After about 3 months, I made the tough decision to leave. Ultimately, the commuting and early start time left me feeling exhausted when I got back to the city. The first few weeks, when I would attend my usual evening runs, I felt like a literal zombie. I was so tired I could fall asleep while standing (running). It got slightly better as the weeks went on, but I was in a constant state of fatigue. My body was not recovering well after runs, and my running started to suffer. After my Santa Rosa half marathon in late August, where I missed my PR by ~30 seconds, I knew I had to leave. I had been in great shape, but in the 3 months of employment, my fitness declined drastically. The toll on my physical health started to affect my mental health, and I summoned up the courage to call it quits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been a month since then, and I had a brief stint of interviewing at new companies. I made it beyond a few onsite rounds, got rejections, and considered returning to tech, but have since canceled those processes. I was burnt out from juggling the new job, my real estate business, and training for a race. I did not have enough time for self-care and decided to take the rest of the year to myself. I\u2019ve got big travel plans in December and would rather not start a new job before then. After I get back, I\u2019ll figure out in which direction to move forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am learning to cope with just \u201cbeing\u201d. I\u2019m a doer and feel like my life has always been full-gas, with every day curated for maximum efficiency. It\u2019s a jarring feeling to stop and be idle. However, even with less \u201cdoing\u201d, I somehow still find my days packed full. Self-care is more involved and time-consuming than I gave it credit for, and I am spending my days doing just that. I finally have time to catch up on organizing, cleaning, reading, writing (this blog!), finances, knitting, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This wraps up my crazy year so far, with more changes than I (and my friends \ud83d\ude05) can keep up with. With less than 2 months till the end of the year, I hope to find some peace in my chaotic life. And to finish up way overdue blog posts. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few months after being laid off, I took up a new job as an Assistant Project Manager at a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7809"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7813,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7809\/revisions\/7813"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sallybzhao.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}