This is the story of a week in Paris, a breakdown, and the exit plan that finally got me unstuck.
Sixteen years ago, I started a tradition of spending my birthday week in Paris. I know it sounds bougie, but it’s a city I’ve grown to love for its rich history, delicious food, and avant-garde art. It’s also constantly reinventing itself—kinda like moi 😉
And it holds a special place in my heart because it’s where I met my husband.
Then I had my first kid, the pandemic hit, and the trip got harder to take. I’d also had a couple of rough international trips in recent years thanks to motion sickness, so I’d been waiting until I felt better.
Back to Paris
This fall, I couldn’t resist the pull. The kids had fall break, my husband and I know the city well, and the direct flight from SFO made at least one leg easy. The real obstacle was my own mental block: jet lag, three kids running around, and someone getting sick—namely me.
Happy to report we had a blast. I was a little sick the first 24 hours, but everyone was so tired they mostly slept through it.
We kept it simple: a tiny apartment in the Marais, one planned activity a day, and the city’s serendipity for everything else. Within a week, we’d gotten used to a bakery steps from our door, walking everywhere, and eating dinner out. I was barely online. In my spare moments, I read or walked along the Seine by myself.
Coming home was the hard part.
Walking the Seine on a weekday afternoon with nowhere to be is a small thing. A year ago, it would have been unthinkable.
It’s been a little over five months since I resigned from Apple. Honestly, it’s taken me that long to decompress and find a pace that works for me and my family. Getting out of my element helped me get clear on how I want to spend my time: with family and friends, and on work that matters to me.
The breaking point
Since I resigned, I’ve been getting DMs and emails from people who are contemplating their next step, or who have already taken it. So I want to share the parts I haven’t heard people say out loud.
I spent nearly three years battling burnout. Starting around 2023, work crept into every spare moment: alarms at 3 or 5 a.m., syncs at 10 p.m. with teams around the world. I tried to hold boundaries. But everyone around me seemed fine with the pace, so holding a firm line made me the odd one out.
I had the means for a nanny, and some days it felt like she was getting more joy out of my motherhood than I was.
My kids turned four, six, and eight this year. I wanted to be with them without asking permission or squeezing it into vacations and weekends. I didn’t want to explain why I couldn’t take a 7 p.m. Friday meeting or a 6 p.m. Sunday one. I also wanted time for myself. I wanted to read or take a midday walk without guilt over a missed meeting or an unanswered Slack ping.
For nearly a year, I tried to decompress on weekends and took vacations with and without my family. Every time I came back, I felt the same: deflated. Meanwhile, the job market and the economy kept signaling me to hold on and not take any risks.
Then, after operating at an intense pace for so long, I broke down one Saturday. That’s when I decided to take time off to figure out “what was wrong with me.”
I took two and a half months off. I rested for the first three weeks. As the first month came to an end, a values exercise helped me finally name what was missing: autonomy.
What I was missing
I needed autonomy over two things.
My time
I was the Burn-in DRI, most recently on iPhone 17. Burn-in means running a fully assembled device continuously to catch weak components before they fail early in a customer’s hands. My job was to deliver the burn-in software for each build (there are typically four to five builds leading up to a product launch).
When something failed, I triaged with cross-functional teams until we found a root cause, which could take weeks or months. Meanwhile, I had to recommend next steps so the program kept moving toward mass production. My calendar belonged to a timeline that was tight and had a lot of moving parts.
My creativity
Day to day, my work narrowed to a few core tasks: leading and reviewing software changes, learning each new hardware design, coordinating teams, and reporting results to senior leadership. That precision is what it takes to ship a quality product.
But after seven years of it across Watch, Mac, and iPhone, I missed speaking, writing, coaching, and building things I wanted to put into the world. I wanted room to explore, prototype, and most importantly, tinker on my own timeline.
Freedom runs on an exit plan
Autonomy isn’t free. I know time and money are finite, and that constraints are useful because they force you to set goals and focus.
