Some recent emotional upheaval which I won’t really dig into led me to make some use of the Employee Assistance Program available to me for some free therapy sessions. Yesterday was session number two. While it hasn’t been mind blowing, it’s been valuable spending some time trying to take a step back and think through what’s really going on, and the values alignment exercise that I recently went through did give me one small epiphany that I thought worth writing down and describing / processing a little more.
The whole thing stemmed from some irrational impulses to quit my job; and while I am in a privileged position of being able to survive for a time without a regular paycheck, I don’t really feel like this was an appropriate / rational response. So I decided to spend some time unpacking what was going on, where did that impulse come from and what was driving it? The answer came after I went through a values exercise (linked for the curious, and one I felt was useful if not life-changingly revelatory) and discussed the answers with the therapist. When I initially brought up why I was seeking counselling, I talked about how a certain work situation brought back feelings of frustration about how some approaches and practices being pushed on me from management weren’t really aligned with my own beliefs about best practice, and that reminded me of why I had left my previous job. This was causing me to relive a lot of feelings of burnout and dissatisfaction that I had been trying to escape when I resigned last November.
But the values exercise showed me I wasn’t really currently that far out of alignment with my values at work, it was more that just I wasn’t giving enough space / time to other areas of my life around leisure time and personal fulfillment, so that anything that didn’t sit right at work got blown out of proportion. All well and good, but why did I feel so badly like I needed a big break from work? Was it really just burnout? I couldn’t square this with the general feeling that for the most part my work isn’t overly demanding right now — there’s plenty to do, but I’m not feeling overwhelmed for the most part, I have a fair amount of flexibility and autonomy, and there’s a team now to share the load.
Meditating on this a bit more, I realised that I’m in a really transitional place in my life, and I do want to make more time for my own personal growth and even just some straight up enjoyment and fulfillment that I’ve left on the back burner for a considerable amount of time. I really don’t know how I exactly want to tackle this problem, though, and beyond trying to make some small steps in some obvious areas (like getting off my rear end and moving my body more), I don’t have a good idea of what I want to do beyond have some time and head space for exploring my options and making a plan.
The thing that clicked into place for me is that whenever I have a new problem to solve, I need enough time to sift through the problem and break it down into manageable steps that I can handle or I just hit up against a wall of overwhelm. I do this at work; it’s my main form of figuring out a delivery plan for new software systems. Taking time at the beginning of a software project to break down the work is a foundational part of software engineering and doing that for other projects just comes naturally to me.
Even when it comes to projects outside of work: cleaning the house, dealing with paperwork, numerous other projects, I always feel like I handle it better when I can Kon-Mari-style just put everything into a big pile, and then sort through it and break it down into chunks that I think I can deal with. My first step of doing the laundry, for example, is to dump all the dirty laundry into a pile and then start sorting things into loads bit by bit. Once I have all the loads divvied up, then I choose whichever load I think takes top priority and shove that into the washing machine first.
So it suddenly made a lot of sense to me that the thing I’m looking for is some time and focus to sit with, understand and break down the problem that is what do I want to do for myself right now and in this place in my life, but I never get a big enough chunk of time to really focus on that. Quitting my job seems to my lizard brain like a sensible escape hatch to giving myself that time, because it doesn’t seem practical to just give up all the other time commitments I have outside of work. I am definitely needing to mull that over and question that assumption, however.
Now that I’ve drawn that connection, I just need to figure out what I want to do about it.