First-Day Jitters

I will always feel like I’m running out of time.

Today marks my first day, having left a job that was incredibly challenging, and deciding to take some time to be softer and go slower. The first time I have left a job, without a new one to take on, like train-hopping from one track to another. In June 2021, I started my maternity leave. Naively, I thought that would be my chance to slow down. Although I reveled in the intimacy and embodiment of it… I now know that the carrying, caring and chaos of being at home with an infant is by no means rest.

Today is my first day of rest.

Perhaps there were days, when my daughter started daycare at a year old and I was still at home, that should have felt more restful. But I was restless. I called those few months before I was due back at work “my sabbatical”. I spent them wracking my mind about my next career move. I didn’t want to go back to management, which I’d done for a year (entirely during the pandemic), nor did I want to work clinically again. I spun like a compass. I worked with a career coach, who helped me define my vision: I wanted to change healthcare. I wanted the work I have been trained to do as a speech-pathologist to be available to those who need it most; I wanted clinicians and services to be more responsive. I wanted to use my gifts, my energy, my drive to bring about change. There is only so much time. I want to make it mean something.

The restlessness, the relentlessness – it was there during my maternity leave. Looking back now, I had been pouring myself into mothering the way I’ve approached all my study and career pursuits. I emptied myself into it: a forge into which I threw myself without looking back. There was no way but forward, to become what I intended to become. I have wanted to be a mother and I embraced it. I cherished the joys and struggles, aching as I warped and reshaped with every new experience.

My partner and I did it mostly as a village of two; the reality of being far from his family and in complicated relationship with mine. I’m grateful to the support system we do have and the resources we were able to draw on, because they allowed me to be the engaged and responsive parent I needed to be. For my own healing, perhaps. But also because there might not be enough time – who knows how much or how little we get with our children?

In those sabbatical months, when being my child’s primary caregiver was no longer the bulk of my day, I felt disoriented. Like the wave I’d been balanced precariously atop had tossed me ashore, violently, into a chilling breeze of expectation drawing goosebumps from my skin. Back to work, career-woman. Back to those goals and that dream and that fulfillment and success you have so defined yourself by.

I didn’t want to go back to my old workplace – I was frustrated by being passed over for several positions I’d applied for; one of which I had been willing to cut my leave short to attain. My ego got the best of me, I think, but I also needed to find somewhere to home the restless energy, the forward momentum of that wave which I could feel but not yet understand. My compass started to point towards equity work. In the hospital system. A new field, a new work culture, a new career path to calculate. It was thrilling, truthfully – I was excited to be surrounded by excellence, drawn to the learning and growth I’d experience in such a space. Forge, fire, becoming. Expectations at their highest. I’ve always made myself in those environments. Here was another chance.

So I did it. For a year. An incredibly hard year.
The sharpness of the expectations did carve me.
But I didn’t know how much softer my heart had become, and how deeply the cuts were sinking.

As much as I believed this softness – my compassion, my whole-heartedness – would create the change I envisioned… I wasn’t prepared for how much it would cost me in the demanding environment of an academic healthcare institution. Because the underlying refrain in this space echoes and outlines and etches those of my long-standing fears.

You are behind.                     

You are not enough.

You. Are. Running. Out. Of. Time.

At first, I allowed this refrain to pull me along: of course I have lots to do, I am new at this. I can be a beginner, I’ve done it lots of times! I will catch up. I produced. I learned. I steeled myself to the imposter syndrome and trusted that I had value to infuse into the work. I was new to the challenges of being a working parent too, but no matter; I’d figure it out, didn’t I always? Fire, forge. No turning back.

But the forward motion of my career… the crashing wave of my maternity leave… was an anxious need to prove myself.

I thought I’d come to know my own insecurities. I thought I was self-aware, able to contain my childhood traumas, label my perfectionism. I thought I was now enlightened, able to give myself grace and divest from old patterns that had caused me suffering in the past.

Couldn’t I see that I’d placed myself right in the heart of those failed achievements from previous imaginings of my career? A university-affiliated hospital – my dashed chance at a PhD? The field of medicine – my dad’s original, unfulfilled, career hope for me?

I couldn’t see it. Not until the work culture of urgency, scarcity and corporate extractive production fused with my own intense pressures to perform and succeed. Throw in the physical demands of a breastfeeding, sleepless toddler and the year that ensued was one of stifling anxiety. Chest-caving panic and doubt, sliding into depression. Chronic pain keeping me awake when the little one finally slept, inflamed to the point I could no longer walk the 15 minutes to her daycare for drop-off. Fatigue, brain fog. I have always pushed through. But this time the forge was crumbling me to ashes.

So I quit.
It wasn’t that simple, or quick… but that’s another story for another day. With the loving support of my partner, my therapists, the lake where my heart always feels open and at ease, I decided it’s time for a rest. I left the job. I ended 2023 with a wide open space before me, an undefined departure from Career™ as I make time for myself to heal – both physically, as well as mentally, the lacerations from throwing myself into the jaws and belly of the healthcare beast.

Today’s story is that it is the first day of my commitment to rest… and I will always feel like I’m running out of time.

Here I am, with the privilege of being comfortably unemployed, having exercised my right to escape from the capitalist, perfectionist demands of the workplace, and I found myself in a storm of anxious thoughts.

Even on this very first day of my freedom, by 9am I felt a thousand things calling my name – calling for me to earn my freedom, to make the most – to prove my worth. To produce. To achieve.

Inbox zero.
Write a novel.
Write this blog (Every day! Every week! Don’t set a schedule, though, you’ll fail. Set a goal – the perfect goal – or you’ll never do it; and then what will you have to show for all this indulgent time off?)

Purge the house. Clear the clutter. Visit all those friends and family members you’ve neglected because you were busy with your job/parenting/life/selfish pursuits.

Do something. Do everything. Or you will run out of time.

One of the reasons I finally took the leap over the edge and quit, was that writing was calling to me. It was a soft landing, ready to catch me as I considered a life undominated by a 9-5. but I want a different relationship with writing than I have had with my other career goals, and I want to develop a different relationship with myself as a writer, a mother, and a person than the dysfunctional, demanding one I have had as a template to date.

I need a new relationship with time.

So I have written this post, to signal a trust that I can put myself out there without the pressure of perfection, ready to rebirth this blog as an experiment in my voice rather than the collection of polished essays I’d originally intended it for.

I’ve written it on my first day of freedom, as a gift to myself for being brave enough to say goodbye to that job, brave enough to slow down my life. Brave enough to give myself time to pursue this calling with no expectation of success.

If I write nothing more, I have at least done this one thing. I can breathe. I can rest.

I can be.