Aside from shipping on time, the thing I’m best at is saving and investing (thank you, Mint.com, for that lesson). My husband and I started having honest conversations in June 2025. But it wasn’t until my second month off that I started really evaluating my next steps.
I spent that month exploring, tinkering, and working out my exit plan: when I’d resign, how we’d scale back expenses, and what our monthly burn rate would be. It’s not perfect, but it’s given me peace of mind and kept me on track, even amid the volatility.
Something else shifted once I started working on that plan. While I was stuck, my thoughts and feelings were stagnant and repetitive. Once I had a plan in progress, a lightness crept in. Over the weeks and months that followed, I started to feel more like myself.
If you’re stuck right now, know that how you feel won’t stay that way.
With rest and a plan, I also saw my options more clearly. As I interviewed for roles and evaluated opportunities, it became obvious they didn’t fit what I needed.
The courage to exit
Even so, leaving was the hardest part. I kept second-guessing my decision. I’d hear something on the news or see a bill and start to worry.
So a good friend became my accountability buddy, checking in on me for the month leading up to my resignation. I needed an outside reminder of why I was doing this, and of the safety net I’d built around me.
Visualizing failure in 2012
This isn’t my first rodeo; it’s more like my third. In 2010, I left Mint.com to start BizeeBee. In 2012, as BizeeBee was running out of capital, a mentor asked me to visualize failure and really feel it. So I did. I thought through everything I was “losing” and how I’d feel.
When the moment came to tell my team and investors, I was present—I even surprised myself. One investor said he appreciated my courage and honesty. That was it. No slap on the wrist, not even a judgy remark.
The buildup in my head had been worse than the reality.
The exercise had done its job. Once I had closure, I was able to move on. I spent 2013 and 2014 turning Femgineer from a blog into a business.
Sitting with uncertainty in 2026
This time, I tried the same exercise. But even I had a hard time convincing myself I was going to fail epically, given the knowledge and skills I’d built over a 22-year career. I also knew which skills were rusty and needed work, which ones I was consistently good at, and which I was bad at, didn’t enjoy, or wouldn’t have the bandwidth to learn.
So I tried a different exercise: sitting with uncertainty. The uncertainty of how long a restart would take. Getting comfortable giving myself time for things besides work. Finding joy in the everyday moments I’d been missing, like time with my kids or baking, one of my favorite hobbies.
The restart is real
I don’t have regrets, but the first few months after resigning were challenging. I had to find a new normal: a childcare routine, learning and relearning the skills I’d need to run my own business, prioritizing what needed to get done, and still making time for myself, which was the whole point of this venture 😉
One question that comes up often in those DMs is, “How did you know what was missing?” Here’s the exercise that helped me.
Tip of the week: find what’s missing before you change anything
If you can’t name what’s missing, you’ll likely carry the same problem into the next thing.
- Notice your energy. For a few weeks, jot down what drains you and what lights you up. Be specific: “6 a.m. syncs,” not “meetings.”
- Pick your values. From a list of values, or in your own words, choose the 10 that matter most to you. Then cut to your top three to five.
- Score your current reality. For each value, rate how well your current work honors it on a scale of 1 to 5.
- Find the biggest gap. The value that matters most but scores lowest is likely what’s missing.
- Get specific. Ask, “Autonomy over what?” For me, the answer was my time and my creativity. That specificity is what turns a vague itch into a plan.
Values won’t tell you what to do next. They tell you what to filter for, so the next thing you choose actually fixes the problem.
What’s next
The world has changed a lot since 2012, and so have I. As I revisit old lessons, I’m also asking which ones still apply and which need rethinking. Over the next couple of months, I’ll share what I’m learning here.
Stay tuned, and happy fall!
Poornima
P.S. I’m also shaping something new for people who spend their days building other people’s products and want to build their own. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and it’s not hustle culture. If you’re working through a fresh start, finding your first customer, or getting from idea to shipped, join my newsletter to stay in the loop: https://femgineer.com/newsletter-signup.html
