I Was at the Top of My Career. Then I Quit My Job to Travel the World for 13 Months

At 37, I was burned out.

I’d been working full-throttle since college, and my career in TV had turned out better than I’d ever imagined. I’d moved to New York at 21, landing an entry-level job at CNBC at the height of the tech bubble. I worked my way up to a producer position, then made the jump to network news as a senior producer for Good Morning America at the age of 30. I worked with Diane Sawyer, and later Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos, and was part of the team that took the show to number one. For eight years, every morning, my alarm went off at 3 a.m. so that I could be in the studio by 4 a.m., overseeing two hours of live television before most people had finished their first cup of coffee. Thanks to breaking news, live broadcasts often extended into the daylight hours. I worked most holidays and a ton of weekends. I was at the top of my game, or so I believed then, in a job I enjoyed and did well. Despite my hours I still managed an active social life and made time for friends and family. At 35 I met a phenomenal man and we married under two years later. And did I mention I was killing it at the office? I thought I had this work-life balance thing down.

And then I hit a wall.

In September 2014 I had a moment of clarity that changed everything. Over the past year my frustration at work had skyrocketed. A morning show is a big, fun, glamorous news circus made up of huge personalities on and off the air. The people who create it work insane hours morning and night to create an environment in which anything can happen, because it’s literally live TV and anything can happen. During one particularly grueling morning, I stood still in the middle of the control room, listening to the yelling around me—a piece wasn’t going to make it. We needed to get on the air with breaking news, and our anchors couldn’t hear my cues about what was coming next. I felt like I was about to crack. In that instant it hit me that this craziness—one of the reasons I loved my job so much—hadn’t changed. My reaction to it had. That rush of adrenaline and pride I’d thrived on had been replaced with exhaustion and dread. I’d plateaued. I was restless, and I was terrified that I’d never get off this daily treadmill.

The logical part of me knew this feeling could just be part of “adulting,” the realization that the bloom can’t stay on the rose forever. But the voice inside me that I’d learned to listen to to get me the career I had said I needed a breather. I told my husband that night that I had to quit. My exact words were “I need a break. I can’t keep this up. I just want to stop.”

“What happens after that?” he asked. I didn’t know. I’d never quit anything before.

His next question was “Should we go travel?”

He had worked in the restaurant business his entire life. When he moved to New York from the Midwest to be with me two years earlier, he’d taken a job that he didn’t love but that paid the bills. He put in long hours that were at the opposite end of my day. Weekends together were nonexistent. As I finished at the office in the early afternoon, he would head into the restaurant. He’d get home around 2 a.m, an hour before I got up for work. Twice we had dates in that late-night-early-morning window: an after-work drink and dinner for him, an early morning coffee and breakfast for me. On one of those occasions, we were sitting in a diner near our apartment around 3 a.m. He was eating pancakes and an ice cream sundae; I had a BLT. The TV on the wall suddenly played the all-too-familiar Special Report music and the graphics reserved for breaking news. William and Kate's first baby had just been born. My phone started to buzz with emails, and the alerts rolled in. Date over. I kissed him goodbye and headed into the studio.

So that night, when he asked, “Should we go travel?” I didn’t hesitate. I pictured a year of uninterrupted dates and going to sleep at the same time.

Yes.

To be clear, I didn’t want to eat, pray, or love. I wasn’t in the dark days of a breakup, and my job hadn’t ended. I didn’t need to find myself. There was no crisis (yet), but I knew that a preemptive strike was needed. A pause for pause’s sake. It wasn’t so much an epiphany as that internal voice, telling me this was the right thing to do. It was the same voice that had guided my previous life-changing decisions—studying abroad, moving to New York, marrying my husband. It was always louder and clearer than the strains of fear and anxiety and confusion that often haunt big choices. When this voice spoke, it was never a matter of Should we do this? but rather How soon can we?

Over the next few weeks we hatched a plan to leave New York and began to tell family and friends. Some people thought it was completely crazy, that we were being irresponsible. Just as many said they wished they were doing the same. I gave my bosses 10 weeks' notice. It was by far the scariest moment of the entire process, not because I had doubts but because once I uttered the words, I knew there was no going back. (I spent the moments before the meeting panicking in a bathroom stall.) The first executive reacted in disbelief, then said he understood that I might need a break and asked if I wanted to take off a month or two or even six, as a sabbatical. He suggested that he could find a different spot for me at the show, with different hours. I was honest and direct with him: I wanted a year off to travel, and my last day would be mid-January. I think he mistook this announcement as a whim. He ended the meeting encouraging me to think it over. But I’d made up my mind.

Reactions from the rest of the executives were the same. As it sank in, I was asked to wait to tell the staff until just before I left, so, as one person put it, “as not to incite panic.” I was even offered the chance to put my job on ice, so to speak, if I would sign a contract to return to the position in a year. The pragmatist in me (not to mention my parents) loved the idea of a guarantee at the other end of whatever this was, but I knew I needed a clean break.

I politely declined, praying that I wasn’t officially the dumbest person in history.

The sense of calm I felt in the midst of these conversations and the whirlwind that followed was remarkable. As the realization set in that this was all happening and I scrambled to figure out health insurance and flights and long-term storage and the breaking of contracts, I felt a new sort of lightness. I knew then that no matter how this journey turned out, this was exactly where I should be.

We sublet our apartment, packed up our things, and by January 2015 we were on the road. On my last day at work, I set an auto-reply for my emails that said, “I’m out of the office, taking a trip around the world.” This remains my favorite use of email ever.

