TL;DR
This was the year a brutal stretch at work and a health crisis nearly ended me, including a night I couldn't breathe and my mother saving my life with a nasal spray. After months of failed medications and a doctor I found on Zocdoc who finally got it right, I used my sabbatical to chase joy: BTS in Las Vegas, then a full month in Rome. The city's light, its ruins, and its stubborn, ancient calm did what no prescription could. This is the story of how travel pulled me back from the edge.
December, When the Floor Tilted
I have built things for a living my whole adult life. By sixteen I had sold a small podcasting company. In my twenties I co-founded two startups, both acquired by bigger fish, both exits I'm proud of. Ten years ago I made a deliberate, almost contrarian choice: I went to work as a computer scientist inside a Fortune 100 giant. People asked why a two-time founder would step into the machine. The answer was simple. I wanted to learn how the machine worked from the inside. I wanted skills I couldn't teach myself in a garage.
For a decade it worked. The stress was real but survivable, the kind that sharpens you instead of grinding you down. Then December came, and the floor tilted.
It started with a new boss. She arrived with a reputation that walked into the room three steps ahead of her, and she did not soften it. In our first one-on-one she looked at my roadmap, the one I'd spent two weeks building, and said, "This is fine. It's just not ambitious." Not cruel, exactly. But the word fine landed like a slammed door. It was a hard season at the office, no question.
But I want to be precise about something, because it's the part people always get wrong. The job was hard. The job did not make me sick. Those were two separate stories that happened to share a calendar. What came for my body that winter was its own thing entirely — a mystery no one could name.
It started with sleep. I simply stopped being able to do it, and to this day I can't tell you why. There was no catastrophe, no trigger I could point to. I'd lie in the dark doing the math of how few hours were left before my alarm, and the math itself became the thing keeping me awake. Then the weight started coming off. Not the way it does when you're trying — the way it does when something is wrong. Pounds I hadn't asked to lose, week after week, until my clothes hung off me and my own reflection startled me in the mirror. The doctors ran tests and shrugged. An unknown sickness, they called it, which is a clinical way of saying we don't know, and there is no lonelier sentence in the language.
The Long Hallway of Wrong Medicine
Here is something nobody tells you about a body coming apart: the fixing of it can be more dangerous than the breaking.
The first blow was losing my doctor. My primary care physician, a man I'd trusted for years, the one who knew my history without my having to recite it, quit. Just like that. I got a form letter. I was reassigned to a stranger, and then another stranger, and I began the exhausting work of explaining myself from scratch to people who clicked through their notes while I talked.
Then came the medications. One after another, like trying keys in a lock that kept changing shape. The first made me so fatigued I'd find myself staring at my monitor at 2 p.m. unable to remember what the function I'd written ten minutes earlier was supposed to do. Another did something to my eyes; the text on my screen would smear and double, and I'd close one eye like a pirate just to read a Slack message. I kept telling myself this was temporary. The lock would turn eventually.
And then one of those keys nearly killed me.
A new doctor, rushing, prescribed something without fully reckoning with the two medications I was already taking. I didn't know. How would I? You trust the white coat. You trust the system. That afternoon my mother happened to be at my house — and I will believe until I die that happened to be is the wrong phrase, that some kinder arithmetic put her there. My throat began to close. The air I pulled in felt like it was passing through a straw, then a coffee stirrer, then nothing. The room went bright and far away.
"Look at me," she said. I remember her hands more than her face. She had a nasal spray, the emergency kind, and she pumped it into my nose while I clawed at the kitchen counter, and she kept saying my name like it was a rope she was throwing across water. "Breathe. You're breathing. There. There."
I was breathing. Barely. But there.
I don't write that for drama. I write it because for a long time afterward I couldn't say it out loud at all. The person who builds resilient systems for a living had a body that crashed in her own kitchen, and the failover was her mom.
The Doctor Who Listened
I found him on Zocdoc, of all places. Scrolling at midnight, half-defeated, filtering by whatever felt like hope. He was an older Jewish physician with a long list of patient reviews that all said some version of the same thing: he actually listens.
He did. In one session — one — he did what a parade of others hadn't. He didn't reach for the prescription pad first. He asked me questions, real ones, and then more questions about the answers. He drew a little diagram on the back of a form. He looked at the whole tangle of what I'd been given and said, gently, "Some of this was never supposed to be in the same body at the same time." Then he gave me something new, and he explained exactly what it would do and why.
