(Image from Modern Witch Tarot)
I’ve been thinking about work a lot lately because I have had the mixed blessing of being chronically ill with an undiagnosed illness. Don’t get me wrong, for most of the last few years I would not have called it a blessing. I spent a long time unable to get out of bed for at least five days out of seven. There was the fun period where I was throwing up everyday and no one knew why. Not to mention what the poor health and lack of a life did to my mental health on most days. Basically I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But now that (fingers and toes crossed) I seem to be on the other side of it and coming back into life and into reality I’m seeing the gifts that being sick has given me.
This is the internet so I guess I should say that I live in the United States (though you would probably have figured that out by reading this post) and I am aware that there are countries in the world that have a sane relationship with work. This is not one of them. I’m also smart enough to know that there are counties with worse relationships with work. But I can only write about what I know and about my experiance.
Before I got sick I was a partner is a successful local business. My illness forced me to walk away from all of that. At the time I didn’t understand that most of what was happening to me was physical and I attributed most of it to depression. When I left I swore I never wanted to own a business again and I wanted a comfortable boring job with good benefits and stability. But sometimes life has other plans. (Or Man plans and God laughs, another good one.) My husband has his own business but he runs it very differently than what I had experienced of business ownership. Whenever possible he would schedule his work around his life instead of wedging a life into the scraps that work left for him. Even seeing that different way did not convince me that business ownership was right for me.
I started my baby micro business almost two years ago because I knew no one would hire me. How can you go into a job interview and tell them “so, I can only work at most one day a week and I cannot tell you in advance which day that will be and it’s also possible you won’t be able to reach me for several weeks. When do I start?” Not going to happen. So I took the skills I have an created something all my own. The first realization that this was going to be different was when I got COVID. I was SICK. Like couldn’t even send an email for almost five weeks. The interesting thing was once I started feeling better and picking up the pieces no one was mad at me. No one. Everyone was understanding that I had been extremely sick and trusted me to get caught up on the work in my own time. Which I did. That awareness made me finally see how toxic most of my past professional experiences have been. I’ve had jobs where if I got sick I had to work on the weekend to get the work I missed done. I have been unable to go to the doctor or get my car worked on because I couldn’t miss work. In short, I couldn’t be human.
While I plan and hope to be working more hours than I currently am (I max out at around two hours a day for now) there are some gifts of being sick that I am unwilling to let go of. I will not set an alarm unless it’s for something fun. At the end of the day it makes no difference in my line of work if I’m working at 8 am or 12 pm. The work will get done. If I have an opportunity to go out of town I’m going to take it and I will trust myself to know I will find time to make up the work. Any appointments I need to make, like my many doctors appointments or car maintenance or meeting a friend for lunch will be the priority and work will be scheduled around that. Basically, I’m done pretending I’m not human. I also chose to extend that same grace to the people I work with. If someone misses a meeting I tell them that life happens and reschedule.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand completely that I am speaking from a place of extreme privilege. If I didn’t have my husband as a partner I would either have had to try to work while my body fell apart around me or I would have moved back in with my parents. Even that is a privilege, there are so many people with no safety net at all. I just wish we could live in a world where life came first.
I think about the way people talk about Gen Z and Millennials, calling them lazy because they don’t want to give up their entire life to work. I think that they aren’t lazy but are waking up and seeing that there is so much more to life than working 40 hours and week and commuting an hour and a half each way. I don’t think it’s lazy, I think it’s a returning of sanity. I’m looking forward to seeing what the world is like when the kids are running it.
Screaming in the Dark 