Love [Work] is a Battlefield

The Berserker battle rage of having a job is NO MATCH for the joys of a baby birthday party

This is a weekly sub stack that did not stack last week.

Each week, even at the best of times, is a skirmish to preserve time and creative energies. Last week, I didn’t sleep well and the weight of a fraught professional situation sent me into ruminating spirals of anxiety. Try as I might, I could not redirect my attention. Tuesday slipped by and so did Wednesday. By Friday, I knew it was hopeless. The week had been squandered and I would not write an entry.

In the battle for my time, the object of my displeasure had won. My “writing time” had been spent drafting professionally watertight emails about process and procedure, workflow and ownership. I arrived at the weekend with nothing to show for my efforts but a strained working relationship and a throbbing pimple on my forehead.

Then came Saturday and Aadi’s second birthday party. We invited our friends and —for the first time ever— Aadi’s daycare friends. (We call them friends, but without a whole lot of language, I guess they could be his enemies, too.) The house was filled. The grill was fired up in the backyard and the kitchen was alive with the creation of a custom-made cake in the shape of Aadi’s very favorite thing — a city bus.

It was a perfect afternoon. Even still, the previous week's professional fiasco crept into my consciousness several times. Among the throng of guests, I had moments of being pulled away into the incoherent replies of a madman in my inbox, mentally formulating another perfect retort to an imagined verbal showdown that would never happen. Then, in the next moment, Aadi would toddle up with his blue car and his sticky fingers, and I’d be back in the present moment. Back and forth, all day long.

Then came Sunday. By Sunday I had so repeatedly digested and regurgitated the drama of the week that my mind began to double back on itself. I noticed a desire to find fault in my actions and behavior that would justify the treatment I had received the previous week. Maybe I was the monster? I re-read my emails and saw only respect and restraint. Even so, the desire to remedy this situation – even if it meant taking responsibility for someone else’s bad behavior — was so strong that I was tempted to fall on the sword in the name of peace.

And then I remembered the birthday party. I remembered how good it felt to drink a beer in the sunshine with friends. How nice it was to see Aadi running around the yard with his tiny friends [enemies?], eating his cake. I reflected on the moments that day where I’d struggled to stay in the present and realized that the peace I was trying to protect would never come if I couldn’t lay down my sword from a work situation that was designed to be unstable and all-consuming.

The peace I was trying to protect would never come for other reasons, too. It would never come until I laid down my desire to be understood by those who had no desire to understand me. It would never come until I recognized when it is a necessity to make things work, and when I was simply free to walk away (a freedom I’ve fought hard to create as a freelancer!). It would never come until I examined the deep part of me that, despite the evidence, is prone to believing other people when they tell me who I am.

Protection feels to me like a defensive position, a posture one assumes to absorb the blows of life. That’s why I turn inward and close myself off in these times. As I laid in bed on Sunday night, I began to consider what life might feel like if the protection I seek is not armor, but connection. Exposing the vulnerable part of my belly, instead of curling up in defense.

It’s not rereading an email to convince myself of my rightness. It’s, instead, staying in the moment at the backyard cookout, wading into the thick of the real-life conversations in front of me. It’s trusting that the love and the relationships in my life are deep enough to support and sustain me during times of change and uncertainty. Trusting that they won’t go away, despite my failures.

The greater battle is choosing NOT to fight at all. The hard truth is: pushing back against the bad is actually less difficult than opening up to the good.

Sorry for missing a week. And, fuck jobs.

Happy birthday, Aadi.

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Last week’s radio show was Sunday Scaries approved:

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