The unsettling thing about my job is that I am getting better at it.
I work at an entertainment agency. I answer quickly. I remember things. I can rearrange an afternoon that several people have already made impossible. There is a satisfaction in being useful, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy being told I’m doing well. Approval remains effective even when you have begun to question the activity for which you are receiving it.
Then I look at the people further along and wonder whether I want the life I am being encouraged to pursue.
This feels like an inconvenient discovery to make in your twenties, having spent so much of your life trying to become employable.
Every morning, people arrive with their coffee and their practiced accounts of the traffic. We open our computers. We establish what is urgent. By the afternoon, something else is urgent. There are meetings to prepare for and meetings about what happened in the meetings. Somehow it is Thursday. I have been meaning to call a friend since Monday, though I have found time to speak to several people on behalf of someone else.
The people around me are not empty. They are funny, intelligent, occasionally very kind. Some love the work. Some have children whose lives this work makes possible. Some are simply having a difficult week and would probably appreciate not being made into a cautionary tale by a person in their twenties.
I know this. Still, I look around and feel frightened by how easily a routine can become a life before you have agreed to it.
Working near creative people makes the feeling stranger. All day, you are reminded that making things is a legitimate way to spend an existence. People write, perform, invent. Their ideas become projects around which entire schedules are arranged. Meanwhile, you begin to treat your own ideas as little indulgences to be fitted in after dinner, provided you have finished everything required to keep other people’s ambitions moving.
I get home and want to make something. I also want to lie down and have nobody need me for an hour.
Usually, lying down wins.
What troubles me about burnout is how ordinary it can look. I am still answering the email. I am still pleasant on the phone. I can have a productive day while feeling increasingly absent from it. Then the evening arrives, supposedly mine, and I have so little attention left that even pleasure begins to feel like another thing I should be doing properly.
I don’t want to become someone who can only enjoy a Sunday until I remember Monday.
Of course, being creative does not make me exempt from work. Writing is work. Much of anything worth doing involves repetition, frustration, and stretches in which you would rather be somewhere else. I am not expecting a life in which every morning confirms my exceptional sensitivity. I would just like the effort to lead somewhere I want to go.
For now, I need the salary. I am grateful for things I have learned. I am also trying to stop using gratitude to disqualify my own unhappiness. An opportunity can be good and still be wrong for you. It can even have been right for the person you were when you accepted it.
I don’t have a dramatic resignation to announce. Mostly, I have an uneasy feeling I am finally taking seriously, and a growing reluctance to spend the next ten years proving I can endure something.
There are people who genuinely want the promotion. I hope they get it.
I would like to find out what happens when I give something I love the best hours of my day.
