Rethinking Work

My unhappiness at work troubled me a lot

In my very first blog entry I expressed some of the gnawing dissatisfaction I'd been feeling over the past year or two in regards to my employment. To be honest, in recent years there's been times where it has escalated from mere dissatisfaction to complete resentment towards my job, my colleagues and the entire industry. It has perplexed and troubled me a lot because in most instances, these feelings are completely unjustified.

The majority of jobs I've had over the last few years have been great. Most colleagues I've worked with have been wonderful (there's been a few that have been painful, but they have been in the minority) and I've been fortunate enough to have a steady stream of work come my way, often without having to look for it.

So it seemed like some cruel joke that just as I was entering my thirties the career that I'd worked so hard for suddenly felt like a prison sentence.

As I poured my heart out one evening to a friend, she listened patiently before suggesting that I may have simply "burnt out". My mother's voice echoed in my ears from ten years earlier: she'd warned me of this very thing happening to me if I didn't "slow down".

You see, despite giving the appearance of being a sociable, well-adjusted and balanced individual (at least I'd hoped); those close to me over the last ten or fifteen years knew this wasn't entirely the case. I had an at times unhealthy preoccupation with work. I recall entire weekends in high school devoted to homework and assignments, where I'd stay up all night painting or writing or studying and ignoring my mother's pleas for me to go to bed. I remember locking myself in the toilets at school and sobbing inconsolably because I'd feared I'd failed an exam (I never had) or because I hadn't topped the class in a subject.

At university it escalated, with many weekends spent chained to a desk writing essays despite my mother yelling at me to take a break. Many a night I would creep to bed at four or five in the morning so not to wake her, having just shut down the computer after working relentlessly for twenty hours straight.

In my twenties this attitude spread from my studies to my paid work and was well received by my employers. I balanced full-time study at university with 25-30 hours work a week and completed additional internships and volunteering whenever I was able. I also worked freelance doing copywriting or marketing, so it wasn't uncommon for me to balance two or even three jobs at once. My grades didn't suffer either and I maintained a distinction average throughout my degree - often receiving high distinctions across all of my subjects.

My week filled with work,
on the weekend I would party

To relax I would drag myself to the gym the requisite three or four times a week and on weekends I would party. Thursday night signalled the start of the weekend with half price drinks offered at most establishments... Friday and Saturday nights followed a predictable pattern of pre-drinks, before heading to a gig or a club around midnight with a 5:00am crawl home.

My parents' suggestion that I might want to slow down fell on deaf ears. There's nothing wrong with me, I reasoned, I know plenty of other people who live the same lifestyle and also juggle work and study and partying and relationships. 

Besides, the evidence was clear. It was paying off. I was getting somewhere. Months away from completing my degree I had two job offers with production companies for full-time roles. One of my lecturers was not-so-subtly pressuring me to do Honours instead, and hinting at potential employment within my university.

Instead I bought a one-way ticket to London and within two days of touching down at Heathrow I had an interview with the BBC. Two weeks later I was waving my security pass as I walked into their Drama department, where a two-week temp contract turned into several months. Following that role I immediately secured another job within television... and so it went for the next five years (with a Post-graduate course thrown in for good measure).

But so what, right? Plenty of people work and study hard to have the careers they want. It's just what you have to do. Especially in the media industry, where the queue of wannabe's grows longer every day. And if you're truly passionate about what you want to do, then it's OK to pull out all stops to get there and fill all of your waking hours with work...

This is the message I was constantly fed. From a young age I was motivated by promises that my hard work would pay off one day and I was inspired by mentors who advised me to "just keep working". My ego was inflated by the praise of my employers and the glowing comments and feedback from teachers and lecturers over the years. And as I ascended in my career, moving from small companies to large ones; small projects to major productions; assistant to manager... this only reinforced my view that I was doing it right. And that as long as I kept moving forward and moving up, I'd find happiness and one day I'd be content with a career I could be proud of...

Never mind the relationships lost along the way. All those ex-boyfriends that complained I worked too much? They just wanted some docile, obedient doormat that would make them the centre of the universe. They were simply insecure because I had a mind of my own and interests outside of them!

Never mind that I sometimes drank a little too much...

And never mind that I sometimes drank a little too much and had developed stress-related IBS. I ate healthy and went to the gym, so I'd be alright. As for the seizures and bouts of depression...well, plenty of people suffered the same (or worse).

And as for my nagging mother...well, she would say slow down, wouldn't she? Her life was her family and her friends and her hobbies and her pets. She'd given up on the prospect of a career years ago!

But of course, my mother was right.

By the end of my twenties it all started to unravel. I was miserable and exhausted. Whatever optimism I'd felt towards my career had started to wane. I was tired of doing ridiculously long hours, lying awake with insomnia and never being able to switch off. I hated the insecurity and competitiveness of this industry. I despised the faux 'creatives' in their funky warehouse/studio/office and the doe-eyed graduates brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. They all talked such a load of shit.

I remember one night sitting in a wine bar in North Melbourne with my fellow film school buddies. They chatted excitedly about projects they were working on and enquired about how my latest job was going. I tried to hide my thinly veiled contempt and forced a smile. They were all so congratulatory. Once we'd all been united by a common desire to 'make it' in this industry, but now I simply felt like an outsider as I wanted nothing more than for my contract to be over so that I could something - anything - else.

I felt so cheated. I was finally getting somewhere in my career, but I'd never felt more lost. And if I'm perfectly honest, I was a little terrified too. Had the last decade been a complete waste of time? Had all of it been for nothing? And if I didn't have work... what the hell would I DO?

My brain yo-yoed between sheer panic and rationalising (It's just a phase... just keep working... just keep moving forward...) The self-realisation that maybe my mother/ex-boyfriends were right and that I did have an unhealthy preoccupation with work didn't stop me from continuing in a similar pattern for another two years.

I needed to learn to relax

But finally, I conceded defeat. Something had to give. Perhaps I was burnt out. Perhaps I simply needed to rediscover what I loved about my work in the first place. Perhaps I needed to learn the art of balance. Perhaps I needed to take up meditation, or yoga, or Pilates... Or perhaps I needed to simply drift across the globe for a while, sampling multiple varieties of beer.

Whatever it is that I 'need', these next few years will undoubtedly help me find out. I've already had a lot of time to reflect upon my skills and interests and even managed to put some of them to good use whilst on the road, which has reignited a small spark of creativity and reminded my why I got into this business in the first place...

And whilst I still feel guilty when I'm not filling my days with activity...and whilst I'm still a compulsive list-maker and planner and scheduler and organiser (much to my partner's dismay); travelling forces me to be more flexible, to deal with the unexpected and (most importantly) to be patient.

One of the reasons I love to travel is because I'm always an outsider, always a foreigner. I'm not defined by the place I'm currently inhabiting. I'm not defined by my accomplishments or my profession or what it is that I 'do'.

Perhaps it's time I stopped defining myself that way too...

I'm still searching