Is This Working?

One of the biggest surprises for me about quarantine has been how much my negative feelings about my job haven’t changed. I honestly thought, before all this, that if I could work from home every day, I would find it a lot easier to deal with the petty frustrations of my job. But that hasn’t been the case at all - if anything, I’ve been feeling more frustrated and resentful of my job. It’s become even more clear to me how silly my job is in the grand scheme of things, how little the emails I write and the meetings I attend matter.

I’ve been in therapy for 12 years, and something that’s been a consistent topic during that time is my relationship with my work/job. I was raised with the story that I would get good grades and get a “good job” (i.e., an office job with benefits, unlike what my parents had) and then that would be it - my life would be smooth sailing. And then I did that, and was desperately unhappy. As my therapist and I have been unpeeling all of the various layers of that, I’ve been hoping for a solution - some combination of factors that would come together to make me be able to enjoy my work/job. I’ve changed jobs (four times), tried to adjust my mindset about work, focused on creating fun/meaning/fulfillment outside my work, etc., etc., etc. And I’ve never gotten there, but I’d also sort of resigned myself to being unhappy about this huge portion of my life because adults need to support themselves and that’s what everyone does, right?

But then I got leukemia and spent six-plus months on medical leave. And I got *really mad* about how much of my life I have spent at work. I just kept imagining what would have happened if I had died, and how mad I would have been that I had spent 40 hours a week (plus commuting time) over the past 14 years giving my time and effort to a collection of people and tasks and organizations that (with very few exceptions) I had no respect for or investment in.

I feel like this is a pretty typical narrative in the self-improvement space, and then the next part is “then I started pursuing [this thing that I’d always been passionate about: baking, making jewelry, writing, making clothes, whatever], and now I’m a huge success!!”

But I don’t have a thing I’ve always been passionate about that I can turn into a job. I do have a chronic disease and a non-negotiable need for health insurance.

I’ve been feeling very stuck about it.

Reading Captain Awkward’s latest post helped, though:

“I also want to say that if you’re feeling disconnected and useless and unsure of what your purpose should be right now, you’re not alone, and it’s possibly because a lot of the messages you were given about how to be safe and good and happy only worked if you cultivated a habit of tuning out the suffering of people who made your comfort possible and mentally reframed a history of institutional and systemic failures into individual inadequacies. … Then when you ran into trouble, everybody told you to look within yourself for the answers and work on yourself, so you did, but here you still are, because it turns out that “inside the letter writer’s self” isn’t the only place that problems live and because the pacts that promised a certain amount of success and security in return for perfecting the perfect economic unit self are breaking down much faster …. We lucky ones who are able to work from home are in a place that we cannot goal-set and self-improve our way out of…

I would add: If you still feel like something is missing, action is the antidote to despair.”

Captain Awkward referenced another great post on Jezebel: “How Do I Figure Out What I Want in Life When Every Day Feels the Same?” that also had some really great stuff in it (emphasis mine):

I recommend cultivating a healthy resentment toward your work. Put in just enough effort to keep your job and no more. The fantasy that an exciting career is enough to sustain a life is one of the most harmful of the modern age—you were never going to find meaning there.

I don’t think we really find meaning at all. We build it, most often with others. The only real antidote I’ve found to a sense of ever-present sameness is to attend to things that grow and change: living things. Care for something alive—start with something small and pitiful like a plant, if you want. A cat; a friend; a neighbor. Be wasteful and unproductive in your pursuits.

So that’s the next thing for me to try: to let go even more, to give fewer fucks about my paying work and more about my home and my community and myself.