A Night in the Desert

48 months. No real pause. Then I went to the Sahara — not to escape, but because I needed to stop and listen to myself again.

Stepping Back is Not Giving Up

I didn’t run from the work. I chose to stop before the work started running me.

There’s a difference between breaking down and stepping back. One happens to you. The other is a decision. I needed it to be a decision.

What I’d Been Carrying

The fatigue was obvious. What I hadn’t fully admitted: the emotional weight.

Resentment I never named. Friction I kept absorbing. The quiet politics of a surgical unit — the management dynamics, the peer positioning, the things nobody says out loud but everyone feels. I carried all of it. Processed none of it.

Morocco was where it started to lift. The Sahara, specifically.

The Berbers navigated by stars because there was nothing man-made to orient by — no landmarks, no signals. Only what was fixed. Only what lasted. Sitting under that same sky, I felt the things I’d been treating as urgent stop feeling that way.

The Permission to Be Still

I’ve always respected practitioners who built fallow periods into their lives — not laziness, but deliberate stillness. Space for the mind to integrate what constant output prevents it from processing.

48 months of output. This was my pause.

What comes next — the clarity, the better decisions, the next chapter — will come from a steadier version of me than the one who left.

Absence Has Its Own Weight

Four years of always being present. Stepping away, even briefly, reminded me of something I’d forgotten: my value isn’t just in showing up. It’s in what I bring when I do.

The man who came back from the Sahara was not the same man who left.

Sitting With It

The desert night was cold. Disorienting. Vast. Nothing about it was comfortable.

I stayed anyway.

That was the real training. Not the gym. Not the content I consume.

Sitting in the dark — and choosing to look up.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Dr Nor Faizal go to the Sahara Desert? After 48 months of surgical practice with no real pause, he travelled to the Sahara not to escape work, but to deliberately stop and process the emotional weight of years of constant output before it became burnout.

What is the difference between burnout and stepping back? Burnout happens to you — it is a breakdown that arrives when limits are ignored. Stepping back is a decision made before that point, a deliberate pause chosen while there is still a choice to make.

Why do fallow periods matter for practitioners in demanding fields? Constant output leaves no space for the mind to integrate experience. A deliberate period of stillness — not laziness, but intentional pause — allows clarity and better decision-making to follow, rather than depleting a practitioner until they break down involuntarily.