In September 2021, Evelyn Lai sat at the brown teak desk in her childhood bedroom and looked out the window. She felt just as uncertain as she had two decades ago.“I remember sitting at that same desk when I was applying to colleges,” Ms. Lai, 36, said.Now she was recalibrating her life. Feelings of professional burnout had left her crying on a street in downtown Austin, Texas, three months earlier. It was more than a year into the pandemic, on her day off, which she had been spending with her mother and sister. She was finally overcome by a panic attack.Ms. Lai had been working 50 hours per week as a pediatric nurse practitioner at a community health clinic in southeast Austin. Some of her patients at the clinic, which Ms. Lai said served a primarily Latino population, didn’t have access to clean water. Some had family members who had been picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some had lost loved ones to Covid. As Ms. Lai walked past people drinking and laughing at a trendy Austin cocktail bar, she reached a breaking point. Her mother placed an arm around her, and she struggled to catch her breath.“It was jarring to see that and then think about the world I’d be going back to at work,” Ms. Lai said.So instead she went home. After considering a career as a writer for …
How Quitting a Job Changed My Work-Life Balance – The New York Times
