Why I Left My Dream Job
For many years, I designed buildings around the world—schools in Rwanda, houses in the Philippines, refuges after disasters. I was an architect working with nonprofits to create safe spaces where they were needed most. I had my dream job. But over time, something shifted.
I started out as a disgruntled architecture student desperately seeking out alternative career paths to the cubicles of corporate design. I love the creativity of architecture, but I knew after some experience that I wanted to focus my work a bit further afield. An extreme stroke of luck threw me into an organization that launched my career into the humanitarian field overseas. I willingly leapt into a leading role with a small nonprofit called Journeyman International, which required me to move to Rwanda when I was 25 years old. This new direction led me into a completely unfamiliar yet absolutely magnificent part of the world. I lived and worked there for 6 years in a country where change was a familiar concept. Having transformed after years of war and genocide, Rwanda was the world’s blueprint for change.
During this time, I met and worked alongside truly some of the world’s most exceptional individuals, most of whom taught me a life lesson or two along the way. After waiting out the pandemic in Africa, I moved my home base to Indonesia where I continued working in the same role. Again, my context was my source of inspiration. Living in Asia was a whole different world, and I found myself overwhelmed with wonder at the people and the stories that crossed my path. I truly soaked in all the beauty of that decade in humanitarian and sustainable architecture. Working in such interesting places gave me deep insight into how people build and adapt in extreme conditions.
Running this architectural nonprofit was my dream job, as well as the source of immeasurable fulfillment and opportunity for about a decade of my life… until it wasn’t. While my passion for my work brought so much joy, it also led me to take on an identity that left no room for any other part of me to occupy. I was engulfed until it sucked away all the energy I had, leaving me a hollow shell, longing for the passion to come back. It was a classic case of burnout. So after months of spinning between countless, intricately-planned business strategies and grasping at anything that might reignite my spark, I decided to scrap it all and quit the dream job. It was time for something totally different, to explore a new way forward.
This would be my “sabbatical,” my transition.
As a person obsessed with purpose, I was fully incapable of just setting off without an internal game plan. I needed a goal - a dream to chase - and this goal would need to connect back to what first motivated me to change my life’s work in the first place. Truth be told, it was not just about burnout. My passion had not disappeared; it had relocated.
In the beginning of my career, I lived to network, connect, and co-create. I took a leading role as a strategic matchmaker of people who would bring sustainable construction projects to life alongside people in need. As my path through countless humanitarian contexts led me across the most incredible, inspiring stories of human resilience, I began to notice something that made my stomach turn.
During several years of working with a village in rural Rwanda to design public educational spaces for the residents of that region, I was tasked to help raise awareness (and funding) so the project could continue to grow. I interviewed local kids and adults, shared countless clips online about how important this community project was, and even hired a team of filmmakers to create a documentary that I attempted to share across as many networks as I could. But the struggle to reach audiences continued.
And that was just one example. Nobody was seeing these stories of impact and change, and as an attuned observer of change, I grew more and more agitated that important projects were not gaining the attention they deserved. Stories about self-sufficiency of communities, the youth rising up to build their own future, the joyful labor of people working in impossible conditions to make the world around them a little more positive, were falling through the cracks. Thousands of stories of everyday humans adapting to extraordinary changes were not being told to the wider audiences they deserved. There was a gap in the system, and I had a hunch that I could help to fill it. This was my new purpose.
All these years I didn’t realize I was already living the life of a roving documentarian, constantly on the move and connected to local realities. And with a growing itch to amplify these realities to the wider world, I couldn’t stay where I was. I had to face the music and leave the comfort of the old dream job for the new one.
The paradox of having seemingly limitless choices and pathways is that you can get paralyzed and sink into an inner oblivion of mental thought-loops. Having nothing but time was incredibly intimidating - how would I go about recalibrating my whole life? After some consideration, I deduced that building a new identity from scratch required me to immerse myself in a context that was completely foreign - South America. It was a continent I had never seen before and knew almost nothing about. New places, new perspectives, new ideas.
What could go wrong?
This blog is where I’ll share stories from the road—of people, places, and the everyday brilliance that keeps communities going. I hope you’ll come along.
