Calling out injustice is good, but we must caution ourselves against virtue-signalling. We must pass judgement where we see failings in our world that we want to see change. But most of all we must judge ourselves and make changes. And our judgements must be a call to action. And the ones who must respond to the call are our own generation.
Reliance and unconditional love
The nightly ritual with my dog
My dog and I have a nightly ritual. I switch off the television or put down my book, and wake him gently from his favoured position snoozing beside me on the sofa. He looks at me regretfully as I carry him outside for a final five minute stroll. On re-entering the flat, I present him with his first biscuit. He leaps on this with gusto before realizing that, being a tiny animal, he cannot fit it into his own mouth. He gazes at me with absolute hope, trust, and unconditional love, sitting patiently at my feet, the picture of reliance. I crush the biscuit into bite-sized pieces, which he consumes while I brush my teeth and wipe off the layers of make-up that have seen me through the day.
As I undress, he gets a second treat, then waits until I am ready to lift him on to the bed. There, I check that there is no residual biscuit trapped down the sides of his poorly-designed jaw and deteriorating dachshund teeth. While I apply moisturizer and take my nightly pills, turn on an audiobook and slide under the duvet, he is already preparing his side of the bed for sleep, hollowing out his space under the covers. Once I have lain down, he rests his head on the inside of my waist or my thigh, nestling it warmly into my flesh. Almost instantly he is asleep.
For a 5 kilo animal, he can snore like a train, but there is no sound I would rather listen to while I attempt to drift off to sleep. In these times, when I wake a lot in the night and dream vividly, his snuffles and sighs are an anchor to reality, and a comfort in the lonely darkness. Everyone who has ever accused me of spoiling him is completely right, but the support and love we offer each other feels mutual and unconditional.
Love and reliance
I know this is the experience of many people who own dogs. For some women, it may also explain part of their desire to have children. Covid has seen an increase in dog ownership, perhaps in part as other relationships are put under strain. It is a strangely compelling thing not only to be loved – whatever it is it actually means for a dog to ‘love’ – but to be needed. For me, in my darkest and lowest moods, I do find myself coming back to the core question: what would happen to him if I were gone? I have written before about the harmfulness of perceiving oneself as irreplaceable, but his attachment to me is undoubtedly real and powerful. He suffered a lot of trauma before I owned him, and I cannot shake my sense of responsibility to him.
His trauma, combined with the many design flaws we have bred into miniature dachshunds, makes his reliance on me particularly palpable. More than just requiring food, water, medical care, my dog cannot undertake stairs on his own. He cannot jump on to the sofa or the bed. He cannot even bite into a normal dog biscuit or clear its remnants out from the back of his mouth. His past means that he suffers considerable anxiety when left alone or asked to endure the company of others.
I find that I am able to be patient with him in a way that I would not be with a person, even a close friend or relative. I forgive him instantly when he gets things wrong. Of course, this is in part because he is only a dog, and cannot be expected to behave like an intelligent human, even a child. But there is also something in our relationship, in what I feel obligated to do for him, that comes from what is definitely a form of love.
Accepting our need of others
At the moment in particular, suffering with my mental and physical health, I have found myself obliged to turn to other people in a way with which I am distinctly uncomfortable. It feels incompatible with my sense of personal strength and independence. There are people in my life who I know love me unconditionally, yet I find it almost impossible to accept that love when it extends to need or reliance.
It has left me asking the question as to why, when I rely on and gain so much from a relationship with a dog who needs me, I cannot accept that the same is true for others who are trying to help me. Doubtless relationships with other people, especially within families, are a good deal more complex than what I can have with a sausage dog. I also accept that it is a joy and a privilege to have people in my life who do offer this love and care, and that not everyone has what I have.
However, looking at it objectively, it seems essential that if we are to care for ourselves we must learn to accept the care of others. I need to find a way to understand that part of love and friendship is to recognize that we must allow others to support us in our vulnerability. When we are incapable of doing everything for ourselves, it is our responsibility both to ourselves and to others to accept their help. I must learn that this may not only be something that I need, but something that those who love me need, too.
Into the rabbit hole: a workaholic stops
Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Content warning: mental illness, eating disorders
Accepting I am a workaholic
I am a self-confessed workaholic. Not even the work hard, play hard type. I have created a life over the past ten years entirely defined by work. My career has given me enormous rewards and fulfilment, but not without great cost: neglected friendships, failed relationships, and deep exhaustion. But last week, for the first time in over a decade, it all stopped. It took a doctor to tell me – as I protested with the last of my diminished energy – that I am not fit to work. There, in writing, on a printed piece of paper, shouting my failure into my face.
