Martha on Work

Here's what Martha Beck tells me this morning:

"If your happiness and your work aren't the same thing, you're doing the wrong work, or working the wrong way. Change."

Mmm-hmmm.

On the Way Free

It's remarkable how easily I forget that I'm free, you know?  I mean, for a while there, I was really stuck in the grind, and was carrying on as if I had to be stuck in the grind, and in one particular grind specifically.

My friend T. got me a gift certificate for a massage for my birthday, and I just yesterday cashed in on it.  I'd been working a problem over in my head all week, hoping to see the truth, knowing I was in the muck, and that it was a productive muck, but with no idea how it would all be resolved.  And then, as the massage therapist was working out the knots in my back, it all became incredibly clear.  I am free, and can disentangle myself from the other knots--the metaphorical ones--I had got myself caught up in.  And I actually laughed during the massage, and thanked the therapist for getting those darn knots free.

Funny how the entrapments were tied up in my back like that.  Funny how the three extra pounds I'd magically put on this semester and couldn't seem to shake just disappeared after.  Funny how the heaviness in my legs left and I was able to feel gratitude again.

Funny.

I picked up Nolie at school early the other day, and there were still a few little kids sleeping on their cots, while their classmates and teachers were busily and noisily milling all about, doing their work, playing together.  They were like little oases in a sea of cheerful chaos.

Another useful metaphor.  To be a little island, still, amid the swirling blue.  Entering the chaos upon waking, and returning to peace when necessary.

Forgive the generalizations and allusions.  It's not easy to write about work and my relationship to it in specifics here.  I hope I've made some sort of sense.  The freedom is the main thing, the knowing I wasn't trapped, didn't even realize I had felt so trapped, until the way became clear.

Grace and grace.

How Far to Push

I think I know the answer to this conundrum, but when I most need answers to problems like this is often when I'm least able to marshall my resources and remember or find them.

The last few weeks have been one long push...to finish classes, to finish grading, to prepare this workshop we're giving today and tomorrow, to redo the bathrooms, on and on.  I've finished everything except for one last paper, not even started, but due in rough draft form to conference reviewers on Tuesday.  It doesn't have to be perfect or even very good.  It just needs to hold my place until the final paper is complete, to be submitted at a later date.  Rough drafts for conferences are often just evidence of good faith efforts.  It's not a big deal.  I should be able to get it done.

Except that every fiber of my being doesn't want to do it.  Once this workshop is done tomorrow, I want to be done, and that's it.  I would like to take next week off before all the conference travel and summer writing begins.  I feel burned out, and grumpy, and am having difficulty expressing myself in useful and kind ways.  I don't want to do anything but lie on the couch.  I can't assess what is happening around me, or determine what is important.

I am worn.  The fuck.  Out.

Or something.

This doesn't seem like a big deal, right?  I should just write the paper, or take the week off, whatever.  But it's symbolic of the larger battles that wage in my head between whining, overwork, self-care, rest, and rejuvenation.

In one corner is the voice that says it is not the end of the world if I don't get this conference paper in.  Conference papers don't count for much in my professional world (though I find they are useful for many things):  publications do.  I can afford a week off and nobody will die.  My career will not die.  I will come back a better writer, a clearer thinker, a more cheerful colleague, a more loving wife and mother.  This focus on over-productivity is a product of globalization, neo-liberalism, and an insane capitalist society that only cares about how much work we can produce.

In the other corner is the voice that says I must keep my commitments to work, above and beyond mental and physical health concerns.  That voice reminds me of colleagues who seem to work much harder than I do and who don't seem to take vacations.  That I'll be letting my co-authors down if I don't get that paper in.  That I am weak.  I'm taking shit from people all week who just assume I have the entire summer off to laze around like some fat-cat professor and it pisses me off and I want to prove them wrong (because they're wrong).  At the same time, there are people in other jobs much harder than mine working much longer hours and under very difficult conditions and who don't complain half as much as I do.  I am a big, spoiled, privileged baby.

Boy, when those two voices battle it out in my head, it's deafening.  It's war of the worlds in there.

But writing them out, here, I just realized that I'm not going to write that paper.  I'll write later this summer, and maybe some of it will be publishable, and it will be good.  But I'm not writing that paper.  I'm taking next week off.

Thank you, dear blog readers, for the free therapy session.

I'm going to bed.

On the Conference

I'm back from attending a conference in Monterey, which was just all kinds of fun and exhausting.  I go to this communication conference every year and the people are so smart and fun and I end up having conversations well into the night with them, and listening to interesting papers, and drinking way too much.  I don't take my vitamins or floss or go to bed at reasonable times.  I'm messy.  I eat at odd hours.  I do exercise but only as much as I need to in order to get up and get going again.

In short, I'm everything at this conference I'm usually not here.  Here, things are orderly and calm and the stress is always just nipping at my heels but I keep it at bay with all these practices--the journaling, the regular hours of sleep, the exercise, the calendar, the meditation.  At the conference, the stress is exhilarating, peaking as you give your talk then dying down as others peak and then you go out and have beers and talk about how nervous you all were even though you're all friends.  The clock and the calendar only matter insofar as you need to know when and where to show up to speak or to listen; time is fluid otherwise.  I take a plane to a new city and sometimes I don't know where I am (I thought I was in San Francisco, for example, until someone pointed out I couldn't catch the BART to my hotel in Monterey) or how I'm supposed to get to my hotel but I always get there.  I don't know where my next meal will come from or if I will meet someone new.  I come home wanting to write new papers and teach differently in my classes and not be so uptight.

The conference is the academic's workation.  I miss my kids, I miss my E., and I also delight in feeling young and free before I come home to security, responsibility, service, duty, peace.  The conference is my drug.  I don't want to live there but I sure like playing there twice a year.