Life seems like a great balancing act, but what weight we apply to different things does change over time.
Work-life is a good example….it’s never been my strong suit.
I know that I’ve always prioritized the wrong things too heavily more times than I’d like to count. When I was in grad school I would always pack journal articles, notes, review papers, etc with me….sometimes Kirk picked them up and removed them from them vehicle and took them back inside. I always felt anxious if I didn’t take work with me….I’d fall behind, people would think I was a slacker, I would fail.
I may not be working on a thesis anymore, but I’m not sure I’ve improved a lot. These days it’s checking the work phone. I try not to, but if it’s there in visible range….I’ll probably pick it up and look as I pass by. And then I think about work….and then I talk about work, and then I usually am mad about something to do with work.
I’ve asked Kirk to try to remember to make me turn it completely off at the end of the work week.
I’m a work in progress…I’m trying to let go a little bit, but it’s difficult. For five years I was unsupported at work, trying to do as much as I could, for as many as I could, and feeling like I was achieving nothing because I couldn’t help everyone who asked me for support. And when I’d bring it up, seeking support, if I asked for some help because I felt that I was doing to much and all of it equally shiftily, the response from above was usually something along the lines of “…just ignore them…”
Well that just never sat right, it literally was my job, part of my actual job title in fact, to support…I was there to figure out how to help.
But if I complained that I was being overloaded, if I got angry that certain others were not being held accountable and their work was just being passively offloaded, well, then I was just a difficult person, prickly, unapproachable, nasty even.
And if I didn’t get something done for someone, well then I felt like a failure and beat myself up without mercy.
Things are better the past six months, they really are. I’m happier, I’m calmer, I rarely cry, my runs aren’t filled with rage anymore, and I’m having far fewer hypothetical arguments in the shower. But the trauma hasn’t gone away.
People say forgive and forget, I say recover and remember.
In these past years something I’ve always know has crystallized. Women typically have to work ten times harder to achieve a fraction of the recognition of their male counterparts, so they burn themselves out and their personal lives suffer. That’s literally the price.
I don’t have children, but that adds another complicated layer. If a woman can’t manage to balance work and life and family and everything else….and her work suffers even just a fraction, a collective “…well there you go…see…she couldn’t cut it…” sometimes follows in whispers around her.
Balancing work and life is hard, I want to do the best that I absolutely can in my professional life and not let anyone down, but I also want to be able to turn it off when I go home and, particularly on the weekends, be present for life….because, as they say, no one typically regrets not working more when they are at the end of their life.
Life is the great balancing act, and the days ahead are fewer in number than the days behind.
On a different note…the hemlock trees, at least the younger trees, have been hit very hard by the hemlock looper moths the past four years. The cycle seems to have ended finally, but the damage they did to the trees in both the Capilano Regional Park and Stanley Park are clearly evident. There are many, many, grey trees below the canopy, and it’s all the more worrisome in a changing climate with drier springs and higher fire risk. They are crispy and it feels like a cigarette held underneath would see them go up like kindling.