Now, of course I know that it is profoundly wrong for me to label this as failure. It is not. But that is how it feels. In spite of an entire career supporting students in a wide range of settings with debilitating mental health issues, I don’t seem to have listened to my own words of advice and pastoral care. I have been diagnosed with a complex picture of depression and an eating disorder, the physical and mental toll of which have reduced me to forgetting my words, making errors, almost toppling over with faintness, and yet the workaholic in me finds herself unable to accept that she shouldn’t be working.
Attempting to stop working
The first thing I did after I was handed the doctor’s note was to rush back to teach my classes, unable in my workaholic haze to contemplate anything else. It took several more hours for me to have the necessary conversations after which I would allow myself to head home, head bowed in my sense of shame and bewilderment. I am still struggling to accept that my students might actually be better without me than they were with me ploughing on in my current state. The guilt of the extra workload I have had to pass on to already overburdened colleagues wakes me up in the night.
However, in five days off work, I have already had time to reflect on the mess of misplaced assumptions and perspectives that have contributed to my inability to cope with the current situation. Whether recognizing them will go any length to dealing with them, I have yet to work out: I can only hope that the next few weeks will give me the time and space to process these along with the more specific details of my current situation.
A misplaced sense of self-importance
First and foremost, I need to accept my misplaced sense of self-importance. I am not irreplaceable. My workplace will not fall apart because I am not able to fulfil my duties. My skillset is niche in places, but it is not unique. My self-worth has doubtless been long predicated on my feeling of significance within the very small pond that is my place of employment.
Yet, however good I may have been at my job, somebody else will always be able to do it just as well. And, right now, I need to accept that they may well be able to do it better. It is my duty, to my students and my colleagues, to accept that, but, having built up so much of my own identity upon the fallacy of my core significance, my failure to do my work has manifested as a failure to fulfil my own sense of purpose in the world.
Have I sold my soul?
This leads me to the second mistaken perspective. I am one of a group of millennial women who has chosen career over relationships, children, to some extent even friendships. Smashing glass ceilings, excelling in my field, these have all defined me and my successes. I do not, for a moment, intend to dismiss the value of what I’ve achieved in my life in these regards. They are not going to cease to be of core value to me.
But, in truth, I am starting to accept that I have sold my soul – and now my frail body – to something the importance of which is crumbling in my eyes. At what point is the cost simply too high? I may not need to find identity in relationships or children, neither of which I am seeking at present, but to have pinned my whole sense of importance on my career at the expense even of my health is a story that many people can doubtless tell. For the first time, I have been forced to stop and ask whether it has truly been worth it.
The privilege and cost of work
In a time of global crisis and increasing unemployment, I fully admit my privilege at being in work and in a career that has provided me with much fulfilment for such a long time. And yet, as we look at the new world we might want to build in a post-Covid era, wider questions about the purpose of human roles within society and of the place of work are surely being called into question. My life is undoubtedly a limited microcosm and I am not claiming to embody the wider experience of even a small part of society, but I also doubt that I am alone. In an era of increased isolation, the necessary removal of normal socialization, and strain on creating and maintaining relationships, coupled with many people’s concern about the future viability of their employment, I don’t doubt that there are others like me who have clung more and more to finding purpose and meaning in their work. And I will not be alone in having paid the price.
Workaholic identity
It is not my intention for a moment to make a reductive comment about mental health. My current issues are both a result of my work and a result of many other factors from recent years. However, I do want to make a point about workaholism and the nature of self-esteem and personal identity and meaning. There is nothing at all wrong with finding pride and meaning in one’s career or a job well done. I would never want to lose that – and doubt that I ever will.
However, right now I feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Even if I have, in reality, been tumbling for a while now, it is the removal of work – even if I have to acknowledge its many toxic and damaging elements, and, more importantly, my own toxic handling of it – that has left me in free-fall. When Alice landed, she ‘was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment’. I only hope that any workaholic who feels like I do will do the same, but it may take wider personal and, indeed, societal changes if that jump is to be easy.
Must I write? I must.
On the need and value of writing in the face of adversity and disagreement.