The Resignation Letter

Maybe this is something you or someone you know can relate to. More and more, I think my experience is becoming a little too commonplace. It all started with the biggest resignation letter of my career. Hang on, that’s not true. It all started with the most sobering words I’ve ever heard in my life. 

“Sarah, if you don’t quit now, you won’t live to see your 45th birthday!” I could tell by the vein in her forehead my doctor wasn’t joking.

“Can’t I just promise not to work 65-hour weeks anymore or find a job in a less toxic and stressful environment?” I was sure we could come to some kind of arrangement. 

“This is the sixth time this year I’ve seen you for a stress-related symptom. Daily migraines, vestibular migraines, heart palpitations, panic attacks, intermittent numbness. You’re killing yourself. Some people can manage their stress by getting a different job, by cutting back their hours or by doing yoga every morning. But not you!” 

She continued driving her point home. “I can see it now. You’ve switched careers and you’re working in a nursery school, and before you know it, you’ve created SOPs and implemented a 360-feedback process for the kids. You’re not cut out for corporate. You’re too intense. I’m not kidding when I tell you if you don’t quit, you won’t live to see your 45th birthday. 

“Why don’t you and your husband cash out and go live in the wilderness somewhere? Write that book you’ve been telling me for years that work is getting in the way of accomplishing. Whatever you do, I don’t want to see you back here on your 42nd birthday. Got it? 

“Go home, enjoy your birthday and then wake up and quit your job.” 

I felt a little lightheaded as I walked to my car. My mother died from a stroke at a young age, so this hit home really hard. Much as I was driven to succeed–it’s in my nature–I had to concede that maybe she was right about me.  

I went home and had that talk with my husband you might have expected. He agreed with everything my doctor said, and in true husband fashion he said to me, “The first sign we get to confirm this is the path we need to take, we’ll give notice the next day or we give it until after our reviews (which meant our annual bonuses and stocks), whichever comes first. Either way, we’re going to leave California and move to an island, and buy a farm. What do you think?” 

A farm? Yeah, I liked that. I hadn’t ever thought about me living on a farm. I’m a New York City girl, but suddenly all I could think about was me in overalls and a straw hat, even chewing on straw while milking a cow or planting a seed that would grow up one day to feed us.  

We made a deal and shook on it. 

Well, That Didn’t Go Over So Well

We were very excited to tell our families. One by one, they all had the same reaction. I’ll say this, they weren’t excited, like at all. These words came from my husband’s oldest sister. She’s never been one to mince words. 

“Are you really leaving all of this behind to live on a farm? Look what you’ve achieved. Have you lost your minds? What do either of you know about farming?” 

“Nothing, but we’ll learn. And nope, this is the sanest we’ve ever been.” And it was. For the first time in both our lives, we felt truly settled. Both of us were raised to believe there’s only one path in life: school, job, climb the corporate ladder, get married, have kids, retire and maybe drive an RV around the country or play golf. 

I knew at this point logic and reason were supposed to kick in, telling us to figure out a way to continue working in a toxic and stressful environment. I asked myself how others do it. Do they go along to get along, really thrive in it or do they have a bunch of stress-related symptoms that cause their doctors to tell them to quit or die by 45? 

The more we mulled over this farm idea, the more we admitted we weren’t built for this corporate life. Whether our families got it or not, well, they didn’t have to live our lives.

We Had a Plan. Now We Just Needed That Sign.

Three months later, the biotech we both worked for announced a reduction in force. They’d start with people who wanted to take the buyout package and then they’d start the layoffs. 

Get out of town! Seriously? 

We were almost giddy the next morning when we went to our respective bosses’ offices to offer our resignation letters. My boss replied, “I’m going to miss the hell out of you, but I’m not surprised. You have been the hardest working person on my team, but you’ve also always been a square peg in a round hole in this corporate environment.” 

We laughed. 

“Remember the time during the FDA filing you came to work in Snoopy pajamas?”

“Oh yes! It was an all-hands-on-deck, no PTO granted, run-around-like-chickens-with-our-heads-cut-off, extremely stressful two weeks. I had a migraine…”

“No,” my boss reminded me. “You had vertigo! How you drove over the canyon to come to work will always be a mystery to me. But that’s you! I’m going to miss you and your work ethic. I’m glad you’re not quitting me, but quitting this … life, if you can call it that. If I didn’t have two in college and two about to enter college, I’d do the same thing.

“Promise me you’ll find a small house way out in the woods and write that book you’ve been talking about for years. And stop stressing about everything!” 

Farm Life, Here We Come! 

That was in 2008–yes, I just outed my age, but it will make sense later why I did that. We bought our 18-acre farm in April 2009. We got a few dairy goats, a whole bunch of chickens, some ducks, even a pig. We started growing lots of cool fruits from around the tropical world and vegetables, and we have one of the largest bamboo collections on the island. Oh what island did we leave Southern California for? Puerto Rico. 

And right about now, I can hear Adrienne, the owner of the PR agency I work for, saying, “Um, Sarah, get to the point. Nobody has all day!” 

OK, let’s fast forward past “it was a dark and stormy night,” i.e. Hurricane Maria and playing midwife to one of our pregnant goats when her baby got stuck because she was breech. Spoiler alert: we saved momma and her baby! I gotta tell you that experience brought me closer to God than anything before or since. 

I’ve discovered some things over these last 15 years here. 

• I love living on a farm. 
• I love having a menagerie of animals. 
• I love hiking in the mountains. 
• I love how easily we made friends with people all over the island, despite not speaking the language right away. 
• I love eating my breakfast while admiring the rising fog. 
• As I had done repeatedly in the corporate world of “exceeding expectations,” I managed to live 12 years longer than my doctor predicted if I continued working in the corporate world.  
• I’m also Popeye. What was it he used to say? “I yam what I yam.” 

Within a year of living on our farm in the middle of nowhere, I went absolutely bonkers! I became obsessive about needing to work. But I didn’t want to go back to project management. I wanted to be a writer, dammit! 

I ghost wrote a book for a client. I kinda liked that. The client asked me to ghostwrite another and then another. It was a subject I was familiar with: relocation to a new country where you know nobody and don’t speak the language. Before I knew it, I’d ghostwritten 15 books on various topics and written two books, including one about what it’s like for people like me who are more than one race living in a world that’s hung up on race, and slapped my own name on them. 

I started writing for Adrienne Greenwood Haus PR Agency early in 2023, mostly profile pieces for her clients. It was cool to get to know her clients through writing about them. As the agency started growing, she asked me to be her managing editor. 

I had worked for a PR agency before, but always as a write, never on the PR side. I had to take Adrienne’s publicity 101, 201 and 301 courses at lightning speed and I’m still learning. I get to write articles for and about our clients. I am a writing coach, collaborating with them to realize their dream of being a published book author. I just completed my first ghostwriting project for one of our clients. Although I’m not one to pat myself on the back, hearing clients express their happiness over my writing never gets old. It’s a reminder to me that 15 years ago, my husband and I made the right choice. We are both doing what makes us happy.

I believe at this point I’m supposed to tell you something like, “Carpe diem!” “It’s never too late to be what you might have been!” or my personal favorite, “I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.” 

I don’t suggest you go to the extremes I did to find yourself or reinvent yourself. I’m a special breed, from a long line of stressed out, type-A people who needed to live on a farm in the middle of nowhere to chill out–or mostly chill out. But I also couldn’t shake that desire to be what I have wanted to be since I was a little girl. So now I get to do both.