Gearing up for withdrawal

The last time I went away for more than 48 hours sans laptop was in 2010. That was seven years ago. Seven years. Every holiday (?) I’ve been on since then I’ve worked. Not all of it, but some of it.  Enough of it to know that I wasn’t completely switching off, letting go, being present. Back in 2014, I managed to stay offline for 72 hours.

It’s a  symptom of the freelancer’s lot. You take the work when you get it because you never know when you’ll get the next bit. Add to that the fear of being disconnected and having some or all of your clients find someone else while you’re gone and then staying with them out of convenience. [And you know this will happen because convenience is why you haven’t moved banks in 9 years or changed utility provider even though you know you should.] And you know that no matter how good you are, you’re not indispensable. There’s no contract. No paid leave. No redundancy clause.

That said, I wouldn’t swap the freedom and flexibility that freelancing offers for anything less than 353 days of paid leave per year from a corporate. I like what I do and like that I can do it from just about anywhere. It’s the ‘just about’ that brings me out in a cold sweat.

I’m off to Cuba. I hear tell that you can buy (not inexpensive) 30-minute vouchers for the Internet but that the Internet there might not be quite as fast as the slow Internet here. So rather than put myself through the torture of watching a large file upload to an FTP and get to 99% at 30 minutes, I’m steeling myself to go dark. Offline. For 10 days.

I’ve done the unthinkable and told my regular clients that I’ll be incommunicado. I’m figuring out how to post an out-of-office message on my various email accounts. And I’m working like a mad woman trying to clear my inbox before I leave. By the time the holiday comes, I’ll be exhausted.

And that will be great. Because I’ll have ten whole days to recover. I reckon I can decompress on the flight and not start to experience the first withdrawal symptoms until Day 2 in Havana. By that stage, I’ll have found a cigar factory and will be busy testing a theory I have about rum and tobacco so the anxiety levels will be minimal.

From experience, day 3 is when the full impact hits – that disconnectedness, that wondering what I’ll be going back to, that faint niggling worry that the workflow will have stopped entirely. And knowing this, by day 3, I plan to be on a beach, somewhere near Trinidad, by the water.  And there’s very little, in my book, that seawater can’t cure. Bring it on, I say, bring it on. Who knows, it might be the start of a whole new career.