Written in 2015.
Written at a moment when narrowing my life felt less like loss and more like relief.
Midlife crisis: why Iām taking a year off
Today is my forty-seventh birthday.
For months, I had been taking a long and sometimes uncomfortable look at my life. Becoming a stay-at-home parent had shifted my understanding of what mattered and what did not. It forced a reckoning with how I was spending my time, my energy, and my attention.
What came into focus was simple, even if acting on it was not.
My wife and my son are the centre of my life. That realisation made everything else feel negotiable. Projects, plans, platforms, side pursuits. I had accumulated too many of them, each demanding a little more than it gave back.
So I decided to stop.
For a year, I would set aside everything that was not essential. This blog would remain, lightly. Everything else would wait. Not as a retreat, but as a deliberate narrowing.
The intention was not disappearance. It was presence.
I wanted to be a better husband and father. I wanted to address my health properly. I wanted to simplify my finances. I wanted to read, walk, train, and be useful where it mattered most. I wanted to repair relationships that had frayed through neglect and distance. I wanted to be available to the people who had earned that availability.
Calling this a midlife crisis felt honest enough. It was not an escape or a rejection of responsibility. It was an acknowledgement that continuing as I was would only deepen the problem.
I did not know then what the year would bring, only that stepping away was the clearest way I could think to step forward.
Some pauses are not about stopping, but about choosing what is allowed to continue.