Rebecca Sperry

“They’re taking a sabbatical.” My department’s secretary said about my advisor via email the other day. Anyone that has been around the world of higher education has more than likely heard this phrase said about a professor and although we all know what it means to take a sabbatical, I’m not entirely sure if any of us non-professors actually knows what a sabbatical looks like. I’ve always thought to myself, why not just use the term, paid leave of absence or temporary leave. Heck, why not call it what we all assume it is, a paid vacation. But in the classic, we’re intellectual and need to sound it fashion of higher education, you never hear that your professor is taking a paid vacation, they’re taking the mysterious sabbatical. 

A quick google search of the word and you will find the following definition, “a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked.” I know that every job comes with its own benefits, I taught public school for seven years and was only contracted to work 186 days a year, but to be granted an entire year off, paid, for every seven worked (traditionally) sounds like the ultimate benefit package. I also know (again, seven years being told that being a teacher is so easy, we even get summers off) that a year long “sabbatical” is very much earned over the course of the seven years spent working as a university professor.

So what makes a sabbatical different from paid leave/vacation and why am I so interested in understanding the definition of this very niche term? When I was told that my college advisor would be taking a sabbatical in the spring of 2022, it didn’t alarm me in the slightest. This is just what professors do, I thought. Followed by, I wonder what he will be working on during his time off? Working on. That phrase is what sets apart a sabbatical from a paid vacation or paid leave of absence. The act of working, whether conducting research or writing. There will be work done while my advisor is “off” for the 2022 calendar year. 

Now, to answer the burning question, why am I so interested in the term sabbatical, it’s quite simple and not at all related to my advisor. I have been an active and public member of the social media platform, Instagram, for over two years now. In the two(ish) years since I went public in this digital community of like-minded individuals seeking to share my life with the world, I have taken exactly zero weeks “off” from posting on my account. I’ve diligently engaged with every single person that has sent me a private message, posted at least three times per week, and am brutally honest in my posts, refusing to be someone I’m not in order to grow my following. But all of that sharing takes a toll on you after a while, and especially over the last nine months, since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, sharing every aspect of my cancer journey has become very time consuming.

Last week, for the first time in two years, I went silent. No posting, no stories, no scrolling, and no engaging with the exception of a few messages for business purposes only. I thought I wouldn’t last more than thirty-six hours without being sucked back into the Insta-verse, but it has been six days since I scrolled through my feed, and I have zero interest in going back to the all-consuming act of engaging with strangers or posting stories about my day. I have never been one of those people that takes time to “work on themselves” but for the first time in years I am ready to completely focus on myself and for me that means taking a sabbatical from social media. 

So what changed? In my early twenties, after about four years of smoking a pack a day of cigarettes, I went to light up a butt, like I did every single morning after waking up, when it hit me. I thought, I don’t feel like smoking right now. So I didn’t. And as the day progressed, I continued to not feel like lighting up, so I didn’t. I ended up quitting smoking cold turkey, and although the cravings did come back after a day or so of not smoking, I was determined to keep going forward on that path of quitting, and I haven’t had a cigarette since. I’m not sure what the reasoning was behind the change then that made me quit smoking, and I’m not sure what the reasoning is behind me being burnt out on social media right now. What I do know is that taking this break, that I am not forcing myself to stick with and have zero expectations or time constraints around, has been one of the best “hard resets” I’ve had in my life in years. I feel focused, grounded, relaxed, and most importantly, happy.

I have every intention of keeping my social media active, and I do go on there from time to time to check and make sure I’m not missing any important private messages from clients, but I no longer feel the need to aimlessly scroll and engage in conversations that do nothing but take away from me focusing on myself and my writing. So for now, I am taking a social media sabbatical, because I have earned some time off to work on myself. To fully immerse myself in the world of literature and writing, to read real, tangible books, to work on becoming healthier and stronger, and to journal and write to my heart’s content.