2022 is the year I ask for help.
It’s the year of not making things harder for myself.
It’s the year when I do what I need to do to protect myself, when I don’t suffer needlessly, when my health and joy come before my professional success.
I’ve always been prone to carry too much—physically, emotionally, metaphorically, in pretty much every sense. I remember walking from the parking lot by the tutoring center to the studio in Hayward Hall during my last semester of college, my arms completely full with my heavy laptop (the one I’m still typing on right now!) and all the other things I needed for my time on campus that day. At night I would stagger through the door of Ripka House where I lived off-campus that last semester, my body again weighed down by a ridiculous number of things. I could have made multiple trips inside, but I didn’t. I tried to save time by carrying everything at once, with the result of feeling more overwhelmed than I already was and wearing myself out. I often still do the same with groceries, packing as many bags onto my arms and holding as many gallon bottles of water in my hands as possible per trip.
When it comes to relationships, I hold a lot of space for other people. I even hold space for potential conversations that probably won’t even happen! Anxiously-imagined worst-case conversational scenarios are staged in my brain on the daily. And if I have a conversation with someone who expresses an opinion different from mine, I immediately make space for their perspective, trying to change how I feel about things (often unconsciously at first) to avoid conflict, even when the “conflict” is the inconsequential matter of us having two different preferences. I often absorb other people’s emotions and feel compelled to help anyone who is struggling, even when it is not necessary, appropriate, or healthy to do so.
Most glaringly of all, my work situation during the past year and five months has made my tendency to carry and hold far too much very obvious. Between a long commute (80-90 minutes each way), heavy workload, and stressful deadlines, work has taken a heavy toll on my body, mind, and spirit, and more than a few days in the last seventeen months have ended (or started) in anguished tears and the resulting “Mascarageddon” (should I trademark that term?). When I am really upset, it’s hard to reach out to ask if someone is able to talk, especially when I am sorting through thoughts like, But I am working myself up just to justify asking for attention? I don’t want to ask her for emotional support again, she’s already given so much. Some nights when I’m upset I do reach out for a listening ear and laughter with a friend, and some nights I cry myself to sleep. The thought of finding a new job has crossed my mind and come up in conversations with my family and friends so many times, but leaving my current position has still never felt quite right. Despite how hard my job is, I love the design work itself and my coworkers. It’s a lovely group of talented people, and I hate the thought of leaving them. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind—how on earth can I keep doing this—and how on earth could I leave—I have continued to struggle on.
That struggle has not been in total silence, but it has been difficult knowing when to speak up. One day last spring, my boss told me to take a sick day because I was so exhausted. I talked to her again during the summer, and she told me to ask for guidance in reprioritizing my responsibilities when things got overwhelming. But the expectation that, “this is the way things are here,” was still clear. With that understanding, I didn’t sit down to talk with her again for months, despite weight loss, on-and-off depression, and continual exhaustion. I didn’t know if it would be worth it to talk to her again when nothing had substantively changed after our previous conversations, so I continued trying to manage my anxiety and overwhelm myself. I had been thinking about talking to her again, though, going so far as to draft an email explaining how I felt, when one day a few weeks ago I finally asked her if we could talk. I hadn’t been planning to talk to her yet, but I was extremely unstable mentally that week, and that day I started feeling stress tension in my abdomen for the first time. Deciding that it was time to talk to her didn’t feel like a big decision the way it would have if I had sent my email; it simply felt like the thing I needed to do. We sat down in an empty office, and I told her that I was not doing well—that the stress was taking a toll on me physically as well as mentally, and that some days I thought to myself, I have to get out of here! I told her that I wanted being at our company to work for me, but I wasn’t sure how. She was lovely and supportive and told me that prioritizing my health should be the most important thing. (She truly is a wonderful boss.)
Things haven’t been resolved yet—I don’t know yet how long I’ll stay at my company, or if or how we will find a way to make my experience working there feel sustainable. But I do feel better knowing that I am finally, finally purposing to take better care of myself. The sentences quoted at the beginning of this reflection are taken from a page of declarative thoughts I wrote out at the beginning of this year. They seemed to flow out of me as I wrote them, and it feels like their time really has come, that this is the year for those intentions and desires to become reality. Having written them out is helping me ask for help, I think. Having declared those attitudes towards myself and about my life makes the actions I need to take to make them true easier.
I am taking better care of myself outside of work, too. In the past few weeks I have started implementing “closing duties,” an idea someone told me about recently. Closing duties are tasks done before going to bed that help me to set myself up for success the following day. I currently have three (which is probably as many as I can keep track of and regularly accomplish): picking out clothes for the next day, packing lunch to take to work, and washing all the dishes in the sink. I can’t say I particularly enjoy spending so much of my limited evening time doing those things, but it is really helpful to not have to choose an outfit in a panic in the morning, rush through packing lunch, or deal with a kitchen overrun with multiple days’ worth of dishes. I also finally bought a desk (yes, the desk purchase pondered at length in this existential post), which means my kitchen table can actually live in the kitchen, and l have separate spaces for cooking and working.
In short, I’m doing what I need to do to be okay. I’m asking for help. I’m making things more straightforward and easier for myself, not harder. I’m making choices and taking actions that, in the moment, are pretty small, but that I think are going to have a big positive impact on my life and wellbeing over time. I’m helping myself live in the healthier way I want to live. And that feels pretty good.
