Sick Day

I have a cold. I’ve been in bed most of today and have hit total boredom. Ever the workaholic, I’ve checked my work email a few times today, but managed not to do (much) actual work since I did after all call out.

My job is sort of a nightmare these days. It has often been that way, so I can’t even say that its more or less so than many other times in the past three years, but right now I’m at a low point in my ability to let things slide off my back. I know I need to leave, but I don’t know how, I’m struggling with when, and I’m absolutely terrified of what it will mean for my future– financially, career-wise, everything. It’s clear that the people who care most for me will probably want to throw a party when I finally find a way to walk away– but I have not yet figured out what it will mean for me. I find the whole situation utterly heartbreaking. I define myself by my work and for work to be such a constant source of anxiety is frankly tearing me apart.

I need a break.

I Hate That So Much of What I Have to Say These Days is So Negative…

I am a “Director” in my little sometimes-struggling NonProfit, meaning not a “Manager”. I’m the senior staff member, and in this long strange “transition” I’m the only one of the now 3 full time staff who’s been here longer than a month. There are 3 part time employees 10-20 hours a week, the longest standing of which has been here since end of July.  And then there are a variety of independent contractors that provide services to the company but are basically around on a per-project basis. This is my third boss in four months, and it’s fair to say I’m grieving the other two in one way or another, but most particularly the most recent of them.

Yesterday was a pretty lousy day. NewBoss is angry with me because… oh it’s a pretty long story. But among the highlights are that she feels I have a bad attitude and that she feels “taken advantage of” by the fact that I’m in and out of the office as much as I am. My hours are odd at times and a strategy I’ve had against my Workaholism has been to try to keep track of my hours and “make up” extra time as it comes up. So, for instance, when I got called in for my supposed day off this week, I worked less hours one day later in the week. To this point, flexible hours has been one of the few benefits of my position and all the stress it causes me. I’ve been lucky to be in a job where I can schedule a doctor’s appointment one morning and not have to jump through hoops to clear it, because everyone knows that I will work several hours “overtime” in the long run. This isn’t working for NewBoss, which is her right to determine I suppose, but her intense reaction (considering we’ve never had a discussion about my hours or her expectations in general) and a few things she said greatly concern me.

She wants me to have more regular work hours (9-5 or 10-6 or something) no matter whether there was a late night meeting or event I was required to go to or not. She basically said that telecommuting isn’t really “doing work” and that if I have to “do some typing at home” its on my own time. The implication is that if I was using my time well in the office I wouldn’t have work to bring home. And that as a “Director” if one of my staff calls out on my day off and I have to cover for them all day, I still need to put in the additional hours above that.  I am a salaried, at will employee. So my question becomes, if salary means I don’t get overtime and am expected to come in above and beyond the traditional “8 hour day plus a lunch break,” is there no upper limit to what could be reasonable hours or workload?

One of her other issues is with one of my two assistants, J, who has a young daughter and is currently sharing a car with her husband because she has to save the money to get her car fixed. I hand-picked this assistant because she is nothing short of amazing and helps me out in innumerable ways. She comes in when she is sick, and she goes above and beyond with the tasks I assign to her. When I ask her to do something, I do not worry whether it will be done or done competently. But there have been times where her child care has fallen through, and so she has called me to see if there are possible tasks she could do from home, or in two cases brought her daughter to work with her. The other day it was raining and she was driving to the office from a mountainous area where it was more slippery than in Office’s City, and she called to say she was a little delayed because of traffic and safety but that she was on her way. NewestBoss has serious problems with all of this because it did not “look that bad” outside, and because she “raised two kids while working and never had any trouble.” I care about J and I’m protective of her in a way, but mostly the tenor of NewestBoss’ objections is what really bothers me. It seems like her view is that there aren’t other priorities in life, and that it’s reasonable to expect that J would choose to put her family after her job.  And when she says to me that the 50+ hours I worked last week aren’t that big of a deal, and that in fact she doesn’t consider time I spent subbing for an absent staff member, making phone calls on the way to the office, having business related lunches with potential partners, or typing up multiple reports on my laptop at home count as work done– that in fact she feels I’m trying to get away with something by NOT  WORKING ENOUGH… well, its been a difficult thing to process.

She wants to structure my hours, fine. She wants to define her expectations, fine. She thinks her lifestyle choices have worked for her, fine. But suddenly my struggles to create a life outside of work seem to have another obstacle, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Checking In

I keep meaning to post and getting swallowed up with living. Some highlights: I finally broke down last Tuesday and handed Transitional Boss a letter saying if I didn’t get the assistant I was promised 5 months ago I would stop coming to work– it about killed me to do it, but it appears that squeaky wheels do occasionally get oiled and I can hire an assistant next week. Also in letter writing news, I wrote the Dept of Consumer Protection about the fact that I’ve waited since April for a functioning washer-dryer– I  don’t think it will help but it felt good to do it. What else… I got into a fight with someone I thought was a good friend who I’ve been blindsided to find out has a rather patronizing view of me. I upset Sister by asking the wrong question at the wrong time. I played with BestNieceEver on Thanksgiving. My Christmas friends are in town again this year and they have encouraged me to drink more glasses of wine over the past two weeks than I’ve had all year.

It’s been a rough week or two. I haven’t been getting enough sleep and I’ve often been so wrapped up in my unhappiness over one thing or another that I’ve gone back to just saying “I’m hanging in…” when people ask how I am– cuz “fine” seems like too much of a lie. I’ve been surrounded by people who really care about me, which has been nice, but I guess I’m in a wilderness place again, and I’m just hoping to find a clearing there by Christmas.

