Jan 11, 2026
It's Tuesday, August 12 at 10:51 AM. I press send on an email. It's short:
To whom it may concern,
I completed the Leave of Absence request form. My anticipated leave dates are Sept 8 – Oct 17.
All the best, (Lea)
The next day, I receive a reply. It's the one I'm expecting, but it still makes my stomach flip:
Hi (Lea),
Thank you! You're confirmed for unpaid leave from September 8 - October 17th. (HR Representative) will be in touch.
Please let us know if you have any questions in the meantime.
Ah, boy did I have a lot of questions, but hell if HR had the answers. Was this the right decision? Would I be fired over this? What would my parents think? What would my coworkers think? Was my stupid project at work going to ship before the deadline? Why did I even care about work? What was I going to do over my leave? Would taking leave even help?
Frankly, my decision to take a leave of absence was impulsive. The day before I sent that email, I found myself sitting at my laptop, completely incapable of doing work. A swarm of fretful thoughts swirled in my mind. Each keystroke felt like a thousand pounds. My usual coping strategies—grabbing a cup of coffee or going for a walk—felt more like homeopathy than actual cures.
But ultimately, that moment led me to question why I was feeling so burnt out, and led me to pinpoint four reasons why I needed to take leave:
I felt exhausted at work. I'd been putting in fifty to sixty hours a week consistently for the past year and a half, and it was starting to wear on me. I started getting eye floaters, and my knees and hips constantly popped. I hadn't seen a dentist or doctor in forever.
Perfectionism also started to get the better of me. Every mistake I made felt like daggers. I was anxious about doing any work, lest I break something and ruin my self-image. This, combined with the pressure to hit deadlines, caused me to lose much sleep.
And it wasn't just the workload or the perfectionism: I managed an intern at work this past summer, and I was horrible at it. We never quite broke down the formal barrier between us, and I wasn't able to give him the feedback or the technical guidance that he needed. His project shipped in a half-broken state, and ended up getting rolled back. Perhaps it was his own incompetence, perhaps it was bad person-to-project fit, perhaps it was bad leadership at the company deciding to scope-creep at the last second. Regardless, I had to deliver the final "no, we are not extending a return offer" to him. And he was frustrated, devastated, and rightfully angry.
Speaking of leadership, I'd also become highly cynical of leadership at the company. Without going into detail, when deadlines slipped and focus shifted to the team I was on, leadership started pointing fingers rather than offering support. I could feel the stress bleeding through my manager, who's usually extremely competent at absorbing that kind of pressure.
I felt anxious about A.I. As a software engineer, I felt existential dread over the existence of A.I. Was all the code I had written going to be fed to the machine? What was the point of writing good code if the higher-ups only cared about deliverables? One of my favorite aspects of software engineering is finding elegant and creative solutions to problems, and that ethos felt like it had been paved over in favor of shipping as much slop as possible.
This is not to mention the economic and social uncertainty I felt from A.I. Is the A.I. industry just an enormous bubble? What happens once it pops? How will my friends in the arts find a living?
I felt lonely. Living in upstate New York, the furry scene lacked what I needed on a week-to-week basis; there just wasn't the frequency of events that I had grown accustomed to living in the Bay Area.
I attribute this largely to geographic spread. I was living in a suburban/rural area. There are lots of great furry events in New York City, New Hampshire, Long Island, and Connecticut, but they were too far and too infrequent to satisfy my social needs.
My living situation felt miserable. Living with my parents was driving me mad. I hated how cold and dim they kept the house. They are very frugal, and the complete lack of decor made the house gloomy.
Not all of my misery was due to my parents though. I was working from home three days a week, and my desk setup was awful. My eyes felt sore at the end of each day because my desk was so poorly lit. Working from my bedroom meant I never felt I could fully disconnect from work: seeing my work setup there consistently primed me to think about work.
Despite all these systemic issues, I still felt conflicted about taking leave. My income felt like a blessing. I thought taking leave would be a blight on my record; as soon as I left, I was sure that all my mistakes would come to light, and, without the chance to defend myself, I would be let go soon after.
On Friday, September 5, I shut my laptop, feeling confident that, for better or for worse, a new phase of my life was about to begin.