Kimuya_N

You promised yourself that you’ll not (dare) think about work over the weekend, but look at you on Sunday evening, scanning through your Monday meetings, setting your weekly to-do list, hyperventilating at the thought of those little tasks that you never got to on Friday that may well be on the burning list come ‘morrow morning. You respond to your spilling emails and Slack mentions and schedule them to be delivered at 8.05 a.m. Monday. Five minutes past the clock-in hour because you imagine that sending it any minute earlier will get the person on the other side of the thread mistaking you for the corporate rookie you are not.

How suave!

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You have spent years taking on difficult projects. Staying late, and consistently gracing the 5am club at the same time. Saying, “No problem,” when it was, in fact, very much a problem. Becoming someone who could be counted on, sought out, invoked when something important needed doing. Anything really. Collecting accolades to your name and still blushing when people call you reliable like it’s your name. And so people got comfortable throwing every ball your way because they knew, without a doubt, that you’d catch them. Dutifully. Because they knew what you hadn’t realised yet. That you had become excellent at carrying things other people had learned to put down.

And you spent the next couple of years setting yourself on fire to keep the cold reality of a broken system warm, wondering why nobody seemed to notice that you were burning.

And in all these years, you missed all the cues from those who had gone before you that working harder was not always the answer. Sometimes the answer was better boundaries. Or asking for more resources. Sometimes it was saying, “I can do that, but something else will need to move.” Most importantly, t’was probably admitting that you had been trying to solve a structural problem with personal sacrifice. You entirely missed the tender reminders that not every crisis is yours. Not every meeting needed you. And certainly not every person’s poor planning needed to become your emergency. But how would you have understood when you had built you entire identity around being the helpful one?

You were so imbued with corporate lingo that you still confused being indispensable for being valued. You still believed in being indispensable, ha! (You hopeless romantic.) Speaking of imbued, your personal life and work life had become hopelessly intertwined. Letting a bad day at work spill into your evening wind-down routine. Letting a bad meeting or careless comment prick the core of your self-worth. Allowing thoughts about that missed deadline, or the task you messed up, or the meeting where you absolutely had no idea what was going on slowly sip into your after-hours. Forgetting that none of these things made you a failure. They just made you a person who happened to have a job.

You stayed just long enough to live through the harsh reality that your organization can love you and still replace you. You understood that this wasn’t necessarily sinister. It was simply the nature of organisations. People leave. Organisations restructure. Departments disappear. Strategies change. Budgets get cut.And because you were watching it all from the periphery, you nodded in apprehension, quietly noting to yourself not to give an institution the kind of loyalty you were unwilling to give yourself.

You reminded yourself to take the leave. To go home, and be there in soul and mind. To keep your skills sharp. And to maintain a life outside the building. You realised that you were allowed to want a life that was bigger than your career. To be ambitious without making work your entire personality. To care deeply about what you do without allowing it to consume you. To know that being successful and leaving the office on time were not necessarily polarities. Because the goal was never supposed to be becoming the person who could survive the most work. The goal was supposed to be building a life you actually wanted to come home to.

On most occasions, you do pretty well. You close the laptop. You take the leave and stay unreachable, even with smoke signals. You go home and, for the most part, manage to leave work where it belongs.Because you know that Monday will, in fact, still arrive whether or not you spend your Sunday preparing for it.

But on days like today, you still let Monday steal your Sunday. Here we go, here we again! (sing!)… Scanning the meetings. Thinking about the unfinished tasks. Still convincing yourself that scheduling delivery five minutes after the clock-in hour is simply good corporate etiquette. But because you are grown and experienced, you schedule the responses to go in ten minutes past.Because you imagine the person on the other side will know that you grab-a-cuppa strong tea right on top of the hour, these days.

Happy Monday. Again.

Yours,
K!