Just work
A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. It’s for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again. Subscribe for free posts.
The call was tense. Two thousand employees logged on to express their angst to the CEO. As questions flooded in, he answered them smoothly, relaxed on camera.
Behind the screen, I fed the CEO responses, my heart pounding. For ninety long minutes, I swallowed the anxiety that poured in and spit out polished answers. My messages were cool, calm and reassuring. But when we logged off, the anxiety rumbled in my stomach like lava. I paced around my apartment as my heart rate came down from the stratosphere.
“Thank God,” I thought, “I never have to do that again.”
Before I went freelance, I held executive-level communications roles, first nationally and then globally. I led communications teams and served as the consigliere for several CEOs. I was the person who could find words for any situation.
When I became a vice president at 33, I saw my rapid rise as a badge of honor. A male colleague and I had built the communications team together, and it was time for one of us to lead. He was better at writing and I was better at managing so I got the top slot. The partnership played to both of our strengths and we worked well together. But looking back now, I wonder about the deal I struck.
At a stroke, our domains diverged. He handled the words and I handled the feelings. He spent his days debating ideas and writing papers. I spent my days in one endless meeting, asking: “How are you? What do you need? How can I help?” I empathized and motivated and mediated. I poured my heart out at work because that’s where I thought it belonged.
Our staff joked that we were the team Mom and Dad. Both of us took pride in our talented and close-knit clan. But their jokes hinted at an uncomfortable truth: our division of labor was gendered. We didn’t mean to set it up that way, we just gravitated to roles we knew. Work relationships are, after all, relationships. As in other spheres, women often do the bulk of the emotional labor.
At the time, the division suited me fine. I enjoyed advising and managing, and in many ways I was built for it. I’ve been attuned to anxiety since I was a child, and I pick up other people’s worries like shells at low tide. I saw myself primarily as a solver of problems and a soother of feelings. Powerful people relied on me for these skills, so I figured they must be valuable.
There was only one catch: holding everyone else’s worries was exhausting. Each time I stepped into soothe a situation, my adrenaline flared like I was racing into a burning building. All day long, I jumped from one problem-solving call to another. At the end of the day, I was jittery and desperately depleted. I’d pour a glass of wine, flop down on the couch and zone out.
But there was never actually a burning building. I was shaping messages, not saving babies. I was hollowing my heart out for work, but my job was never going to love me back.
In my final months at my full-time job, I posted two pink sticky notes on my computer that read, “Your work is not your worth,” and “You have done enough.”
They felt aspirational and vaguely naggy, like the free weights I’d bought and never used. I aspired to be a person with boundaries and toned biceps, but I’d get to it tomorrow. There was always one last project, one last push, one last person who needed me. Each email was a ping of need, a worry shell to collect. The sticky notes eyed me reproachfully.
So I answered the emails and took the calls—until, one day, they stopped. When I went freelance, a flip switched. The calls evaporated. The flood of emails slowed to a trickle. I refreshed like an adrenaline junkie looking for a fix, but my inbox stayed stubbornly silent.
Unsettled, I searched for problems to solve. In my first few weeks freelance, I scheduled meetings and drafted agendas and built color-coded work plans without being asked. My clients scanned the documents, politely bemused, and never opened them again. They hadn’t hired me to manage, they had hired me to write.
I realized that I had unintentionally reset the clock to the moment, years before, where my role as team Mom has diverged from Dad’s. I had a chance to live in the land of intellect, rather than emotions. There were no worries to swallow, no fires to fight, just the steady work of stacking words in a row. Week by week, as I settled into this placid new realm, the hours at work streamed by smoothly. My inbox pinged maybe once a day, and I stopped refreshing. Gradually, I stopped seeing myself as a solver of problems and started seeing myself as a writer.
As an introvert, I enjoy a good conversation but too much interaction drains me. My old executive roles felt like working the room at a cocktail party. Freelance feels like solving a crossword puzzle in pajamas. Writing engages my mind without sapping my spirit. At the end of the workday, I have the energy for pottering in the garden and baking pies and catching up with friends.
Recently, I noticed one of the pink sticky notes on the floor. It had fallen off my computer, its nagging done. “Your work is not your worth!” it chirped at me one last time. It felt like a reminder from another era.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s just work.” I smiled and threw the note away.
One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!
Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
I feel this 100%. Holding everyone else’s worries is exhausting - tough to let go of, and not anyone's job, but as an introverted empath, that is a very hard lesson to learn.
Clearly Liz, you are a writer! I love the way this piece swirls around and circles back to the sticky note in the trash. Such poetic justice!