A writer reflects on the moment she understood the roots of her workaholism.
“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.