I’ve started to notice that I feel pretty anxious when I’m not working.

Truthfully, I think I’ve been this way for most of my life. As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t yet found a cadence of work that feels sustainable, and I’ve battled burnout after burnout throughout my career as I try to maintain a level of completely unreasonable accomplishment.

From what my family tells me, I was a precocious child. They tell stories about how my intelligence intimidated other parents at our private pre-Kindergarten. I was social engineering access to admin accounts on school computers when I was 5. Starting in second grade, I was bussed across the county for ‘gifted’ student programs, where I was rewarded for being able to see Magic Eye patterns and falling in love with logic puzzles.

I started working when I was in high school, on top of graduating with 7 A.P. courses and an above-perfect GPA. College came as a rude awakening, when I suddenly had to learn how to learn for the first time. I was humbled by Virginia Tech’s Computer Science curriculum, but this was countered by a job offer at 19 years old to join Microsoft in their Redmond, Washington office on the other side of the country.

For most of my life, succeeding in highly structured, authority-driven contexts was presented to me as the only option. I was so good with computers – of course, I’ll go into Tech. I was 13 years old when my love of art was swiftly shut down with “your younger sister’s work is better than yours, you’re not the artist.” Throughout my childhood, teenage years, and early twenties, I was an extremely accomplished, yet extraordinary naive person – primed for Corporate America success.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 2016 hit me hard. The 2016 election was the first one that I voted in, seven years after I was eligible. I was going into my fourth year at Microsoft, rapidly burning out after months of 12+ hour work days as a “tech evangelist”. I was facing increasingly hostile gender-based discrimination as I tried to advocate for myself, and eventually took a significant pay cut to go work for a VR startup. My serious college relationship ended when we realized we couldn’t agree on a timeline for a future together. Through all of the stress, work was a continual beacon to me. Immersing myself in deep technology allowed me to intellectualize away my emotions and the voice in my head setting off every possible alarm bell to get me to slow down.

Through COVID, I had moments of clarity about the unsustainable way I was living. I was finishing a fellowship in San Francisco that had me commuting 3 hours each day of the week. After months of lockdown, my then-fiance, now-husband and I made a decision to move back to the east coast. While part of me knew what leaving Silicon Valley would do to my career, another part underestimated the amount of productivity that had been programmed into me in the seven years I was there.

Within a year of moving to Maryland, I started making plans to leave. I had returned to Mozilla after a 9 month stint working at AWS, and finally acted on my long-standing desire to go to graduate school. I applied – and was accepted – to Columbia University’s business school, and my husband moved mountains to sell our house and coordinate a move to Brooklyn in just under a month and a half. I started classes – ten hour days, every Saturday – on top of working full time managing a team of 31 employees.

My pregnancy with my son gave me the urgently needed signal to slow down. After a horrific mental health breakdown after a 16 hour work day at twelve weeks pregnant, I withdrew from a term and reevaluated where I was. I had moved back into an individual contributor role, but it was hard to mentally manage what felt like a professional step back at a time that put my career at risk regardless. Maternity leave after my son’s birth slowly helped me out of the all-consuming pull of my work.

And then, in May of this year, I was laid off.

I didn’t share the news widely. Before my official time as an employee ended, I found another role at a separate subsidiary of Mozilla, and I was able to put the past behind me. For six weeks, though, between being told I was no longer welcome on my old team and starting on my new one, I had a glorious period of exploration and freedom. I launched the Data Introspection Project and had a few conference talks accepted. I took long walks with my husband and now-toddler, and I applied for an adjunct role at a local community college.

The break wasn’t long-lasting. I started my second Masters program in August, throwing myself back into the now-familiar grind of balancing graduate school with full time work. I was offered the adjunct role, and started teaching a class on project management. I feel extremely drawn to academia, so being able to explore these all in parallel is rewarding and deeply fulfilling. My routine is tightly managed and scheduled, to make sure that all deadlines and deliverables are tracked. I get to do it all from my home, which still gives me many hours of the days with my toddler. This morning, we baked pumpkin muffins together. He loves cracking the eggs.

I joke that school is my hobby, but I hold myself to the criteria that I never get too busy to bake for my family. When things are smooth, everything feels like a well-oiled machine. I’m tired all the time, but that’s just life in our post-capitalist society.

This weekend, though, I’ve started questioning whether or not I’m tricking myself into the belief that this is sustainable. I find myself anxious when all of my work is finished, and I seek out something else to do. There is an almost frantic energy behind my need to be productive, and I struggle to find rest as something that is permitted. I know, intellectually, that it is necessary. Fill your own cup first, etc.

There’s an immensely manipulative quote attributed to Jeff Bezos that they teach you when you’re on-boarding at Amazon related to finding work-life harmony. It’s this idealistic idea that gets thrown at employees to get them move invested in work as a core part of their life and identity, and coming from the mouth of a billionaire, it rings more hollow than inspiring there days. At the same time, I find myself wondering about the lives of historic academics, who immersed themselves in the things that they were fascinated by and drawn to. Is this ambivalence that I feel a result of capitalist pressures? Or am I just a privileged polymath, well-supported by my community in service of constant learning and growth?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. My medical records write the story of the antidepressants, misdiagnoses, and anti-psychotics that have peppered my adulthood as I’ve learned to cope with the onslaught of emotion that is tangled up in my relationship to achievement and accomplishment in America. Mercifully, I don’t need them anymore. My data-driven brain is delighted when I look at my daily mood tracker and discover a single 1/5 star day since my son was born. I excitedly open up LibreOffice Writer to start my homework assignment, a whole day ahead of my usual schedule. If I get it done today, I can play Brotato with my husband tomorrow.