A Year Later...

I guess we all, and by we I mean me really, thought there'd be more to work out - publicly at least, because there was certainly a lot going on behind the scenes. To be clear, I did spend a lot of the Fall doing this, just not through this blog. I committed to healing out loud - while also working here and there, and really just taking time to be human. 

Things switched up however, as my grandmother (my mother's mother) who had been focused on getting her affairs in order ended up getting sick in January and my sister and I began full time caretaking for her before she passed at the end of that month. She was 94, she lived a full ass life, so as much as we wanted her to be able to live in a post-pandemic world, I'm grateful to have had the last few years to be as closer with her. 

That said, whatever I had in my mind about where I was going with my professional life in the Fall and early January had been centered on making sure I could incorporate her care into my time. When she passed that was thrown out the window and a new layer was added to my healing process. 

We know healing isn’t linear and we also know there is no singular formula for how it should work. Prior to grandma's passing and in the immediate weeks after, I felt I needed to be honest about my healing but was often conflating it with the "out loud" part. Not everything I was going through needed to be shared publicly, as I was also negotiating how to continue disconnecting my professional and personal selves from each other, giving each one its own breathing room, even planting them in separate parts of my garden. They had been so dangerously intertwined that I hadn’t seen how I no longer wanted to be the person I thought I wanted to be at the beginning of 2020 until then. (Aside: raise your hand if you didn't think 2020 was going to be your year. Yeah, I thought so.) 

At some point - maybe late Spring - I decided I needed to continue to be honest about where I was with my journey, but I didn't need to share every detail. Something happened after grandma passed that clicked me into holding parts of the journey closer to my chest - not that anything of note was happening. Moreover it was that as the two year maker of the pandemic arrived - and I saw people I am close to hit their COVID walls and begin to return to their old lives while I was retreating again into my new layer of grief. I saw people begin to do their own public meaning making about our collective grief, about having to pivot in their own professional and personal dreams. Not a single person was asking me to perform my grief - but as I watched everyone else processing out loud - or in some cases jump out into the world I couldn’t help but feel like my continued sharing could be read that way - as a performance of some kind. Who was saying this? No one. Did I care? Enough for that thought to occur to me. It was - however - good for me to just be with it again. I also think that I subconsciously had a script I thought I needed to create for what I shared about my journey. It needed to not be frivolous. It needed to not be petty. It needed to be just personal enough, but still somehow universal. I needed to give space to everyone else experiencing this massive collective grief - and for some their first experiences of it at all. Everyone quitting their jobs needed their time too. So I retreated. 
Besides - I didn’t have it in me, in ways I did before (pre-pandemic even) to share platitudes about how “we can all do it (!)”, how we are all “more than enough”, about all the lessons and learnings I had about grief, about work life-balance, about capitalism and productivity… etc. etc. etc. 

And while my break - or shift in boundaries more specifically - was needed, and was good, I can’t help but reflect now that it has been a full year, that this Fall has begun, maybe I’d also over corrected, because there were still things I wanted to share.

Silly things on Instagram stories, just because I think they are funny or weird or wild. I want to share things I’ve realized about work and life and the concept of work life balance, because I don’t want other people to be taken advantage of the way I felt I was at times, I want folks to feel empowered and able to get themselves out of those situations. I want to let everyone know that grief sucks, and it’s totally a normal part of life. There are things I want to share because I feel like there’s value to the unique experiences my millennial siblings and I are having as we spent our childhood hyped up and told we could be anything we wanted with a college degree and are now buried by never ending student loan debt and a myth about adulthood and the American dream that is not possible but we are overly bought in to while Boomers, Gen X and Gen Z just want to shit on us for our shared anxiety, IBS and coffee addictions. We know it's all a scam y’all, we’re just in too deep. 

