The Summer I Stopped Being Important
What two months away from work taught me about identity, money, and the lie we tell ourselves about being indispensable
I wrote the first version of this in 2017. My perspective has evolved since then. The underlying lesson hasn’t.
In the summer of 2017, I did something that made my colleagues look at me like I’d lost my mind. I quit my job and took two months off to stay home with my kids.
Not a sabbatical. Not a “work from home with the kids around” arrangement. I stepped fully away from client work, project deadlines, and the constant hum of professional relevance — and I spent the summer painting, going to the beach, and staying up too late watching movies with a five-year-old and an eight-year-old.
I thought I was giving my kids a gift. It turned out they gave me one instead. That summer taught me things about work, identity, and what actually matters that I’m still drawing on almost a decade later.
You’re not as essential as you think you are
Before I left, I did what every conscientious professional does: I documented everything, briefed my successor, checked in with every team member. And I still worried. What if something fell apart? What if they needed me and I wasn’t there?
Spoiler alert, they didn’t need me. Projects went ahead as planned. The team adapted, found new rhythms, and the world kept turning. My colleagues missed me — which was nice — but they were fine.
This was humbling in the best possible way. I’d been carrying around this quiet belief that things would fall apart without me, and it turned out that belief was more about my ego than reality. They made decisions instead of relying on me to make them. They solved problems in ways I wouldn’t have thought of, and, best of all, when given the opportunity to figure it out on their own, they thrived.
It made me wonder how much of my “being essential” had actually been me getting in the way.
Money matters less than the story you tell about it
My grandfather was a bricklayer. He only worked when the weather was good, which meant whatever he earned in the warm months had to carry his family of five through winter. Money was often tight, but he was pretty philosophical about it. He used to say, “Money comes, money goes. Somehow it always works out.”
And somehow, it always did.
I planned ahead for my two months without income. I saved what I could, though it wasn’t quite enough to fully replace my paycheque. I braced for the stress. But it never really came. Without the daily commute, the bought lunches, the coffee runs, the convenience spending that fills the gaps of a too-busy life, we spent far less than I expected. Parks are free. Beaches are free. Lazy mornings at home cost nothing.
It turns out that a huge chunk of what I thought I “needed” to earn was just the cost of maintaining a pace of life that wasn’t making anyone happy. I wasn’t spending money on things I loved. I was spending money on shortcuts and compensations for a schedule that left no room for the things that were actually free.
The hustle is hurting everyone around you
I have vivid memories from my own childhood of lazy summer days and long nights staying up past my bedtime. I wanted my kids to have that experience too. More than that, I wanted them to have a stretch of childhood where they weren’t constantly being told to hurry up so we could all get to work and school and daycare on time.
The first week was awkward. We were so wired into routine that we didn’t know what to do with unstructured time. But after about a week, something shifted. We found a groove. Mornings were slow. Afternoons were for adventures — usually something low-key like painting or wandering through a market. Some nights we went to bed early; others we stayed up ridiculously late. It didn’t matter. We had nowhere to be.
As the weeks passed, I could feel myself becoming calmer, which I expected. But what I didn’t expect was that the kids changed too. They were kinder to each other. They laughed more and fought less. They started telling me stories from the school year that I’d never heard — things they’d been carrying around all year with no space to share them.
We don’t think of kids as being stressed out. But when both parents work, kids often have longer days than the adults do — drop-off before work, pickup after. They absorb our pace. They feel the rush even when they can’t name it.
That was the revelation I wasn’t prepared for. I’d been telling myself I was grinding for my family’s sake. And maybe I was. But the evidence of that summer was hard to argue with: when I slowed down, everyone around me got happier. Not just a little. Measurably, visibly, unmistakably happier.
There will always be another project
Did I miss out on interesting work opportunities that summer? Probably. Does it matter? Nope. Not one little bit.
There will always be another project, another client, another opportunity. But my kids will never be that age again. And I have never — not once, not for a single moment — regretted choosing that summer over the work.
I think we overestimate the cost of stepping back and underestimate the cost of never doing it. We tell ourselves we can’t afford to take a break, but we never calculate what we’re spending by not taking one — in health, in relationships, in the slow erosion of knowing who we are outside of what we do for a living.
The real lesson
When September came, I felt calm and genuinely excited to get back to work. Not relieved. Not desperate. Just ready. That’s a very different feeling than the one most people have coming back from a week off, already dreading Monday.
I came back sharper, more creative, more patient, and with a much clearer sense of what I wanted my professional life to actually look like. The summer hadn’t been an interruption to my career. It had been a stepping stone to what came next.
Almost a decade later, I think about that summer regularly. Not with nostalgia — but with gratitude. It was the first time I’d given myself permission to stop be a “productive member of society” and just… be. And what I found on the other side wasn’t laziness or irrelevance or falling behind. It was clarity.
If you can’t remember the last time you truly disconnected, I’d gently suggest trying it. Not because you’ve earned it. Because you might be surprised by what you learn about yourself when the noise stops.
My grandfather was right. Money comes and money goes. But somehow it always works out.
The summers, though. Those don’t come back.
When’s the last time you genuinely disconnected? Not checked-email-by-the-pool disconnected, but truly present, unhurried, with nowhere-to-be disconnected? What did you learn about yourself when the noise stopped?
I’m Katie Bedford. I spent a decade helping agencies run better. Now I help agency leaders think better — about their business, their role, and what it all actually means. If something in this piece hit a nerve, I’d love to hear about it.