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.