One Year Later: What Freedom Actually Feels Like

Going Sideways - Part I

On September 1, 2025, I handed over the keys to the Kumon centres I had spent twenty years building. This month marks exactly one year since the sale was completed and the new owners officially took over.

I stayed on to help for the first couple of months. Then came Kenya in December, flew back again in March when my mother fell and injured herself, and between it all preparations for my son’s engagement party and civil ceremony coming up in July. Somewhere between family, travel and learning how to live without a business constantly occupying the back of my mind, twelve months simply disappeared.

During that year, I waffled.

Should I find another job?

Become more active on LinkedIn?

Return to writing?

Do all three and exhaust myself for old times’ sake?

Writing appears to have won.

This week, after four rounds of edits, I submitted a short story to a competition. The word limit was 6,000 but the difficulty felt unlimited. I sat in front of that blank page wondering how someone who had spent twenty years teaching children could suddenly become so uncertain about verbs, adverbs, pronouns, adjectives and the construction of a decent sentence.

Writing is hard.

Getting your backside into the chair is hard. Looking at the blank page is hard. Rewriting something you were rather pleased with yesterday - only to discover today that it is mostly waffle - is especially hard.

And yet, I loved it.

I loved finding the story. I loved wrestling with it. I even loved editing it, although “loved” may be doing some ambitious public-relations work there.

Winning would be wonderful. Not winning will still have given me something far more important: practice, momentum and proof that I can begin again.

Today, on the first anniversary of selling my business, I also worked on my new author website. That feels wonderfully fitting. One year ago, I handed over one life. Now I am beginning to build another.

The centres gave me an extraordinary two decades. Selling them gave me freedom - and enough distance to understand what those years meant. I am deeply grateful that the right opportunity arrived when it did. I do not regret selling. I do not regret the work that came before it either.

It feels like just the other day I turned 40. This December I turn another milestone year, only with better judgment, more stories and considerably less patience for wasting time.

Twelve months have flown. But I don’t think this year disappeared.

I think I cleared the runway. And I’m ready to fly again.