Kym Wootton
- Kym Wootton quit her six-figure job at a consulting firm to take a gap year.
- She said she was "emotionally wrapped up" in her job, but decided quitting was best for her.
- Wootton plans to use her gap year to write a book and spend more time with her sons.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kym Wootton, a 42-year-old from Boulder, Colorado. Insider has verified her employment with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Before I quit to take a gap year, I'd been working since the day I turned 15 — I worked throughout high school. Sometimes I had two jobs. I did the same when I went to college, and I got my first office job as soon as I graduated.
I never took a break, and I was raised with the idea that the value you bring is your work. During my career, I've mostly worked in leadership positions, and I was good at moving up because I brought a lot of passion and energy that companies generally rewarded. The money was exciting too.
Over those years, it didn't occur to me to ask myself, "Do I want to be doing this?"
It felt like I was on autopilot
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working as the chief administrative officer at a consulting firm, where I was earning six figures a year. I managed the marketing, human-resources, IT, and project-management departments. I was also responsible for integrating companies that we were buying.
The stress of the job was increasing. I would work from about 7:30 a.m. to about 6:30 p.m. I'd sometimes have meetings as early as 6 a.m. if I was working with someone on the East Coast.
Deep down, I had always wanted to write a book. I'd felt that I was meant to be a novelist since I was a kid, but I never felt like that was a job path available to me. It was a time many of us were reevaluating what was important in our lives.
I kept trying to write on the weekends or in the evenings, finding 30 minutes where I could, but that did not work for me. I was working a lot of hours, checking emails, and working on projects for my day job on the weekends. And when I wasn't so busy with meetings, I was trying to keep up with my sons and their activities. Unfortunately, I just couldn't find the discipline to also be a good writer. And so, I felt like I needed to not be working at my job anymore.
My husband was really supportive, and we started to think about how we could make quitting my job financially possible. When we were in lockdown, my family naturally started spending less money. We weren't going out to eat or taking vacations. In summer 2021, we bought an investment property so we could have more passive income. And though we still had our mortgage repayments, we'd paid off all our debts by summer 2022.
I kept saying to myself that I needed to find the right time to quit
I was emotionally wrapped up in the success of the company, and I felt guilty for leaving because people depended on me — I had worked there for 13 years.
It felt unfair to my coworkers and the rest of the leadership team. I was also nervous about how I would find my value when I wasn't working.
I soon realized that I just had to stop thinking like that, and that I should accept that there would never be a "right" time to leave. I told myself that, right now, quitting is the most important thing for me.
I decided to prioritize my family and my dream of writing, and I handed in my notice in December 2022. Afterward, I felt freer and more excited than I could have ever imagined — I knew I'd made the right decision.
I hope to have the first draft of my book manuscript done by early summer 2023, then I want to do some editing and start querying agents. The first draft I'm working on is a dark-dystopian novel. I've had a lot of fun writing it.
After the gap year, I don't think I want to go back to doing the type of work that I did before, but I've thought about doing consulting in the future. I've also thought about starting to copywrite or doing another job that lets me use my writing skills.
I'm not worried about what a career gap will look like on my résumé. Overseeing HR meant that I knew a lot about recruiting, and we were OK with gaps because contacts often recommended candidates to us, and we made sure that they had the skills. I also have a lot of contacts I could rely on if I wanted to go back into the industry.
This gap year has helped me check my ego and made me realize that I don't need "chief" or "vice president" as my title.
I couldn't have quit my job if I didn't have a supportive partner. He believes in me and is passionate about making my dreams happen.
Over the past three months, I've been enjoying wonderful mornings with my sons before they go to school. My mornings used to be frantic and frenzied, full of early meetings. Even if I was physically with my sons having breakfast, I would be very distracted. Now, I can be more present for them. I've also made a lot of time for friends that I wasn't as connected with — we've gone out for lunch, fun dinners, and a weekend getaway.
The pace of my day is so much slower now, and the freedom of that is shocking. I hadn't realized how much tension I'd been holding in.