I have trusted this interconnectedness to guide me always, often without realizing I was doing so. Now, at the big age of 32, I’m reflecting on what the last six months of sabbatical have revealed after a decade of being a social entrepreneur. I’ve come to understand that life communicates what I need to know only at the exact moment I’m capable of accepting it. This essay is an accountability practice, an opening of my Scorpio heart, to the possibilities that arrive when I share my innermost realizations and use proper grammar even though I actually hate it when it comes to my own self-expression. Bear with me.. Lol 

This last year was a clearing.

In my outer world, I was ejected from the role of grounded, open, trusting Tianna into the work of healing from burnout. I have never felt more demoralized and inspired at the same time. The hopelessness and exhaustion felt like a birth into an entirely new life.

In this same year, my 97-year-old great-grandma, who has lived with relentless Taurus resolve, has for the first time slowed down and accepted that she is dying from Alzheimer’s. Many of the close relationships I had done deep, vulnerable, trying work in to sustain - dissolved as we shifted into new phases of life. At the same time, I have deepened with some of my oldest, newest and most trusted friends in ways I couldn’t have known I needed. Or was capable of. 

In other words: I became a retired oldest sibling. I have been loved, babied, and cared for by my youngest siblings, both real and chosen family, in ways so healing I may never remember how I once moved through the world. Not that I want to return to that way of being anyways lol I was doing the MOST.

The literal world does not want people like me alive: officially, covertly, overtly - 2025 has proven this. After a lifetime of hope and trust in social change work, I grieved the moments I didn’t realize I was holding in my body: the wins and losses, the coming together and falling apart of community. It was like watching a montage of tender, ordinary moments you only understand once they’re gone: laughing over breakfast tea, listening to an album on the floor for no reason, walking and dreaming about what meal we’d cook when we got home, imagining ourselves in a decade still being us together. 

Every land project, chosen family, lover, mentor, and tender memory resurfaced through dreams, texts, synchronicities and mailed reminders. My AuDHD nervous system was pushed to its limits only after I had trained my body into something resembling able-bodied predictability through slowness and care. Then BOOM another mystery that could only be solved with rest.

Nothing familiar survived the humbling tests of honesty. I crossed another threshold that only my nervous system could carry me through. My community’s love kept me committed to healing even when all I wanted was to sleep until it was over like it was a college weekend off work and school. Thankfully my work and community allowed me to be met by others devoted to this same path. One night, the truth landed clearly as I started to see the light at the end of the seemingly neverending tunnel:

Peace is not calm or certainty. Peace is devotion to being intimately in relationship with complexity, routine, vulnerability, and dignity, rather than nihilism or defeat.

In late 2024, I had an eerie sense that I was going to “lose it all” in 2025. I didn’t know what that meant, only that I was grieving something I couldn’t yet name. I leaned on my people as an unending river of emotion moved me toward a sea of unconscious sadness. 

I came to understand that I had been carrying deep sadness maintained by my inability to judge the people I love with the same clarity as my boundaries. I learned this heartbreakingly: many people I had loved for years wanted nothing to do with me when I was no longer shiny or resilient. I became a ghost in my own life, everyone still inhabiting it, still expecting me to perform roles I could no longer sustain.  

Professionally, I saw how I had allowed extraction under the belief that relational integrity alone would protect me. AuDHD delayed processing and pattern inconsistency made me vulnerable to power games I couldn’t perceive in real time. I learned that love, safety, collaboration, and success required entirely new definitions.

I had a choice: embody these truths through grief, or disappear and deal with the fallout alone. I learned that betrayal clarifies intention. That endings measure faith. That my pattern recognition, once my greatest asset, now required a deeper accountability to the present moment and to longer life cycles I could no longer control or at least create the illusion that I controlled some aspects of those cycles. 

When titles, productivity, and possibility were stripped away, I learned how to stabilize myself in ways I had never practiced for anyone else. I allowed myself to be supported, feeling as small as a single piece of sand and as rich as a grandparent surrounded by their complete family - fed, housed, loved and engaged in a meaningful, cozy life. 

I learned what rest as reparations truly meant. I learned what it feels like to be so completely held and absolutely alone at the same time. I learned that ruminating on the meaning of life and being romanced by morning fog can coexist.

I reclaimed my attention from what I could never be and redirected it toward what was already offering presence: land, memory, relationship, myself.

I released pain loops born of my behavior that sustained my invisibilization and extraction. 

I chose to dream of relational systems rooted in reciprocity and care, regardless of what the overculture keeps screaming at us all through our phone screens.

I offered my rage in exchange for radical acceptance. 

I chose non-reaction and love where isolation once felt safer.

I had to begrudgingly accept that:

• Relational integrity without boundaries is martyrdom

• Being needed is not the same as being loved

• Self-erasure is not sustainability or grace 

• Devotion must be chosen, not demanded or modeled 

This sabbatical was a rite of passage. It taught me: 

That stillness can be crushing because many of us have been carrying unacknowledged harm - that is neverending and coming from all directions for many of us.  

That my nervous system has always known: ease is not laziness, it is wisdom.

That even though I imagined emerging radiant, decluttered, and endlessly energized I am not LOL 

However,  I am grounded. 

I know my own bravery in ways that soothe my ancestors and loosen what they were forced to carry in silence.

I know my ancestors living, estranged and transitioned into the afterlife, did what they could with what they had so I could be here now. 

I enter 2026 with a promise to feed my life force into relational ecosystems where my existence itself is nourishing. I did what my 22-year-old self dreamed of and more.

My life will be my offering not my secret. I am an odd, sacred, devoted, nerd that is here to offer a baseline of curiosity and genuine expression in the world. 

I’m calling in:

• success that is reciprocal

• abundance that stabilizes

• clarity without rigidity

• intimacy without confusion

• wealth without burnout

I will no longer shrink to avoid the possibility of facing the expansion and awe others mirror back to me. I’m embracing my shyness as a memory and signal for subtle social boundaries I need to maintain my light and to maintain enjoying being out and about in the world more regardless of what the world is saying I cannot or will not be. I am trusting the timing of what meets me next because I know it will arrive at just the right time, in just the right place - in all of the right ways, always.