It saved my life. I mean that with the same flatness I'd use to report a server outage. The thing that was killing me stopped. The thing that was supposed to help, helped. I slept. The first full night of sleep after months of fractured ones felt like surfacing from underwater into a warm room.
But here's the cruelty of recovery: getting the medicine right is not the same as getting you right. My body started to mend. My nervous system didn't get the memo. I'd healed enough to function and not nearly enough to feel like myself. Work was still there, the new boss was still there, the tightening was still there, just quieter now, like a fire moved to a back room.
I needed to leave the building. Literally.
Las Vegas, and the Permission to Feel Joy
Mercifully, this was the year I was finally taking my sabbatical — banked over a decade, deferred a dozen times, suddenly the most important asset I owned.
The first thing I did with my freedom surprised even me. I flew to Las Vegas to see BTS.
You can laugh. I laughed at myself in the security line, a tired engineer in her comfortable shoes heading to a stadium of people half his age and twice his lung capacity. But something about that show was exactly the prescription I hadn't known to ask for. Seventy thousand people holding light sticks that pulsed in waves across the dark, a single ocean of color breathing in time. The bass came up through the concrete and into my chest, into the same chest that had failed me in my kitchen, and instead of fear there was just sound, enormous and joyful and asking nothing of me.
I cried during a song I didn't even know the words to. The man next to me, a dad in a tour shirt clearly there for his daughter, caught me and just nodded, like, yeah, me too. For three hours I wasn't a patient or an employee or a problem to be solved. I was a body in a crowd, alive, and glad about it.
Vegas cracked the door. Rome is what walked me through it.
One Month in Rome
I rented a small apartment in Trastevere, on a lane so narrow the morning light arrived late and left early, with ivy spilling down ochre walls and a café below where the barista learned my order by the third day and stopped asking.
I had no itinerary worth the name. After a year of being scheduled to the minute by other people, the radical luxury was drift. I'd walk until something stopped me. And in Rome, something always stops you.
The first morning I rounded a corner expecting nothing and there was the Pantheon, enormous and impossibly casual about it, two thousand years old and just standing in a piazza like it had nowhere better to be. I stood under its open oculus while a shaft of sun moved slowly across the marble floor, a clock the Romans built out of light, and I thought: this has been keeping time since before anyone I've ever worried about pleasing was born. My boss's word — ambitious — felt suddenly very small.
I ate dinner alone most nights and never felt lonely. An old man at a trattoria near the Campo de' Fiori, seeing me eat slowly, gestured at my plate of cacio e pepe and said in careful English, "You are not in a hurry." It wasn't a question.
"No," I said. "Not anymore."
He tapped his temple, then his heart. "Good. The stomach knows before the head."
I walked the Forum at golden hour when the broken columns throw long shadows and the whole ruined city seems to exhale. I threw a coin into the Trevi Fountain at dawn before the crowds, just me and the water roaring and a street sweeper who wished me buongiorno. I climbed to the top of the Janiculum and watched the whole city go pink and then gold and then soft grey, the domes floating like something half-remembered from a dream.
Somewhere in that month, without my noticing the exact day, the fire in the back room went out.
It wasn't a single revelation. Healing rarely is. It was accumulation — a thousand small permissions to be a person instead of a function. Rome doesn't perform for you. It doesn't optimize. It has survived emperors and plagues and tourists and time, and it carries that survival lightly, almost playfully, in every weathered stone. Being near something that durable did something to my own sense of scale. My crisis was real. It nearly killed me. And also: the city had seen a thousand crises like mine and a thousand worse, and the light still moved across the Pantheon floor every single morning, indifferent and merciful at once.
What Travel Knows That Medicine Doesn't
The doctor gave me back my breath. Rome gave me back my life — the difference between surviving and wanting to.
I came home lighter. I went back to the Fortune 100, to the same boss, the same roadmap. But I returned with the thing the whole terrible year had been trying to teach me and that no prescription could deliver: a sense of proportion. Work is work. It is not load-bearing for the soul. The ground that's actually trustworthy is older and quieter than any quarterly goal — it's a mother's hands, a stranger's nod in a stadium, a sunbeam two thousand years old.
If you are in the long hallway of a hard year right now, I won't insult you with book a trip and you'll be fixed. That's not how any of this works. But I will tell you what I learned: sometimes the most medical thing you can do is leave the place where you fell ill and go stand somewhere that reminds you the world is enormous and you are still, miraculously, in it. For me that somewhere was Rome. Yours is out there, waiting, indifferent and merciful, with the light already moving across the floor.