“COME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU’RE IN,” concludes the flurry of Slack messages from my manager, an all-caps tirade that began at 4:56 a.m.
It’s a Monday morning in 2017. I’m sitting in my car in the parking lot of my newish job, my body frozen, my eyes glued to my phone screen.
I’m 45, and after decades relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, I’d landed a high-profile, C-suite “dream” job and published my first book, a career guide for misfits. I’d become an in-demand speaker, traveling the country to deliver talks on “making it,” my platitudes-with-a-twist quoted in business magazines, written up in women’s lifestyle blogs.
To the outside world, my success was unimpeachable. Inside I am a mess.
I’d worked through the weekend and, because I worked most weekends, the days and demands had all started to blur. My husband and I had moved to Los Angeles five years earlier, but I still hadn’t made any friends.
I’d skipped the parent social at our kid’s new preschool because of a work trip. I’d turned down an invitation to a neighbor’s potluck because I knew I’d be at the office late, and had said “no” to enough coffee requests from the few people I knew in the city that eventually they stopped asking. Instead of putting in the effort required to build a community, I spent nearly all of my energy in service of my career.
The Slack messages are followed in short order by three calls from my boss’s assistant. When I don’t pick up, the accompanying voice messages, each more frantic than the last, remind me that our boss wishes to see me, post haste. The crisis, like most work crises, does not warrant this level of urgency. But it feels like a five-alarm fire to me.
While I’d heard the term “workaholism” — coined by Wayne E. Oates, a psychologist who wrote the 1971 book “Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts About Work Addiction” — I hadn’t yet connected it to my life. Oates believed chronic overwork to be an addiction similar to alcoholism that creates a “disturbance or interference with bodily health, personal happiness, and interpersonal relations.”
In the months I’d been in the new job, I’d ground my teeth so hard that I’d torn through a night guard. I suffered from blinding headaches and was on several medications for gastrointestinal issues, including a gastric ulcer caused, my doctor warned me, by work-induced stress.
But the term “workaholism” didn’t land until I took the Work Addiction Risk Test, around the same time as my boss’s tirade. The WART is a questionnaire developed to identify five dimensions of overwork: compulsive tendencies, control, impaired communication and self-absorption, inability to delegate and self-worth. When I took it, I scored a 96 out of 100, I was near perfect at working and not much else.
Parentification
I’d grown up rough, the unplanned child of two in-love Italian American teenagers. Like many parents at the time, they had an old-school caregiving style built on dominance and a blind demand for respect. I was frequently smacked in the face for getting “out of line,” screamed at to be more industrious.
They did what they thought was best: pushed me to be tough, to not wallow in my feelings; insisted on a degree of grown-up common sense that, as a child, I could not possibly possess; let me in on adult fears and worries that I was too young to absorb. I was a hypersensitive kid, creative, extra tender and soft. In this environment, I never felt good enough.
Reacting to my childhood, I set out to prove my worth. I started working when I was 13 and basically never stopped. I found comfort in labor, in blotting out my feelings by pushing myself to exhaustion. Later, in office jobs, I found safety in proving myself and earning my keep through a harder-than-necessary day’s work.
Though data on workaholism and its connection to trauma remains scant, mental health experts do see a link. In the 1998 book, “Chained to the Desk,” Bryan E. Robinson, a psychotherapist who created the WART, suggests that the through line between trauma and workaholism is parentification.
Parentification has little to do with parental love. Instead, it occurs when caregivers fail to set appropriate emotional boundaries and attend to a child’s needs. As a result, parentified children can develop perfectionism, a need to control and an emotional chasm they seek, too young, to fill on their own.
By the time I left home, at 18, I felt emotionally beat up, inherently broken. Though I would not be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder for decades, I exhibited hypervigilance, an overdeveloped desire for control, nonstop self-blame and the feeling that it was all my fault if something went wrong. These qualities made almost every essential part of living — love, family, friendship — nearly impossible to manage. That is, almost every essential part of living except work.
A manager’s dream
Childhoods like mine can affect people in ways that make employment, let alone career advancement, difficult. But for me, this dynamic was flipped sideways: I was unnaturally driven to prove my own competence; so unable to absorb criticism that I’d work to avoid it at nearly any cost. In corporate parlance, employees like me tend to be proactive, high-performing, self starters — in short, a manager’s dream.
For more than a decade, I wound my way up and through the ranks, living for the next promotion, a high performance review or simply a pat on the back. I worked in cutthroat women’s magazines and in toxic Fortune 500 corporations, in scrappy startups and high pressure Hollywood production companies.
No matter how unrealistic the goals — quadrupling site traffic in two months, leading a team of five to do the work of 20 — I met them, often at a high cost to my relationships and my health. I conflated success with happiness, productivity with value. Again and again, I sought out high-challenge, high-stress jobs. I thrived when I felt bad. It was a skill that I’d been practicing my entire life.
By the morning of my manager’s all-caps diatribe, I’d somehow had enough. Maybe it was the therapy I’d recently started or maybe it was the wisdom of age, but I didn’t answer my boss’s messages. Our meeting never materialized, and the crisis simply dissolved.
Healing often feels like a scavenger hunt, clue upon clue leading toward a kind of emotional liberation. After that day, I became more interested in understanding myself than in proving myself. I started to set boundaries at work. I stopped laboring after hours and even took a few days off. I’d be fired within months. I no longer fit.
Over the next few years, I took all the clues I’d uncovered to reassess my relationship with work and find projects and positions where I did fit.
I’ve learned to right-size my relationship with my career, work manageable jobs that allow me to live a balanced life, invest in community and enjoy my family and friends. What I failed to consider in my years of striving was that building a connected, contented life outside of work would be the most rewarding success of all.
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