I didn’t mean for this to be a quiet season. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t marked on my calendar, and it certainly wasn’t framed in my mind as a stretch of intentional rest. In fact, I’d gone into the summer with a different kind of momentum, nine blog posts in under three months, riding a creative streak I didn’t want to lose. My goal had been at least one post a month, ideally one every two weeks. But somewhere in July, the edges started to fray. I was feeling burnt out, and I told my team as much.
When I’m burnt out, the signs are obvious to me, even if they aren’t to anyone else. Being autistic, I already spend a lot of energy masking in professional spaces, and burnout strips that ability away. My patience thins. My calendar feels like an enemy. Even a small request for an update lands wrong. It’s not fair to the people around me, they’re just trying to get things done, but those moments tell me I’m running on fumes.
I encouraged my team to take time off, partly because I could see they needed it too, and partly because something unusual was happening inside our own organization: there was a noticeable uptick in people taking real vacation time this summer. Not the quick long weekends we often pass off as rest, but actual, meaningful breaks. That visibility matters. Modeling rest matters. And while I don’t think any of it was planned in some coordinated way, it felt like a collective exhale after years of pushing hard without a true reset. It gave the rest of us permission to step back, even if only for a little while.
I had originally planned for a single week off, Disney with my littlest, then Beyoncé. Fun, yes, but not the kind of time that restores you. I talked myself into a second week. In hindsight, I should have gone for three. Some of that time was restorative; some of it was me falling into my usual staycation trap, doing chores instead of work, still filling every hour. I’ve learned I need at least part of my time off to be away from the house entirely, because that’s when I stop defaulting to “doing” and start actually resting. Two weeks was better than the one I’d planned. Next time, I might be brave enough to take all three.
And yet, even in the middle of all that noise and pressure, I keep coming back to the same pattern: every season I’ve grown in any meaningful way has been preceded by a stretch of quiet. It’s never the stretches where I’m running flat out, juggling deadlines, flying to conferences, keeping the inbox under fifty. It’s the days where my calendar stops dictating my brain, where the work shifts from reacting to making sense of what’s already happened. In a quiet season, I notice what I’ve been carrying for too long. I see where I’ve been moving on autopilot, or chasing someone else’s definition of impact. I get to ask myself the questions that don’t fit in a sprint retrospective: What actually matters to me right now? What am I building toward? Who am I in this role, in this industry, in this moment?
The irony is that this kind of pause is exactly what makes me better at the work when I come back, but the industry isn’t built to reward that. We’re wired for velocity. We celebrate the visible wins: the shipped features, the talks, the threads that go viral. But we rarely acknowledge the invisible labor of thinking, integrating, and recalibrating, because it doesn’t fit neatly into a status update. And so we treat the quiet like absence, or worse, irrelevance, when in reality it’s the thing that keeps us from burning out completely.
Leading in a climate like this comes with its own contradictions. I want my team to rest. I tell them often that taking a break is a good thing, and I try to notice when they’re pushing too hard. But I also know that they’re watching what I do more than what I say, and the reality is, I don’t always model it as well as I could. A few years ago, it felt like the conversation around burnout was shifting, companies were starting to understand that running people into the ground costs more than it saves, that healthy teams are more sustainable than exhausted ones. But lately, I feel like we’ve slid backwards. Even in places that value their people, the pressure to keep producing is hard to shake. Some of that pressure is external, but some of it is just me, seeing what’s happening in the job market, watching talented friends struggle for months to find something new, and not wanting to be in that position myself.
If I could change one thing, it would be for companies to remember that humans aren’t an infinite resource. Yes, I know we’re all replaceable in the most pragmatic sense, but there’s still a cost to burning people out and swapping them for someone new. It’s a cost measured in institutional knowledge lost, in creativity dulled, in trust eroded. I’m still learning how to balance the reality that protecting my own time and energy is part of how I protect my team’s, and that stepping back doesn’t have to mean stepping away.
What I’ve learned, slowly, and often the hard way, is that the quiet season isn’t a retreat from relevance, it’s an investment in it. The kind of relevance I want to have isn’t built on how many hours I can log or how often I can show up in someone’s feed; it’s built on depth, on perspective, on the ability to make sense of what’s happening in a way that helps other people. And you can’t get there without getting out of the rush long enough to see where you’re actually heading.
The reality is, none of us can outrun the uncertainty in this industry. Layoffs will happen. Markets will contract. Leadership will change. New tools will upend our workflows and our confidence. The only constant we have is the way we choose to meet those moments. For me, that means protecting the space to think, to rest, to listen, especially when the culture is screaming at me to do the opposite.
So yes, I’m writing again. And maybe I’m less “everywhere” than I used to be. But I’d rather show up less often and have something worth saying than burn myself out trying to convince the world I’m still here. The quiet season has its own kind of power. And I intend to keep making room for it.