Amanda Mohlenhoff: The Life-Changing Magic of a Creative Sabbatical

Amanda in costume for a performance during sabbatical.
Photo: Julia Nardin.

Tell us about the sabbatical. Why did you take it?

I'm American, but I have been living in Germany on and off since 2018. I was leading a UX team in the travel industry through the pandemic, and it was time when the business was really struggling. I left that job in October 2021. So I was not working in a corporate capacity between October 2021 and January 2024. It was just a little more than two years on a career break

As someone who has worked for VC-backed startups, I know the pace can be intense. How did it feel to no longer get Slack and emails? What are some of the changes you noticed as you stepped back? 

I mean, first of all, I was so burned out. I couldn't look at a computer screen for months after I quit. I have a little bit of a strange situation, because immediately after leaving my job, I had to leave Germany because my visa was tied to my work. That meant spinning down my life that I had built over four years in Berlin. 

I spent my sabbatical in Seattle, for the most part. I moved into a friend's house that had a spare mother-in-law unit and looked at the future in front of me and completely crashed. 

I could not function for a good, I don't know? Maybe another two months or three months? Burnout ultimately is a form of depression. I was just full of exhaustion from the burnout and then also from managing this large life change.

One thing that was really challenging in that time was: How do I structure my own time when nobody is imposing a schedule on me? I was also grieving something at the time and also grieving this change. 

I actually started making super complicated sourdough bread, which I think everyone else did in the pandemic. But because I was locked in Germany where bread is amazing I was like, “I'm not making sourdough, I can just walk down the street and get something really delicious.” 

Mmmmm sabbatical bread.

But then I got back to Seattle and I thought, “Shit, I can't afford to spend $17 on decent bread and everything else is terrible!” So the process of making bread over the course of several days mean that somebody's counting on me. Those yeasts are counting on me too! [laughs]

I would basically be doing whatever I was doing, such as writing in my journal or doing yoga or doing chores around my house. And then every half an hour you have to get up and turn the dough. And so it forced me into this structure.

You mentioned journaling and yoga, and I'm curious how you started to explore the empty space created by this break.

They say in order to make art, you have to get bored. And there were days when I was in my apartment, not trying to spend money and I didn’t know what to do. So I started to write music again, and I borrowed a bunch of gear from friends and eventually invested in some of my own stuff. 

But only analog stuff, no screens required, so that I could be expressive without having to squint at my tiny laptop screen. 

I tried to find ways to get out of the house and socialize. A lot of my friends were going to this queer night at the roller rink in Seattle, which happens on Wednesdays. And I didn't know how to roller skate. And I said, “I should do something physical.” And I was trying anything. And as long as it got me moving.

I started skating and then someone invited me rock climbing. I just asked myself, “What are people interested in around me? How does that dovetail with what I'm interested in or things that I enjoy doing?”

I was really seeking novelty. I knew that the antidote to boredom and depression is newness and learning new skills and building this confidence and allowing myself to be afraid, wobbling around on these roller skates. I'm old, I had to wear all the safety gear and stuff, it's all these Gen Z’ers whizzing by.

To be afraid, but still do the thing, was really a helpful experience that helped me retrain my mind to remember that I can just go somewhere any time I want. I can just go hiking. I don't need a plan or I need a person with me.

I also did The Artist's Way, which is a creativity course, but you can buy a book and just do it on your own. That taught me a couple of practices that really helped me during this time too, like writing in the morning, just like emptying your brain out, free association, whatever. Also I think in the book she calls it like “artist dates,” which is just you taking yourself on a date for anything that makes you curious or interested or joyful. 

So really seeking out these things and again, trying to make them social so that then I had something to look forward to and some accountability there. “Yes, I'll be at the next party a month from now.”

I'm a performance artist, on top of being a musician. And so I met with a friend who is a big time theater producer in Seattle. And I started to daydream about putting on a show. He said, “You’ve got time, you’ve got money in the bank, why don't you put a show on and make it anything you want?” 

I thought I would bring a little slice of this Berlin that I miss. 

It seems poetic that this moment in your life where you felt burned out and a little trapped in Berlin, ended up being the fuel for the creative expression.

Absolutely. I mean, this is integration, right? You have an intense experience. It takes a little time and it often takes a layer of abstraction in order to be able to process that fully. For me, I'm a dancer, I'm a yogi, I'm a cyclist. I'm in my body a lot. And so to be able to process this through singing, which is a whole body experience.

Dance performance was also a really, a really powerful tool that helped me come to terms with what actually happened there. How was I complicit in my own burnout? What was I lacking? When I was really integrating all this stuff and I was really being expressive and really creative I felt supported by people around me who were collaborating on these projects with me? I thought, “This is maybe this is what I needed. Maybe it wasn't Berlin's fault after all.” 

And so I came back to Berlin after it was all said and done.

It’s interesting that America “refilled” your energy, but you wanted to head back to Germany.

