1 Year Later: What I Did After Leaving Tech
Lessons from embracing ambiguity, healing through art, and building community.
July marks my one-year anniversary of leaving tech after burnout led me to take a 12-week medical leave and forced me to re-evaluate my career. I left after realizing the corporate career path no longer aligned with my values and life goals. Outside of a deep gut feeling that this was the right choice, I had no idea what would come next.
This was a year of exploration and healing: freedom from corporate performance, joy from pursuing my creative passions, anxiety from sitting with uncertainty, grief from processing the root causes of my burnout, and ultimately, clarity about who I am and where I want to go. The past year has been a crash course in self-growth and learning to find my voice in unfamiliar spaces.
A quick milestone update: I’m celebrating my one-year post-corporate anniversary by launching my website: yiannie.com! Over the past few months, I’ve been testing small-group burnout recovery and creative reflection workshops, and I can’t wait to offer them to more people. Sign up on my website if you want to be notified of upcoming workshops.
Looking back on the year, I wanted to document my journey and share four lessons that helped me navigate ambiguity after stepping away from corporate to build my own intentional career.
1. Experiment with a Clear North Star
My reset year was full of experimentation—with moments of triumph and moments of failure. Learning to embrace both with grace is an ongoing journey.
Both a pro and con of working outside of corporate is the limitless possibility: How do you prioritize what to work on when you have complete freedom and get to make your own structure? This is where setting a clear North Star and mission statement became essential in guiding my decision-making and how I spent my energy.
I took on a mix of projects that aligned with my interests and experience: content creation, 1:1 marketing strategy consulting, corporate burnout presentations, and creative reflection workshops. While the formats were different, they all pointed toward the same North Star: advocating for burnout recovery, intentional career design, and emotional healing through storytelling.
By the end of the year, I built a portfolio of projects and gathered helpful data points that show me the direction my soul wants to continue growing.
2. Invest in Joy as a Non-negotiable
When I hit rock bottom, art and writing brought me back to life. Stepping into creative flow regulated my nervous system, taught me to value process over outcome, and helped me let go of perfectionism. Which is why I doubled down on both after leaving tech: I took local studio art classes, enrolled in a creative nonfiction course with a writer I admire, went on a writing retreat, and attended events that resonated with me. A year later, those exact experiences ended up forming the bedrock of the workshops I design today.
I still had to unlearn old conditioning—the belief that we shouldn’t spend money on non-productive hobbies unless we’ve “earned it.” Now, I view investing in joy as a non-negotiable contribution to our health. We’re taught to buy material goods as a coping mechanism for being in jobs that exhaust us. What if we directed those resources toward experiences, learning, and hobbies that bring lasting fulfillment instead?
3. Finding Community (and Redefining “Networking”)
Stepping out of tech was isolating because I didn’t have creative entrepreneurs in my immediate circle—making it hard to visualize a non-traditional career path. I had to actively seek out artists, writers, coaches, therapists, and multi-passionates who had also walked away from high-performing corporate tracks to go on a journey of building sustainable career paths for themselves.
Learning how others navigate their lives while processing chronic illness, separation, or grief showed me how resilient we are. There is no single “right” way to live.
An unexpected perk when you pursue work you care about: networking stops feeling like a chore. As someone who experienced burnout after the pressure of participating in obligatory “circle of deaths” networking activities in business school, this was a refreshing breath of fresh air. Every conversation felt like a genuine connection rather than a transactional exchange. And something I’m starting to learn is that neurodivergents often have to experiment and build our dream career because the traditional mold was never built for us.
4. Doing the Deep Internal Work
To build a sustainable future, I knew I had to address the root causes of my burnout—specifically, lifelong patterns and beliefs rooted in my upbringing as an eldest immigrant daughter. Using high performance as a survival coping mechanism while masking left me constantly exhausted with a dysregulated nervous system. And while on the outside I might have looked like I had my shit together, my emotional regulation was a wreck, often leading to periods of anxiety and depression.
During this gap year, I was late-diagnosed with inattentive ADHD and began focusing on C-PTSD and inner-child healing through EMDR and therapy. I took a Mental Health First Aid course, and dove into research on how ADHD manifests in women. I also went down a rabbit hole of reading memoirs about resilience, trauma recovery, and Asian American mental health. Reading other people’s real stories was just as healing as talking to them.
My list of recommended books and resources on ADHD and C-PTSD:
Gender Issues and AD/HD: Research, Diagnosis, and Treatment by Patricia O. Quinn and Kathleen G. Nadeau
Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate
Permission to Come Home by Jenny Wang, PhD
The Pain We Carry by Natalie Y. Gutierrez, LMFT
A few memoirs on mental health by Asian American authors that I loved (trigger warning: these books tackle heavy but very real subjects):
What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
House of Sticks by Ly Tran
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
What’s next for Burnout BFF?
I’m excited to host more in-person creative reflection workshops and virtual intentional career circles to help exhausted high-achievers connect with their intuition and recover from burnout. I’ll continue to share my behind-the-scenes reflections and my healing journey in my newsletter.
If you’re in the Seattle area, I’m leading a small group creative reflection workshop on 8/8 where we’ll use Pantone colors as a guide to tap into our intuitive energy and reflect on our dream future. You can grab a spot here.
If you want to be notified of upcoming workshops, subscribe to the Burnout BFF Luma event calendar.
Your journey has been incredible to witness. Your past year has been rich with growth and experiences in unimaginable ways - thank you for sharing!
👍👍❤️