Finest Worksong

Take your instinct by the reins

You'd better best to rearrange

What we want and what we need

Has been confused, been confused

It's wild to me how often, when we meet new people, one of the first questions we ask is, "What do you do?" As an experiment, I often avoid asking that question just to see how long a conversation can go before work comes up. It's surprisingly difficult. When people don't ask me what I do, I notice myself relax a little. It's a subtle shift that reminds me I am more than my career.

Introducing myself as "Megan the Therapist" tells you almost nothing about my friends, hobbies, or interests. The places where I meet people—dog parks, gyms, churches, and grocery stores—say far more about who I am than my job title ever could.

My resume from beyond ten years ago tells a story of a community social worker employed by religious institutions, educational publishing, and a series of layoffs due to lack of funding. Now my resume tells the story of someone who pivoted from community social work into clinical practice, healthcare, and eventually small business ownership. What I know about myself from looking at my resume is that mission and purpose have always been important to me.  Financial stressors meant I often worked two jobs, intentionally choosing side work that exposed me to different people, ideas, and opportunities. 

The story my resume does not tell is all the mistakes, bad job fits, relationships with coworkers I fumbled, or encounters with burnout. My resume also doesn’t smell like reheated fish someone put in the office microwave. Or have the snark of passive-aggressive Post-it notes and “per my last email”. My resume is absent of the fingernails of the cubicle mate who clipped his nails at the desk, catapulting them over our partition and onto my desk.  Under “Special Skills," my resume doesn't list managing the mood swings of a coworker who once slammed every office door, shut off the lights in the middle of the day, and then screamed at me through my entire lunch break.  My education does not list sweltering under fluorescent lights, enduring until payday, and frantically trying to find any other job than the purgatory I was in. That resume tells a little too much truth about who I am under stress, and how I wasn’t the best co-worker. 

Those were the years everyone tells you are supposed to be your finest.. Youth, energy, hope. . . evaporated.

Like most people, I've spent forty hours a week at work, plus a commute each way.

Day after day, I realized I was spending more time working and preparing for work than I was with my family, my friends, or even asleep.  Never mind the family / household work tasks that are unpaid but must be done. When I consider how other cultures manage time and employment, with greater time off and better health care access, it makes me really mad.  I hate that work often gets the best of me. Work got my patience, my creativity, and my emotional energy. Home got whatever was left. I knew it wasn’t great, and the harder I worked to find a way out, the more impossible it felt. 

My professional despair isn't unique. I think many of us are trying to survive inside an economic system that rewards productivity while quietly consuming our attention, relationships, and health.  When Michael Stipe sings, "What we want and what we need has been confused," my complicated feelings about work feel seen. 

For me burnout begins as a small wave of dread when I leave my front door. It grows while I wait for the bus. It swells during the commute. By the time my hand reaches the office door, it crashes. Every part of my body wants to turn around, while my brain reminds me I have eight hours to survive before I can leave.

Burnout has become a buzzword, but I wonder if it's actually a barometer—a warning light that something deeper is wrong with the way we've structured modern work. For me to address my own burnout, I had to examine my relationship with the elusive work life balance.

In a period of unemployment, I consulted a career coach.  She asked  “What do you actually want from work?"   Me: "Honestly? A paycheck and not to work with jerks."  She asked me to think about the kind of workplace I wanted, and who I knew whose career I admired—not because of their title, but because they had built lives they genuinely enjoyed.   I started talking with people and realized a few things about myself. Eventually it dawned on me that a shift had to take place in my attitude and I needed to find environments that brought out the best version of me (or made me less of a jerk).  

That self-assessment of what I value in work, who I want to be at work, led me to thinking about taking a risk I had been avoiding. I started talking to friends from grad school and asking them questions. They insisted it wasn’t crazy for me to sit for licensing exams ten years after graduation.  Taking that risk, having the confidence from my peers, and doing the work to return to something I love helped me make some major pivots that have offered some protection against burnout.  It has not protected me from bad days, stressed out co-workers, or global pandemics. But at the end of the day I am better able to see and feel the mission and purpose of my work.

Those changes came with sacrifices, lots of hard work, and a knowledge that my identity must be more than how I spend my working days. My finest of hours, need not be spent working for The Man. I do not want to confuse the value of my life with what is in a bank account.

As a therapist, I've seen how burnout can look remarkably similar to anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress. It happens slowly, depleting our emotional and physical resources until we no longer recognize ourselves. Burnout happens slowly; it depletes our mental and physical resources. As those resources are depleted, often folks will think they have changed, not realizing that in fact they are ill. Symptoms of burnout include procrastination, chronic fatigue, pessimism, loss of imagination for the future, an inability to feel happiness, survivor guilt, and doubting our core beliefs. That last one really strikes me, I started my career valuing mission and purpose and in the midst of burnout all I wanted was to be left alone and a paycheck.

Recovery rarely happens overnight. For me, it looked like protecting time for rest, reconnecting with people who reminded me who I was outside of work, celebrating small wins instead of moving the goalposts, and getting professional help when I couldn't untangle the problem by myself.

What do you want to do with your one wild precious life?  

Coming out of these experiences of having jobs I hated, and burning out in- I find it’s more and more important for me Not to fully identify myself with my work and to make sure my conversations with others aren’t about their work either.

Work is a huge part of our lives, but it is certainly not the most important thing I will ever do. Someday I'll have another resume. It will list titles, employers, licenses, and dates. It won't mention the friendships that sustained me, the mornings spent laughing over coffee, the dogs I've stopped to pet, the concerts, the books, the people I've loved, or the ordinary Tuesday afternoons that reminded me life was happening outside the office. Those moments will never appear under "Experience," but I suspect they'll be the truest measure of my life. Those are the hours I hope become my finest.