So, as I continue to figure out where I want to be and what I want to be doing - or rather how I can find things to do and places to be that feed both the personal and professional, even maybe allow the personal to be the bigger part of the garden - I’m trying to more organically let myself say and do and be things out loud because it’s authentic to me to do so and less so because of others and what they think, or don’t think or need to hear or don’t need to hear. 


Here are some of the things that have been brewing and I want to share.

The concept of “balance” is a scam.
We all have been dreaming about a work-life balance during the pandemic, because we’ve been able to see all the ways we were fooled by capitalism and productivity and put too much weight into the work part of things. But I just don’t think balance as we’ve defined it in popular culture - is possible. Things are never truly balanced, and if they are - its temporal. We need to be working more to cultivate equanimity. It leaves room for the good and bad to coexist, it leaves room for you to honor whichever side of the scale is requiring more of your attention. 

As a person who LOUD quit, quiet quitting is not actually quitting.
It’s setting the boundaries you already should have had, boundaries that capitalism has told us we can’t have. Take your sick days. Eat your lunch, away from your desk. Unless you are in a life saving profession - and sadly while I think education can change lives, for folks working office jobs, or reform spaces like I do - there is no work so urgent that you cannot call out, go to the doctor for a regular check up, or miss a family funeral. If it’s urgent - someone else can do it. And if you really need to quit - do it - don’t be reckless, but the boundary holding that we’re calling quiet quitting can only work as long as the conditions to hold them up are supportive.

If “Break Your Soul” was the thing that made you finally say - “I think I'm unhappy with my job” - I’m sorry you needed Beyonce to be your mirror. 
I generally think her experiences aren’t actually that comparable to us regular degular people. She literally took steps toward her current career when the rest of us were working at Jamba Juice and Foot Locker as teens. It’s also not Beyonce that made you actually realize this - but the fact that the pandemic actually gave folks space to pause, reflect and see people treat others like trash because they were more pressed in isolation and with stay at home orders than they ever had been before. 

The things I used to use to measure my happiness, success, value, etc. - were mostly made up. 
I already noted that I realized I didn’t want the things I wanted in early 2020 anymore, but what I also mean is I was measuring my success against things that don’t matter to me anymore. I was seeing peers win accolades, get promotions and new titles. Half of which are either made up or symbolic - not that folks aren’t deserving, these are all people doing important amazing work - because there is no industry standard for folks outside of the classroom. There’s not a national “Ed Policy Analyst” Award, or Guild (though I am now recalling there was an attempt in my district to bring folks who had that same title all together for the sake of feeling collegial and important even though our job duties differed from person to person). But the same goes for dreams of adult rights of passage like homeownership, (IN THIS ECONOMY?) of marriage or partnership (the days I am grateful to be unattached during this pandemic have slightly outweighed the days I have wished I had a partner, given all we’ve been through). Those were based on old frameworks that don’t apply any more (read: the old economy). 

Student loans, a scam. College, a scam. Not that I don’t value my education, I’m grateful I was able to continue learning, when and where I did, BUT back to my age old adage of school systems saying “college is not for everyone” - is that for us to say? What if it's a “not right now” thing? What if the purpose of college was for folks to just learn what they want to learn? AND what if we didn't charge folks an arm and a leg for it?

And things? Stuff? Consumption? I want things, but I also don’t want all the physical things I thought I wanted before, I want less most days to be honest, but maybe that’s just part of my streamlined “I’m just here living and being” mindset right now.
There are a million other ways for me to measure and validate all the good in me. I have hope that we can all find other ways too, that work for us, that are true to who we are. 


So… yeah. Lots of continued rumblings, rewriting myself for a 3rd time in so many years. A member of my chosen family talks a lot about revision, but I don’t think that’s what I’m doing, I think I’m actively throwing things out and having to start from scratch. As hard as it is at times, I’m okay with that right now.

Anyway, here’s to more transition. May the next ones be filled with a bit more ease.  

Maybe this time, I’ll have more to say before another year has passed, till then ✌🏽.

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