A few weeks into living in France, I stopped posting in our company Slack. Not because anything went wrong. Not because anyone said anything. I'd take a photo at a market or lift a glass of something good at dinner, and I'd feel this quiet shift. Some small voice that turned the moment into evidence I'd rather not submit. So I stopped.
Now the people I work with and genuinely care about don't know I swam in Lake Annecy, or that I've been wandering through markets trying to figure out why I can't cook like someone who actually lives here, or that I've figured out I'm a limestone wine person. I did that to myself. Nobody asked me to.
That's guilt doing exactly what it's built to do. It edits you until you're acceptable.
I'm working remotely from France for two months. I'm still in meetings, still on Slack, still doing the job. What I didn't account for was the emotional weight of the whole thing. It's so different from taking a regular vacation.
When you're on vacation, everyone knows you're gone. There's a clean understanding. Nobody expects you to jump on a call at seven in the morning because you're in another country, and that's the deal. You're allowed to actually be there. What I'm doing doesn't have that. I'm still doing the actual job, which means I'm never fully off the hook and never fully present either. The guilt lives right in that gap.
I've been trying to close it by being more visibly productive, more reachable. All that's done is turn me into a tired version of myself who's technically present everywhere and actually nowhere. I went up a cable car in Chamonix, came home, and wrote Google scripts at four in the afternoon because somewhere in my head that required justification. I had a Michelin-star dinner in Giverny, photographed the wine, and felt like I owed someone something for it.
Not my business partner. Not my team. Just some invisible auditor I've apparently hired to track whether I'm having too good a time relative to everyone else.
"Nobody hired this person but me, and I've been paying them in sleep ever since."
At home, I don't have to work on Tuesday. It just shows up, and I live my life in it. Nobody, including me, asks me to account for it. Being here made every good experience feel like it needed something productive on the other side of the ledger to make it okay. That's exhausting in a way that's hard to explain until you've felt it.
My team isn't getting a better version of me because I'm monitoring my own enjoyment. They're getting an overextended one who responds fast but isn't really thinking straight. I'm on the French Riviera. That's a sentence I should be saying out loud a lot more than I am. Instead of being in it, I've been negotiating with myself about whether I've earned the right to be there yet. I keep calling it conscientiousness. I'm not sure what it's actually been in the service of.
And honestly, I don't think this is just about me or France. I think it's why a lot of entrepreneurs don't take real vacations. Not because the logistics are impossible, but because being somewhere good while other people are somewhere ordinary feels like a tax. And most of us decide it's not worth paying. So we don't go. Or we go and spend the whole time being miserable enough to feel like we've earned it.
That Slack channel would've been better with the markets in it. My team deserved to see me figuring out why I respond so differently to certain wines, or hear that I miss the food from Alsace, or know that walking through a town in the South of France genuinely reshuffled how I think about showing up at work. The version of me that's actually in France, the one who's curious and a little lost and paying attention to things, she's more useful to everyone than the one performing availability at the expense of being present.
You don't have to earn your own life. I know that's easier said than it is to feel, especially when you built the business, and you carry every gap when you're not in it. But here's the question I keep sitting with: what would you do differently this week if you actually believed that?