Now for a disclaimer: I’m very aware most people cannot do this. When we made the decision, we had no kids and I’d saved up enough fuck-you money to sustain me for a year or so without work. At the same time, I’m not sure I understood the chance I was taking, especially as a woman nearing 40 in an industry that highly values youth. I’m glad I didn’t. I had every intention of coming back to my career. I loved being a TV producer. I just wanted to take a step back. Get off the merry-go-round. Hit refresh. As kids we get summers off, a couple of months to recover. In college, students who decide to get lost in the world for a semester are applauded. But after that it’s expected that we’ll work, nonstop, for the next four or so decades, saving up for a few weeks off here or there, until we reach the more and more out-of-reach promised land of retirement.

I made a deal with myself that I would completely unplug from the working world while traveling. And I did, with glee. Job inquiries, LinkedIn requests, and emails from potential employers went unanswered. I didn’t allow myself to consider—much less worry about—what would happen when we returned to the real world.

For the 13 months that followed, we traveled to 26 countries on six continents, everywhere from the Amazon to Patagonia to the Sahara and Siberia and New Zealand. We spent a month living on an olive farm in the mountains of Mallorca, where we learned to herd sheep and received room and board in exchange for six hours a day of manual labor around the property. There wasn’t another house in sight, and at night the mountain went completely dark. We would sit outside with a glass of wine, look up at the cypress trees under the stars and listen to the goats talk to one another, the bells on their collars ringing as they walked around the land. We went to an island in the south of Thailand for three days and ended up staying four weeks, renting a house on stilts 30 feet back from where the ocean’s aqua blue tide rolled in. We had a late-night emergency room visit to a small but busy hospital during a wine festival in Argentina, where a kind stranger made sure my husband’s bleeding hand (he’d picked up a dropped bottle) received stitches as quickly as possible. A few weeks later another stranger, who became a friend, removed those stitches in a powerless salt hotel in Bolivia, while yet another new acquaintance held a flashlight. We brushed up on guitar (him) and French (me) during a month in Paris, shared homemade vodka with Russian families on a four-night train ride from Moscow to Lake Baikal, were moved to tears hearing the call to prayer in Marrakech, and giggled during late-night mating calls from geckos in Bali.

We came back to New York on a bitterly cold night in February. I still remember the cab pulling up to our building, and our walking into the empty apartment, ordering dinner from the same Vietnamese place we’d frequented for years, and going to sleep on an air mattress—feeling like nothing had changed even though everything was different. The movers brought our stuff back the next day. After living out of four bags for so long it was overwhelming to watch box after box coming in the door. Why did we need so much?

I wish I could say that the trust-in-the-universe attitude I’d adopted while traveling carried over into this next chapter, but in truth I panicked as soon as the plane touched down in New York. The inner voice that had spent months whispering reassurances it was all going to be okay was bound and gagged. The OCD and perfectionism that had been dormant in the steppes of Mongolia and on the deserted beaches of Tonga sneaked back up on me on the Upper East Side.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I decided I’d be back to work within a month of arriving home, and it was go time. Reality had other plans, and I did not start a job that month or for the rest of that spring. Looking back, it was the universe telling me we weren't ready. After 13 months away, we were shell-shocked to be back home. We sat on our newly moved-in sofa and stared at each other. Big grocery stores were jarring. We didn’t want to see friends. It felt like depression. We didn't expect sympathy from anyone after the incredible year we’d just had, and we were very happy to be back in the same country as our loved ones, not having to pack a suitcase up every three days. But it was a jolt to the system to be here, in one place, not on the road, without any prospect of a new destination ahead of us.

Or the prospect of a job.

So my husband and I kept traveling, thinking about how to reincorporate that spirit of spontaneity that we’d cultivated. We’d have interviews, then road-trip to Vermont. Or use miles to fly to Tokyo. A job offer came my way, but I knew wasn’t right for me. Having survived that low point, my inner voice told me to wait for something better. This time I listened.

We were in the Philippines when I found out that an executive producer from CBS News had moved to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. It had long been a dream of mine to work in late night. I did not know this person, and I emailed him cold, asking if I might be able to help. I hoped my reputation in our small world would convince him to give me a shot. In our first meeting he asked about my trip, as had everyone with whom I’d met during the job search. But unlike most interviews, which were dominated by the topic of my adventure, he then talked to me about the show, and we had a real conversation about what was needed and how I might be able to contribute. In our second meeting, he hired me. Eighteen months after leaving my last job, I walked into a new one. I again became part of a brilliant team that took a show to number one, and was promoted to co–executive producer less than two years later.

It’s been three years since I rejoined the working world. People often ask what made me leave my job and then how I wound up in a position that was even better for me. I’ve had time to reflect and this is what I know: Even if I'd left and come back to offers that were less than ideal, I wouldn't regret the time that I took for myself. The move was never about work. It was always about the life my husband and I wanted to live.

At the time, when people asked what had prompted me to leave, I liked to tell them I needed time off life. But that wasn’t true at all. I didn’t take 12 months away from life. In that time I ran toward it. I lived a rich, full, incredible adventure. Then after, when I made an active decision to return to my career, it felt like a real choice.

We don’t let ourselves come to a crossroads as adults. We spend our twenties and thirties setting ourselves up for a “good life” and are conditioned to think that following a premade path is what success looks like. I didn’t want to keep floating along in the lazy river of professional life. I wanted to give myself the chance to choose it again. And I did. It won’t come as a surprise that the lessons I learned in the months I was gone are a little clichéd, but that doesn’t make them less true: Take your hand off the wheel once in a while. Have faith in yourself. And most important, listen to the voice inside you. It’s telling you everything you need to know.

Denise Rehrig lives in New York. For more about her travels, check out ourfullstop.com.

Originally Appeared on Glamour