The Week Between Jobs (Or: Why I Finally Gave Myself a Floor)

There’s a weird little pocket of time that exists between jobs. It’s not a vacation. It’s not unemployment. It’s not even a break you can fully enjoy without feeling like you should be “using it wisely.”

It’s just… the week between.

I went into this week thinking I might rest. Reflect. Maybe romanticize my mornings. You know—become a person who journals. Instead, I laid floors.

For context: we moved into this house in November. Since then, we have been living on bare concrete like we were auditioning for a very low-budget HGTV survival spinoff. Every day I walked across it thinking, this is temporary. Reader: it was not. So during my week off between jobs—the week society says I should be “resetting my nervous system”—I decided what I really needed was… laminate flooring and knee pain.

And honestly? Best decision I made all week.

We don’t talk enough about how awkward the in-between is. You’re not burnt out anymore, but you’re not refreshed yet. You feel pressure to prove you’re still ambitious, while also being told to “rest.” It’s confusing. It’s guilt-flavored.

House projects were never on my vision board for this week, but there was something deeply satisfying about finally fixing the thing that had been quietly bothering me every single day. No performance. No productivity metrics. Just very visible progress: floor → not concrete.

There’s a special kind of healing that comes from work that ends when you stop touching it. No emails. No meetings. Just stepping back and thinking, wow, I did not know I could care this much about flooring.

This week reminded me that rest doesn’t always look like naps and bubble baths. Sometimes it looks like finally giving yourself the bare minimum you’ve been living without—like an actual floor.

Next week, I’ll start a new job. I’ll put on real pants. I’ll use my brain again.

But this week?

This week, I stopped living on concrete—and that feels like growth.