Interview with Meenakshi Menon
on taking a radical sabbatical and exploring creativity
Before we dive into today’s interview with the brilliant , I want to share three quick notes:
I was recently featured on the Making the Grade Podcast, where I discussed slow living and productivity for educators. You can listen to that episode here.
I’m facilitating a free workshop on Sunday August 4th from 1-2pm EDT called “How to Effectively Reach Your Goals this Season.” Register here to attend or sign up to receive the recording if you can’t make it live.
I’ll be hosting co-working for paid subscribers and Success & Accountability Coaching clients twice this August. You can learn more about Quarter 3 co-working here.
Kate: Hi Meenakshi! Welcome! I’m continually inspired by your approach to your work and I’m excited that you accepted my invitation for this interview! My first question is to help my readers get an idea of the work you do and what makes your approach to it special. Could you share a bit more about your past work and how it led you to consulting?
Meenakshi: Thank you so much for having me, Kate! Continually inspired by your slow productivity scholarship and all I learn from you. In terms of my work, over the course of the last 15+ years, my work has centered around advancing the freedom, liberation, and bodily autonomy of people of color and LGBTQ+ people, interests cultivated from an early age by my family. Born in New York City to Malayali immigrants from India and Malaysia, I grew up in the South Asian diaspora, and was raised across Singapore, Malaysia, India, and the U.S. (Texas). My grandfather, born in 1899, was an Indian Independence Movement activist. From my elders, I inherited a deep allegiance to grassroots organizing, and movements in the global South building collective power across borders to resist racialized capitalism, colonization, imperialism, military occupation, and apartheid.
Weaving together my lived experience with my eclectic professional background in public health, human rights, reproductive justice, and philanthropy, I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects in over 30 countries, lead 2 non-profit organizations, and raise over $100 million. Most recently, as the Interim Co-Executive Director and Chief Development Officer of Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund, I co-authored and co-organized The Time Is Now Pledge, calling on philanthropy to radically increase funding for abortion access, and better resource grassroots reproductive justice organizations after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
After several years of battling with chronic illness and, in 2022, developing long COVID, in 2023, I took a year-long sabbatical to prioritize my health and well-being. Along the way, I’ve reclaimed my joy, reconnected with my personal mission, and reimagined what work could look like for me, which has led me to consulting! As a consultant, I specialize in providing services in coaching and capacity building, philanthropic advising, and narrative and cultural change. You can read more about my work here.
Kate: I’ve heard you talk about your Radical Sabbatical before and am very inspired by this act of intentional care for yourself. Could you tell us a little more about your experience?
Meenakshi: I am someone who lives with chronic illness, and in the fall of 2022, I got COVID. My initial experience was not too bad, but I ended up going on to develop long COVID, which was the initial catalyst behind my decision to take time off. I was really reluctant to take a break—I was concerned about how I would support myself as someone who doesn’t come from wealth or have an abundance of resources saved away. I was concerned about being away from my work at a really critical time for grassroots movements, particularly reproductive justice organizations. And I was uneasy about taking an extended amount of time off because I wasn’t quite sure how I would fill the time beyond taking care of my health. But sometimes decisions are made for you, and towards the end of 2022, it just became clear that I was very unwell and wouldn’t make it farther if I didn’t take a break.
The first few weeks and months of the “break” were really mundane. A lot of my effort went towards getting physically well: going to doctors’ appointments, getting enough sleep (after years of chronically depriving myself of sleep), and learning how to be active again. At the beginning of my COVID recovery, I wasn’t well enough to be physically active. Even walking one city block was hard on my body. So I spent a lot of time practicing how to be active, starting small, and reteaching my body to find ways to be active that were both accessible and nourishing. For me, this looked like going on a lot of walks, starting first with one block, and eventually leading me to my current practice 18+ months later of going on daily 7 mile walks. I also started exploring strength training, yoga, and breathwork more. While I felt really demoralized at first over how “basic” my goals were, it has been a beautiful lesson in how dedicated, consistent small steps can aggregate towards much larger goals and dreams.
A few months into my break, when I could start to see and feel that I was getting better, I realized that this experience was going to be a lot more of a sabbatical than a break. So I began thinking about what more I could learn (or unlearn) during this radical sabbatical. What habits and goals were serving me well? What in my life needed to fundamentally change? How could I use this time to transform myself and my life rather than feeling overwhelmed by the circumstances I found myself in?
I had always hoped to be able to take a sabbatical at some point in my life, and when I did, I thought it might involve travel, or learning a new skill/hobby, or doing something else “productive.” But mine ended up being much more radical—it was more about reconnecting with myself and with lessons on managing health and wellness; moving through and metabolizing grief and anger; building and embracing community, love, and abundance; and creating the conditions I needed for designing a more sustainable, accessible life, one that I’d never need a vacation from. I’m in the process of writing a piece about the experience and will share more on my substack when it’s ready!
Kate: How does creativity fit into your work as a consultant?
Meenakshi: I really appreciate this question, because reconnecting with creativity has been a big part of my personal and professional work over the last year. I think having creativity as an outlet for my consulting work has been really important, especially as I have thought about the kind of work I want to do moving forward. Over the course of my sabbatical, it became clear that I wanted to re-engage with my inner creative, with writing as my primary medium. So I’ve thought about ways that I could infuse writing into my work more, whether it was as an area of my consulting practice, like the narrative and cultural change work that I do, or building time into my schedule for dedicated writing time. I’ve also been thinking about if there are other mediums that could support my work, like podcasting, or if there’s a way to explore the overlap between pop culture and social justice work more. Can we leverage pop culture and media more broadly as a tool for social change? I’m not quite sure I have the answers, but it’s been incredibly rewarding to be able to think about and explore these type of questions within my work, and have a dedicated creative outlet to do so.
Kate: I like to end my interviews by asking folks to share something that they’re feeling hopeful about in their field of work or study. Is there anything that has been giving you hope recently in that realm of your life?
Meenakshi: In general, the young people in my life, both at work and in my family, make me feel hopeful. Gen Z, Alpha, and beyond will inherit a complicated, messy world, but have astute political analysis and a clarity that I find really refreshing. They are inherently inclusive, and aren’t willing to leave anyone behind, and we really need that for the future! I also feel hopeful by pieces of art, or film/tv I see. Most recently, I discovered a show called, We Are Lady Parts, which in the U.S. is streamed on Peacock. It’s a series about an all-British Muslim Femme punk band. I fell in love with the characters, and it made me hopeful for more nuanced, complicated storytelling, and how it’s possible for media to represent many different kinds of people well on screen.
Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today! If you’d like to learn more about Meenakshi and her work, you can subscribe to her Substack here.
Take care and talk soon,
Dr. Kate