Quitting my corporate tech job to build an indie magazine

Welcome to our first newsletter! I'm hard launching a major life update.

Hi everyone,

I’m Sophie, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Off-Menu Magazine, an independent, community-driven magazine exploring the behind-the-scenes stories of people in the culinary world. We recently launched our second print issue, A New Wave, which you can now find on our website and at select stockists around the world (soon).

Starting Off-Menu has been a life-changing experience, one that has taught me so much about the creative process. This Substack will be a space to share what goes into making the magazine—the behind-the-scenes process, the inspirations we draw from, the lessons we’ve learned, and the things we’re reading, eating, and thinking about along the way.

So. What better way to kick off this Substack than sharing an ultra personal essay about quitting my job? This leap not only marks a big moment in my life, but also the transition of Off-Menu from a fun little passion project to, well, my career (nervous laugh). My self-consciousness aside, it feels like the right place to start.

Enjoy, and welcome to the Off-Menu Substack :)

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2025 has been a year of major life updates.

If you know me personally you probably know that I have been working as a full-time UX designer in tech ever since I graduated from college. You probably knew that I was fortunate enough to have a job that was mostly remote and flexible with work hours, with a friendly company culture. And that for a long time, Off-Menu Magazine and freelance photography both started as passion projects to explore my creativity outside of work.

For a while, it was really the perfect setup. I had the stability from my corporate job, and it was flexible enough and not too demanding so I had the time and space to explore side projects in my free time. Doing both at the same time kept me satisfied. Particularly during my days of living in New York, when I was witnessing almost all of my peers suffering from insane work hours, I felt grateful for what I had, even if I was earning less than them.

In March 2024 I found out that I was not selected from the US work visa lottery, and by that July, my company relocated me to Barcelona where our design team was based. This was the most drastic change in my life thus far and felt like an earth-shattering disturbance to what I thought my life was going to look like.

After a deathly heartbreak and August in Barcelona (IYKYK), I slowly crawled out of this transition heavily scathed but still alive, somehow. I didn’t know this at the time, but, looking back, there were beautiful seeds sowed in those months of finding my footing in a brand new city where I knew no one.

I started to meet people in the creative scene who were all pursuing their own freelance projects; some of them later became my closest friends here. These people helped me unlearn something that had been deeply ingrained into my thinking all my life, having grown up in an Asian household—that creative or artistic endeavors should only be a hobby outside of your “practical” career.

I started diving deeper into my passion projects—saying yes to any and all photoshoot opportunities, cold messaging people to collaborate on projects, signing up for classes and workshops. At this point, we had just launched the first issue of Off-Menu, and the response had been better than I had anticipated. We just hosted a successful launch party in New York, somehow packing an entire Brooklyn wine bar on a Monday night.

After hundreds of emails and months of waiting, we finally started landing on shelves of bookstores across the UK, Europe, and US. When I heard the magazine was stocked at the Tate Modern in London, I cried.

Pinch-me moment

As my creative world expanded, I began to ask myself, whenever I logged onto a corporate Zoom meeting, Who am I doing this for? What am I really getting out of this?

I started yearning for hours in the darkroom, artist residencies abroad, photography workshops, book fairs, and a million projects that I could take on with Off-Menu. What started as a sort of healthy daydreaming turned into a gnawing restlessness which made me more and more dissatisfied with my corporate life.

A thought gradually began to creep in: this job which has previously afforded me the flexibility and stability for my creative work has started to become something that was holding me back.

I always thought that it would be a dream to work on the magazine full-time, but for so long it felt like a destination beyond my vision. Whenever anyone suggested encouragingly that it’ll happen, I always brushed it off as something unrealistic.

In my head, all the successful examples of ‘passion projects turned full-time career’ were tales of safe landings, in which the passion projects have grown over time to a point of financial success matching the level of what their corporate job provided for them. I was nowhere near that.

I wrote in my journal one day: “I feel like photography and Off-Menu are both going well but not well enough for me to make the leap yet. So I’m in this state of suspension, which really tests my patience.”

I have to pause here and insert a disclaimer that objectively speaking, I did not have a terrible experience at this job at all. If you are one of my old co-workers reading this, it isn’t anything personal. If anything, it was my luck to encounter such a lovely group of people in my first experience in the corporate world.

But the reality is that my life outside of work began expanding at a rate that I never expected, into directions I never considered as career paths in the past.

Before I knew it, I felt like I was working 3 full time jobs at the same time. In the early mornings before work meetings began, I was doing photoshoots or printing in the darkroom. In the afternoon I would hop on back-to-back meetings until about 7pm. After dinner, I worked on Off-Menu, brainstorming with my team in New York or grinding on editorial feedback, until the moment I closed my eyes.

This cycle repeated for about 6 months.

Many late night work sessions for issue 02

I thought I could handle it. For the past two years I had juggled my corporate job with side projects, and I’d always prided myself on operating at a high capacity. After all, I had survived years of demanding college life and the grind of New York.

And it was true, until the burnout hit me hard.

It started from physical signs—trouble falling asleep, lack of energy, breakouts… then it turned into me underperforming—missing deadlines, canceling on plans, pushing back meetings, both in my corporate job and my other projects. I was struggling to keep up. I felt like I was trying to climb up this wall while slowly losing grip in my hands. Every morning started with a sense of dread.

Eventually this accumulated to a massive mental breakdown in front of my trusted and empathetic mentor at work, who watched me—over Zoom—cry about how exhausted I was and how I felt like I was disappointing everyone around me.

How do I swallow the feeling of letting people down when I’ve never dropped the ball at work?

How do I move past this sense of guilt for going against my parents’ wishes after an entire life of being “the one they never have to worry about”?

Believe me, I’m usually better than this. I don’t mean to do a bad job. I could hear my inner self insisting.

Only then did I realize how much I had associated my self-worth with my performance—and why failing to deliver felt like failing myself.

I had no more energy to keep up with work but I couldn’t so easily step away either. As always, my immigration status was tied to this job. I needed to figure out my next steps before I could set myself free.

June and July became a blur of chasing immigration lawyers, having tough conversations with my manager and parents, and preparing for the launch of Off-Menu Issue 02—all with many emotional breakdowns in between.

Officially quitting my job

Nobody talks about how terrifying and deeply uncomfortable it is to quit your job for the first time.

Besides moving to Spain on my own, this has been the most terrifying experience of my life. Maybe even more so—because this time, it was an active and independent decision, knowing that it’s against the wishes of many figures of authority in my life.

And yet, beneath all that fear, there was also a deep certainty: I knew I had to give this a shot. I wanted to see what could happen if I poured 100% of myself into Off-Menu and my creative work. Even if it didn’t work out in the end, I knew I would regret it more if I never tried.

It’s been over a month since quitting and I’m still figuring a lot of things out. In moments of doubt and anxiety, I always think back to something that a friend of mine—who I deeply admire—once said to me: “It’s like watching a movie and already knowing the ending. That’s no fun, is it?”

He’s right.

For the first time in my life, I don’t know what this next year will look like and where I’ll even be. But even with all the fear and uncertainty, I feel sure—and proud—that I’ve walked away from something that was no longer right for me.

So cheers to this new chapter—a year of unexplored possibilities, both for me and for Off-Menu.