I’m a Hypocrite & You Can Be One Too!
I don’t know how to separate my identity from work. But I don’t want to keep living this way. And something tells me, if you’re reading this, you may not want to keep living this way either.
The only reason why I’m so passionate about work and identity needing to be separate is that I am a complete and total hypocrite on the topic.
My earliest and strongest memories have to do with work. From the particular 90s oeuvre of television I watched (Murphy Brown, Just Shoot Me, Allie McBeal, etc.); to the games I played (Kid Executive was a popular game I’d play by pushing my desk to the center of my room and forcing my twin brother to be my secretary); to my earliest forms of “output” — obsessive homework doing, extra-credit seeking, general poindexterism — all of these activities felt and still feel hardwired in me. Neurotic, to be sure, but productively-so (to a point). These activities made me feel like I could command a type of personal meaning that seemed to escape so many people close to me growing up.
The opposite of meaning, to me, is addiction. You’ll see that this is a hypocritical statement in a moment, too. Substance abuse runs throughout my family. Addiction was the metronome that set the pace for every day of my childhood. This thrumming consistency gave me guidance about who to avoid, where to hide, what to focus my attentions on so as not to get in the middle of the persistent beat running through the household. More often than not, where I hid was in output — school work, babysitting, sick Sim City towers I obsessively built — anything that I created myself, that I could point to as an example of something that wasn’t entrenched in the heavy weight of substance abuse and anger that surrounded me. This type of productivity provided an essential escape. It was the first lesson I taught myself. The first consistent salvation I found.
So, the thing about escaping chaos, finding safety, and defining oneself around your output as a means of coping with dysfunction that’s totally above of your pay grade, so to speak, since you’re a child, is it creates a GREAT DYNAMIC in which you (me) become obsessed with, and convinced that, work is the only thing worth doing. It creates an addiction to work, to pointing at something outside of yourself and saying “ah yes, that is me.” To, when you haven’t been producing as much as you’d want, looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking “who am I if I’m not doing anything meaningful?”
While substance abuse set the pace for my childhood, my dependence on work created the metabolism that still runs my life, my body and my mind today. I don’t know how to separate my identity from work. But, I don’t want to keep living this way. And something tells me, if you’re reading this newsletter, you may not want to keep living this way either. I’m going to figure out how to make this separation, and I’m going to bring you along while I try to do it.
In this newsletter we’ll do experiments. We’ll discuss articles from the Internet. You’ll learn way more about me than you wanted to. I hope to hear from you, dear reader, on specific topics you’d like covered. Or, topics you’d like to NOT have covered.
Until next time.
Some work/life-related links that have caught my attention recently:
Icon of the Week: “Outgoing CBS News President Held Up ‘I Hate My Job’ Sign In Meeting
https://pagesix.com/2021/04/15/cbs-news-susan-zirinsky-held-i-hate-my-job-sign-in-meeting/
“Girl, Wash Your Timeline”
On Rachel Hollis and the pitfalls of building a business on your most “authentic” self
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/rachel-hollis-tiktok-video.html
After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/opinion/google-job-harassment.html