2022 was a year of extremes. It was my first full year as a mother. It was also a time of overwhelming stress for my career and my marriage.
2022 transformed me, and it was only through this transformation that I realized who I really was before.
Then
I used to be consumed by work. As a middle school student, high school student, college student, PhD student, college professor. I’ve come to see that this preoccupation is a cold hand that has touched every part of my life.
The only time that I’ve had a healthy relationship with work was in high school. It was the first time that I felt an ownership over my knowledge and learning goals. I came to love learning for its own sake. Although extrinsic motivators played a role in my work habits (I did chase perfect grades), I truly enjoyed the work needed to gain strong understanding. I took breaks. Cross-country and track right after school. Gray’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, or Law and Order: SVU in the evenings.
And then in college it all changed. Grades became everything and fell into complete misalignment with my intrinsic motivation. Because most of my professors did not have student learning as a top priority, the tantalizing tickle of ideas that kept me joyfully chasing learning in high school wilted. It felt like the whole point of taking courses was to perform rather than to experience the thrill of learning meaningful and useful ideas. Learning became something I had to do, not something I got to do. And I had to work almost all the time. This loss of gratitude marked the beginning of a wholly unhealthy relationship with work that has persisted to this day.
This isn’t to say that college was 100% bleak. I had some genuinely great experiences and a handful of inspiring teachers. I discovered my passion for statistics in college. This pocket of joy was enough to propel me into a biostatistics graduate program.
However, grad school too was a time of monumental stress. The ever-lingering fear about moving fast enough to get my work published meant that I worked around the clock. And the motivation for work was often to temporarily quell a feeling of unease rather than to chase the joy of working on a fascinating problem. If I can just get these next parts figured out, we’ll be close to the next milestone for paper submission.
This isn’t to say that grad school was 100% bleak. (Pattern emerging!) I experienced a blissful state of flow during many work sessions: hours of work passed in seconds. These hours where progress sat with me at my desk and gave me a clap on my back. This is it! I’m fucking doing it!
But.
This pattern. This enshrouding backdrop of stress, illuminated only sporadically by patches of joy, has lingered insidiously through college, graduate school, and now my career.
It’s poisoning me.
Name me, and so shall you break me. My emotional well-being and my relationships, the two most important parts of my life, have been drowning in the toxic bog of my stress.
Now
I’m “finishing” this annual review in mid-April, and I’d love to say that my first semester back to teaching was a great case study in work-life balance. It hasn’t.
This semester has been one of the hardest of my life and pushed me to the point of burnout. I’ve come to realize that despite recognizing my problem, I’m still shackled by fear. Fear that my students will hate me for not being the best teacher possible. Impostor syndrome all over again. It’s led me to be too ambitious in revising my courses and to a terrible work habit.
Word of the year
Authenticity
In January, I chose this word because I felt that an authentic approach to my work would leave me more fulfilled. I did successfully integrate authenticity into my course grading structure and assignments, but this wasn’t enough to ward off the all-consuming fear that is impostor syndrome.
Vision
I don’t want to lose sight of authenticity. I had initially only thought about authenticity in terms of my work, but I need to remember that it is also a core part of my happiness in my relationships.