Through the depths of my misery, when I wasn’t eating, when I was crying whenever I was alone, when I relied heavily on prescribed assistance to sleep, well throughout all that, I was working, and working like I’d never worked before. Now a lot of this was not necessarily by choice. There was no negotiating with my terrifying workload, no shortcuts to get around having to give four lectures a week (all of which were on topics I’d never taught before and had no particular interest in). When I coordinated one subject last year, I still ended up working about six days a week for at least two-thirds of the semester, and this time I coordinated two subjects, so it was a no-brainer that I would be burning the candle at both ends. For the record, my average day this semester involved me waking up at 6am to start working (by mid-semester, once marking came in, that would often be pushed back to 5 or even 4am), and my work day generally came to an end sometime around 10pm (but increasingly that was 11pm or later), and I worked a reduced version of that on weekends. Some of that was lack of advance planning, but a lot of it is simply that universities really do rely on self-exploitation, and every colleague that I spoke to about what I was doing casually revealed that the first couple of years are just ‘like that.’ I guess the idea is that pride in one’s work (and fear of looking like a fool) will cause one to put in crazy hours at the expense of the much bally-hooed ‘work-life balance.’
Even when I was in the thick of it, I was still objectively amazed by the fact that as everything crumbled around me, I could keep ploughing on. There were certainly moments where I thought I wasn’t going to make it (especially that first lecture, literally only four hours after my ex told me BY TEXT MESSAGE that he definitely wasn’t moving over) and granted, there were a couple of days where nothing was achieved, and many moments where not even the thought of referring to military leaders by their entertaining nicknames talking could stop the tears. By and large, however, I just kept slogging along, working often quite literally through my crying jags. I wrote lectures, prepared for tutorials, read multiple drafts of my Honours students’ thesis, peer reviewed an article, gave a guest lecture, attended an array of pointless and time consuming committee and departmental meetings, underwent irritating staff training that ate up my valuable time, helped a bit with the organization of a conference, all whilst treating eye drops and caffeine and my anti-depressants like they were air. At the end of the semester, despite my continued belief that I may well be a ‘bad’ lecturer, I could nevertheless feel an objective sense of pride. Sure, some of my lectures weren’t great, sometimes I was so tired I probably seemed like a zombie, but it all got done, and it all got done on time. I met every commitment and disappointed no one (sometimes at the expense of my sanity and my health).
This was a bit of a surprise to me. Firstly, I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a slacker. Lord knows that during my postgraduate years I was the first to try and get friends to have a beer (or twelve) at midday in the middle of the week (in fact, I developed a simple hand gesture to signify my intentions, and by the end of my PhD I had become a bit notorious for this habit, well beyond my friendship circle). In short, I fully enjoyed the freedom that my PhD (and its attendant scholarship) gave me, and I got used to the dismissive comments that some people (like my ex’s family) made about the lazy, indolent lives of PhD students. Now on balance I can see that I was often working quite hard, because I also tutored throughout my candidature, worked as a research assistant, worked at a library, was involved with a postgraduate journal, went on several lengthy research trips to archives, and still managed to achieve the all-important timely completion. However, I never thought of myself as someone who had much of a ‘work ethic,’ and I had always quietly disapproved of the way that many academics worked, and often talked about the need to be pragmatic and to set boundaries. In short, I swore to myself that I would never be one of those academics who had no life. (HA!) So my first revelation was that when it came to the crunch, my work ethic trumped everything else – trumped my emotional distress, my misery, my loneliness, and the more physical manifestations of my heartache (complete with nausea, vomiting, weird ulcer-like cramps, eye twitching, headaches, dizziness, etc). Through it all, I never thought about giving up, of not writing the lecture, of not marking the essays.
Initially, work seemed like the most unbelievable burden. Sometimes, my tears were partly out of self-pity because I couldn’t simply ‘take a week’ and give myself over to grief. There was no time for me to sob for days, to lie in bed eating bonbons, no room for the classic movie montage of a disheveled blonde in sweatpants, surrounded by balled-up snotty tissues, crying whilst paging through a photo album. Instead, I found myself leaking tears on the bus (behind my trusty sunglasses, of course), crying in my locked office in the break between lectures and tutorials, weeping in front of my laptop, and always, crying last thing at night and first thing in the morning. I longed for the space to just give myself over to my feelings, instead of having to look up from a fit of weeping and get back to that thesis draft.
After a few weeks, however, I realized that the work, the constant, ever present (and ever growing) list of things I needed to do, well it forced me to keep going and to focus on something outside myself. It was real, it was tangible, and it had little to do with my emotional state. Furthermore, as my emotions became deeper and nastier, I increasingly realized that giving myself over to my grief (which was quickly and intimately connected to darker themes of self-hatred), well that wouldn’t necessarily speed up the grieving process or help me in any way. So work became a way of trying to tamp things down, to put off self-reflection, to compartmentalize things. That may not be particularly healthy, but as a coping strategy, it was pretty good. Furthermore, losing myself in my work, losing myself in the detail, in the facts, well that actually gave me a small amount of pleasure. And not to be glib, but write a few lectures about shitty human behaviour and you’ll find yourself completely unable to take your own problems seriously (at least, for a while). You may still cry, but at least you’ll be crying for someone other than yourself.
To sum up, I had the startling revelation that work can set you free.
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