I was trying to see if I like the lifestyle in the US and I gave myself a lot of runway to explore that in different ways. If I want to have a family, do I want to do it in the States? Or do I want to do it in a place where there's a bit more social safety net and fewer guns? And in the end, that was a big deciding factor. I don't want to help my kids understand why they have to do active shooter drills in first grade. That's really scary.

When you went back to Berlin to work, how much does it mirror the life you were living on sabbatical? Did you make any changes from the previous stint there?

I ended up kind of tripping over a bunch of my unresolved baggage from the pandemic when I first moved back, because I had left in a hurry in 2021 as lockdowns were just starting to lift and they were quite strict here. I use all the skills that I had built over the last two years to get through it. And one was asking for help. 

I negotiated with my new company to give me an advance allowance basically on my personal development budget. I asked them to make an exception for me to get a coach to help me readjust back to corporate life. 

You took nearly two years off. How did you navigate that length of time financially?

I had a bunch of savings that I had amassed, especially during the pandemic when there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. 

On sabbatical I was living really frugally. I made my own bread, as I mentioned before. I had a little garden and I helped friends who had bigger gardens in exchange for produce. And as a performer, I would get paid to perform, though I was performing sporadically.

My second year of sabbatical, especially, I said, “I need to do something to stretch my money.” So I just did whatever odd jobs I could. I walked dogs for friends.

I started selling vintage clothes. I go to Burning Man sometimes, and that community is always ravenous for costume pieces in the weeks before large festival events. And so I would basically go to the Goodwill bins with gardening gloves and dig through all these clothes and stuff and find things that I thought people would wear, take them home, wash them, mend them, catalog, tag them. That along with some dog and housesitting is how I paid my rent that way for two months.

I was really careful about never running out of money but when I got down to $20,000 across my German and American accounts, that was too close for comfort.

You were able to use what two things you had abundance: time and creative capacity and you would just combine those things to result in not only income — but I'm sure you met people to open up your doors for you. It's a change of pace from moving pixels on a screen all day and and it sounds like that was like the formula you wanted to preserve as you moved forward.

Definitely. And it's cool to take the time and do that. I have a friend who owns an organic farm outside of Portland, Oregon. And I just went and worked on the farm for a week in exchange for literally a boatload of vegetables. I was really trying to see, “what actually is my relationship to work? Do I hate this? Do I hate work? Am I intimidated by this? Am I just too tired?” 

I worked on a farm, which is really physical. So I'm not too tired to work. I thought maybe I became exhausted because I was working for someone else's dream. And so then I produced my own, I wrote a musical and it was really successful. 

And I thought, okay, well, “I can also work hard on my own ideas.” All of these things helped me build confidence and then selling clothes or dog walking was like, okay, I'm rebuilding my confidence in my ability to work in all of these seemingly random, but actually kind of cool, creative, funky ways.

So you had a bunch of hypotheses and you're testing them? I'm sure in retrospect it seemed methodical, but I'm sure at the time it didn't feel that way.

No, I was very intentional about it. I thought I was going to be out of work for a year, so that's how I broke it up. The first three months I'm just gonna smoke weed – legal in Washington by the way – on the couch. I’m just going to go hiking and sit in this hot tub I got with the place I was renting.

On paper, this seems like you just hopped back into your old life and I’m not sure that’s how it feels.

I mean, yes and no. 

I stumbled into a LinkedIn job posting for a job that I knew that I was extremely qualified for and a company that I really liked and a product that I had used to go cycling. 

So I applied. I was taking a design course too at the time thinking, “maybe I'll become a freelance product designer?” I never thought they would hire me. I had moments of doubt and stress over the course of my time off. But for this application I told myself to just have fun with it.

Now my KPIs are, “how many people are going out on their bicycles because of what my teams are working on?” It's not a venture backed startup. And then everybody working there are mountain people. They will tell their coworkers they will finish up their work in the evening and spend the afternoon skiing

What’s your advice to people considering taking a break? 

I tell everyone to do it. Your life has seasons. Sometimes it's time to buckle down and do some stuff. And sometimes it's time to focus on other aspects of your life, your one life that you have before you die forever.

The other thing I tell people about is unstructured time and how debilitating that can be. It's like looking at a blank page and you think, “How do I even start? What do I do?” And then you end up just doom scrolling. Don't give into the doom scroll. 

Amanda in 🇵🇹

Have a routine, especially free writing in the morning. Fill three pages with anything in your brain. Don't judge it. You don't have to read it again ever. 

It was helpful because I knew that every day I'm going to get up. I'm going to have a cup of tea. I'm going to write a page and a half. Then I'm going to need breakfast and I'm going to make toast. And then I'm going to finish my last pages. This was every day. and that gave me some insight into how my mind works. It helped me process my experiences. 

I also tell people to do whatever it is that makes you feel calm in your body. I would go to the Arboretum in Seattle all the time and just walk. Get out of the house, go be with friends, co-work from other people's houses. Even if they're working like a corporate job, have lunch together and then work on your own stuff.

Don't isolate yourself just because your schedule is different from people around you.