A life's work
Athletic work, overwork, feminist work, art work, hierarchies of work, life's work, work work work
While I was away from the newsletter last month, I read Ambition Monster like a good millennial feminist. It’s a great book, a memoir I plan to use in classes, and I was pleasantly surprised by how
connects childhood trauma and workism, without simply falling into attachment therapy/blame the parents pseudo-psychology. Late capitalism is also a central character.Since I read the book, but also increasingly over the past few years, I have been thinking about my own tendency toward overwork, and what, actually, counts as such. While I was away from the newsletter, for example, I worked. I worked extra hard as a parent, to the point of annoying my children. I worked on my next book, to the point of annoying my agent. I read as a critic, and forgot to read for pleasure. I kept copious notes in journals and my Notes app. I ran and ran, then I tore a muscle.
I find value in those forms of work, in laboring with my body (of which my mind is a part). I have a certain amount, though not total, agency and freedom lately over my work, for which I’m unspeakably grateful. The only reason I’m able to think critically about my relationship with work now is because for many many years I overworked so hard— at least, that’s the story that is often told about work.
On Facebook, which for some reason I still occasionally frequent, I was reminded that fifteen years ago, I was excited to start an unpaid internship at Ms. Magazine after “rocking” my interview. I wanted that work so badly, even though I had to drive three hours round trip to get to that job, which paid me nothing. Some narratives of work would say that all the unpaid work I did then, and later in graduate school, sending emails for professors for example, is the reason that I have a little creative and intellectual freedom today. I put in my time. But the truth is, I had luck, and privilege, too.
Either way, I felt last month like I was just beginning to recover from my overwork. For so many years I was not just burnt out, but operating in a kind of constant panic mode, financially and existentially. For years, every moment of my day, especially time when my kids are away, I have scheduled myself. I must be doing something, because I am so used to thinking about time in terms of an impossible scarcity—and as a threat to my own ambition, and therefore my worthiness as anything other than a woman/sexual object. I am #reclaimingmytime, as they say, but it’s taking time.
Overwork comes in cycles. We can’t ever really get away from it in late capitalism. When I was promoting my book, like most authors, I was frayed at every edge, ground down to a fine sand, though I think it was worse when I was finishing my book, trying to hold on to an impossible idea about who I was and what I could be, while also parenting and getting by. I was grateful when the book came out of course— wasn’t I grateful? I was supposed to be, and not broadly, but in every moment!
Overwork is often called an addiction, i.e. “workaholism.” As someone in recovery for addiction— whose overwork has at times saved her from that other addiction— it’s hard for me to hold these kinds of addictions equally. Those in recovery often say we have to be careful about just showing up in another addiction. But is overwork really an “addiction” or is it “healthy” coping mechanism? Are these the same? It depends on who and how you ask.
And it depends on how you answer when you ask yourself. I’m working (overworking?) on a larger project about pathology and diagnosis and gender right now. One issue that keeps coming up is how medical professionals use the idea of personal and interpersonal “distress” to qualify a certain way of being as a disorder. What makes us personally or interpersonally distressed, however, is incredibly complex! Both alcoholism and workaholism are, in their own way, socially approved addictions. For women, however, that is only true until those addictions interfere with her ability to show up as a wife and mother, her primary socially approved roles.
In any given moment, we are likely to be distressed because of our beliefs about what makes a person good and worthy, and whether we fit the bill.
It’s been full-on Olympics over at my house over the past few weeks, and I have to say, for all the faults of this nationalistic endeavor, I get such delight watching these athletes. I like to watch the particularly niche sports like weightlifting and canoeing (who knew they lunged the whole time like that?!), but also track and swimming and gymnastics. I know the problems with the Olympiad, okay, they are many. But there’s something miraculous about watching dogged athleticism, and the absolutely ridiculous nature of human overwork. It’s not so much that I feel inspired by the level of work and the merit-based fantasy of it all— it’s that I’m fascinated by how one makes a life around a practice of anything. I am fascinated by the concept of someone fully committing to their life’s work.
Meanwhile, I’m over here recovering from a pulled or torn (my crappy insurance can’t tell me for certain) hip flexor (or maybe something else??). I am slowly healing and this is an insignificant injury in the grand scheme of the world right now, I absolutely know. But I have had to learn how to walk again, and now I am contending with the fact that the only thing that keeps me sane— running for miles— is something I cannot do. I am slowly getting back to it, but in the meantime, I have to find another way to not have a bad attitude about life, and that’s a kind of work—the work of recovery, too. I have always overworked my body to deal with my attention and sensory sensitivities, my anxiety, my nerves, my childhood hurts, my gendered socialization, all the other things from which I am recovering.
I have been thinking about the athletes who get career-ending injuries, and what this must do not only to their identity, but to their minds. I watched that documentary on Olympians’ mental health, in which athletes talk about the huge (sometimes really tragic) letdowns they experience after their time at the Olympics. Here are people, athletes, who have learned to deal with their own childhood trauma or excess energy or whatever by funneling it into a life’s work that we have all, as a society, deemed well and good, “healthy” or “productive.” To be suddenly cut off from that— it must be so impossibly confusing and painful. And it seems to me the lesson is not that finding meaning in one’s life’s work is unhealthy, but that for a time, it meant so much.
I guess what I’m saying is that I am no longer that distressed by my own overwork because I find value in the work I do. Because I no longer feel alienated from the means of production, perhaps. I don’t mean that I have the illusion that I control the means of production, i.e, Substack, hah. But that I have allowed myself to understand that the work is good and worthy, and that it is my best addiction, a kind of love affair.
I am always thinking about the value I find in my work, in feminist work, in art work. I don’t want to imply that my work is better or more valuable than someone who does hard material labor. It is not. I don’t want to create a false hierarchy of labor.
But when we talk about women and ambition, these are the kind of complex wrinkles that fall away from the oversimplified conversation— that is, the idea that women might find value in their work, meaning, what we often call purpose—but also that others might benefit from the work women do. That women might have something to offer the world.
I understand that we glorify waged work. I also understand that we sentimentalize the work women do in the home, and therefore hold women to different standards when it comes to work. And I know that as a culture, we really fail at complexity and nuance. But these are the kinds of realities that fall away when we continue to talk in circles about women simply choosing between “work” and “family,” “staying home” or "having careers,” being cat ladies or moms. I mean, come on. Sometimes, though certainly not always, work beyond the home and family is also love, and meaning, and community, and a life. And because women are people, we want that, too.
Related, from the archives:
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This: “I guess what I’m saying is that I am no longer that distressed by my own overwork because I find value in the work I do. Because I no longer feel alienated from the means of production, perhaps.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, too, as the quiet of summer (my summer are always sans-kids and often pretty ill-defined) evolves into the return to campus and a busy calendar. I’ve read Work Won’t Love You Back and The Good Enough Job (both great books), and like you say, the issue isn’t work per se, but exploitation. Building a culture that blames individuals for overwork is a convenient way to evade discussions about raising wages and building universal health care, etc. Certainly not everyone finds meaning in their work; for some, work is a way to build a life of meaning outside of work, for far too many work is about survival. But personally, I’ve found that avoiding work in order to avoid overwork isn’t serving me, since I do find my work to be particularly meaningful. So, I’m actually responding to my summer doldrums with a pretty packed Fall calendar and feeling darn good about it!