This post should have been about my so-exciting cruise

And I will have to remember to fill you in on all those details because really. It.Was.Wonderful. — but instead it’s 20 of 4 on the morning I have to return to work and I just found out something this past evening that is going to make tomorrow, er, today– even more depressing than I was kind of already anticipating it would be. Phooey.

Suffice it to say I think I’ve finally come around to truly question the viability of the NonProfit I work for. Economic viability, programmatic viability, everything. Things have always been rocky here, and I often say the great miracle is the fact that we’re still here. I have tried so hard to fix so much, and certainly it’s fair to say that my identity has gotten quite mixed up in my place here. And for the first time I think I will be truly in a place where I can will myself to consider whether I should stay. It makes me ill to even think of leaving. But until tonight people would say “How can you stay there? Don’t you know there are places where you could be paid more? Appreciated more?” Maybe I haven’t known. Maybe I still don’t. But tonight’s the first night that I haven’t been able to brush those questions off easily with a “well maybe someday I’ll come to my senses…” or a “it’s working as a job for me for the moment” or a “there’s a lot of benefits in this job that I couldn’t get somewhere else.” Tonight’s the first night that I’ve hesitated at all, even let myself grapple with the question for real.

Damn it. And I was so rested.

How to Re-Member - OR - I’ll put money down my day sucked worse than yours

One of the causes worth supporting that I’ve linked on this site is a place called Re-Member. It’s an organization that serves the Lakota Indians on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I volunteered there a couple years back, building bunk beds for families living a dozen to a trailer. I am glad to have done it and would love to go back, it is a wonderful spiritual place that is making a difference in a community that sorely in need of healing. They host volunteer education and “mission” trips (though not of an evangelical variety in any sense of the word) providing service to Remember and Re-Member the Lakota people. That is, first, to Remember what has been done to the Lakota in the past and what continues to afflict them now. But, perhaps even more urgently, Re-Member seeks to Re-Member, that is to do the opposite of dismember– to take something that has been broken and put it back together somehow.

That image has resonated with me ever since that trip. I’ve been thinking about it a lot today, which was, to put it mildly, a very sad day from beginning to end. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to explain. Suffice it to say that children are often extremely cruel to one another and I would like nothing more than to take away some of the pain they so carelessly inflict sometimes. In my position at work I take responsibility for the well-being of hundreds of children a year, and it is a heavy responsibility I take extremely seriously. I care desperately for the kids I work with. Sometimes that isn’t enough. They fuck up. They hurt each other. They disappoint me. And today I spent literally the whole day– from 8:30AM to well-after 10:30PM, sorting through a mess of crazy proportions that included all of this, all in the name of protecting a victim. I made kids cry. I made parents cry. I blamed myself. I’m angry and sad and exhausted and disgusted. But mostly it’s just sad. And I look at all that has been broken in my organization, and these kids lives, and in my trust in certain people and I wonder How could any of this possibly be Re-Membered?

Loving People Sure is Emotionally Draining

My pastor is moving to another church. I find it extremely hard to talk about with friends my age, particularly friends who don’t know my church and what it is like there. Partly because its my faith is very personal to me I guess and partly because everyone my age seems to be agnostic, or passionately pagan, or devoutly  atheist– and the fact is that Christianity has a bad rep among my generation. I don’t dispute that this rep has been largely earned– it’s just that it’s become kind of accepted to bash people of faith as though they were all ignorant, or mean-spirited, or at least misguided. And that hurts sometimes.

I am the first to say that the public face of Christianity in this country disenfranchises virtually all other world views and spiritual practices on a regular basis, and that it’s not fair. And that one of the greatest travesties done on behalf of the church, throughout the ages, is abuse. Sometimes I try to grasp just how many have been hurt on behalf of religion, and by my religion, specifically. I can say that my God is a different God than that of the man who stood on the pulpit over my friends’ corpse just under nine (!) years ago, who felt it necessary to let us all know at that moment of his future in hell and ours as well. I can say that the whites who sought to Christianize the Lakota Indians by stealing children from their families and beating them in boarding school prisons when they didn’t speak English were not truly acting in His name. But semantics aren’t very helpful in these cases, and to some extent that is what it is. I met a young man a few years ago who blew his settlement money on crack cocaine after suffering for years because of his priest’s sexual misconduct. I doubt my protest that technically I’m Protestant would mean little in the face of his well-earned right to despise the Christian faithful. Christians need to own up and take responsibility. People are broken. It’s in our nature and it’s part of our life. And sometimes the institutions we are a part of contribute to that brokenness. I can’t fix the way so many people I care about have been hurt in this way, and I respect those who have examined the evidence and come out critical of this belief system that orders so much of my life and provides what little clarity and comfort I feel I have at times. So I laugh at certain comedians and remain silent when my friends comment that they think Jesus is a fake made-up story. But there is a bitterness towards my faith sometimes that makes me feel like I need to hide it, almost be ashamed of it, and it hurts.

I’m grieving my minister. He has not died, he is just moving on to his next adventure and I am proud of him for embracing the opportunity for new challenges. He has played so many roles in my life, in just the short time I’ve known him and been a part of this church. He’s sweet and funny and wise– kind of a self-deprecating teddy bear sometimes and kind of a world-weary activist in others. He gets excited about things and it’s contagious. He wears his heart on his sleeve and worries about being liked, and yet he had the courage to write a sermon about a friend who died in Vietnam during the months when America appeared to be counting down to the start of the Iraq War as though it were a Superbowl. He let me direct Laramie Project in the sanctuary and then shielded me from the outrage of those who did not approve. He comforted me with his quiet anger when I confided that someone in the church, charged with helping me through a difficult time had dropped the ball. He prayed with me. I miss him already.