61. Oops: Healing made me worse at my job
My struggle to find a healthy balance in a toxic working world
If you know me personally at all, or even if you’ve just gleaned a bit about my personality and point of view from these newsletters, it might surprise you that at one time, I was the woman at the office until 10pm.
Picture me living in New York, taking rage-inducingly unreliable public transit 50 minutes to and from a startup office every day, a marketing contributor in the middle of an irresponsibly fast rebrand and Super Bowl commercial campaign, with a new boss and new goals as the whole team restructured. (Are you sweaty yet?)
Every day, it seemed like there was a new crisis. Always some new resourcing gap that needed to be filled immediately. Some project that had to be babysat 24/7 like a sickly newborn foal. Some critical, last-second task blinking like the timer on a bomb, threatening to blow us all to smithereens if no one jumped on it.
So I would do it.
I’m not saying I was the only one on the team who stepped into the breach, but I’d linger at the office with a strung-out handful of colleagues until well past any reasonable American dinner time, chipping away at an endless mountain of tasks just so that I wouldn’t be caught in a total avalanche the next morning. I told myself this level of stress and overfunctioning was acceptable because it was just for a limited amount of time—until the rebrand! until the Super Bowl! until we hire a new Creative Director!—but secretly…?
I loved it.
I loved it because the environment rewarded me for it. I was given more responsibility, more influence, and (remarkable by today’s standards) I was even given more money. The job was a bottomless pit that would take as much of me as I gave it with zero qualms or restraint, and while I might extract some value in return—money, clout, experiences to pad the resumé—the bottomless pit was indeed bottomless! When I think about it now, I picture myself plummeting down an infinite tunnel, my body slowly eroding from the wind shear, collecting cash and accolades until, for the rest of eternity, all that’s falling is a cluster of unenjoyed rewards, my actual self vanished completely. (This is not to pick on this particular role or company, by the way! This is pretty much the relationship between all companies and their employees.)
At the time, this madcap pace was energizing and exciting, and/because it precisely salved/exacerbated a wound in my psyche that was desperate to be recognized for what I could do because I didn’t have faith I’d be recognized for who I was.
This was a wound previously soothed/worsened by academia; I was good at school, I was recognized and rewarded for being good at school, and I was motivated by the attention and approval I received from people around me who seemed to be able to help me get to where I wanted to go. Then I blithely entered the harsh reality of trying to work in the arts in New York City, where absolutely no one gives a shit about what you can do because there are already 300,000 people doing the same thing and half of them already have a lot of money and connections and the other half got there before you. Being really good at stuff didn’t seem to matter anymore, and I lost a huge pillar of (what I thought was) my identity.
Then I joined the corporate world, first at branding agencies and then as an in-house marketer at startups. And you know what really does seem to care when you’re good at something? When you work really hard and overachieve and take on more than your fair share? The norms and standards of a for-profit business environment, that’s what! It’s where everyone is incentivized to believe all jobs serve some greater human purpose and we do them because we’re passionate and dedicated. Employers are incentivized to believe this because it means a loyal, compliant, overfunctioning workforce who don’t necessarily need to be paid more to perform more; employees are incentivized to believe this because it means they aren’t “wasting” their one wild and precious life making widgets.
Whenever I get on these particularly anti-work rants, I always feel the need to caveat everything so as not to be strident and alienating. (And I also hope it’s clear that I’m largely talking about knowledge work jobs and not, you know, being a paramedic!) Because nothing is black and white, and what brings people meaning and purpose can be subjective. Plus, I genuinely did find some meaning in the job I’m describing and the ones that came after. I adored my colleagues, many of whom are dear friends to this day. I learned an incredible amount about what I’m capable of. I took from those experiences what I needed to successfully launch Bonfire with Kevan—hell, I met Kevan at one of these jobs!
All I’m really saying is that the ways in which I was/am wounded, insecure, and have learned to cope fed in perfectly to a system that would perpetuate and exploit those tendencies if I wasn’t conscious of them—which I wasn’t for a long time! But then I went to therapy. I read a lot of books about attachment styles and family systems and dysfunction. I saw the ways in which I was people pleasing and dishonest about my true feelings with those around me. I uncovered some core beliefs about myself that were harmful and false. I discovered mindfulness and separated my idea of self from my thoughts and emotions. I started paying attention to what made me angry (things that violate our values!) and what made me jealous (things we truly desire for ourselves!) to know myself more deeply.
And throughout all that, as I felt better about myself, as I reconnected to joy, as I began to have healthier boundaries and show up more authentically with the people in my life…I got worse at my jobs. (“Worse” according to a rubric I no longer believed in.)
If something was broken, I didn’t volunteer to fix it. If there was a resourcing gap…then there was a resourcing gap. A new initiative or project that needed a champion? What a great task for somebody else! I said no to things and I said no on behalf of people I managed. Too much to get done on a normal work day? Then I guess it’ll happen tomorrow, and if there’s too much to get done this week, then I guess it’ll happen next week. And if it doesn’t…?
No one will die. No one will even get hurt. The stakes for me and the people around me, when I examined them, were actually incredibly low. And more often than not, a scootched deadline or a missed deliverable was hardly a blip on anyone's radar; we were all just operating under breakneck urgency for a lot less legit of a reason than we thought. (The reason? Making the company more valuable, and any of us at any time could be laid off or reassigned or managed out in order to make that come true.)
I leaned into the idea that, unlike in the arts, it was in fact an enormous, expensive pain in the ass to replace me—and replace me for what? Not even being bad at my job, just simply not being over-the-top exceptional. When my self-worth didn’t depend on being exceptional at work, I wasn’t. And I was a lot more peaceful because of it.
The problem, of course, is that these issues are systemic. It’s not a bad boss or jerk CEO or toxic company culture; it’s the whole set up of working life under late-stage capitalism. And when you’re in a system with coworkers whom you really care about, people who are maybe buying into the system more than you are, it’s really hard to let those people down! If your peer wants to overfunction to get something done and they need you to help them, it’s really, really hard to leave them hanging. And this is also a way the system perpetuates itself, exploiting the inherent goodness of people not wanting to let down their friends and colleagues. (Side note: This is why collective bargaining is so powerful!)
I wish I could tell you that there’s some clear answer, some exact sequence of steps that achieves the perfect balance of showing up for others and protecting yourself—both from overfunctioning and from being fired or managed out of a role. I wish there was a formula for working exactly enough. There is not. I struggled with it throughout my years working in tech and I struggle with it now as a baby business owner, when in fact I am one of the people who directly benefits, in certain ways, from overworking.
Perhaps just being increasingly conscious of these forces and how we participate in and resist them is the only goal. Because then no matter what you choose, no matter how hard you lean in (or opt the eff out), you are doing so intentionally.
Over to you…
Have you noticed a change in your relationship to work? Did you ever put “too much” of your self-worth on your job or professional achievements? We’d love to hear about your journeys!
For more…
Follow us on LinkedIn and on Instagram. Stay tuned to our Substack space for new community features and ways to meet your fellow subscribers.
And let us know if you’d like to go deeper with us to talk about you and creativity. We do:
1:1 coaching and mentorship
Team workshops and consulting for marketing and leadership
Speaking and appearances on podcasts and at events