Content Warnings: work anxiety, stress
Dear Reader,
You have to be at least a little anxious to do what I do. At least that’s what I tell myself. I have a corporate job. The kind that involves planning and coordinating and project meetings and launches. How would I know to follow up with someone if I wasn’t nervously awaiting their response? How would I continue to put out fires if I wasn’t constantly anticipating the worst-case scenario? In the workplace, my anxiety feels like a superpower. It doesn’t feel like worry (though it very much is). It feels like strategy, adrenaline, and problem solving. It feels like saving the world.
At home, things are different. I’m not very good at letting things go. I wake up several times a night with my heart pounding in my chest and my head spinning with “what ifs.” I breathe and I repeat my mantra (“they aren’t paying you to worry about this right now”), but I cannot seem to turn it off. When I go to work the next day, it feels like I haven’t really left.
These issues came to a head when I got promoted. I had been there less than a year, and my responsibilities doubled. Anxiety did not feel like a superpower when I cried in the bathroom after meetings. It did not feel like a superpower when I came home and stared at the ceiling for hours, too emotionally drained to speak. The adrenaline I once relied on consumed me completely.
In retrospect, I was not set up for success in that role – poor planning, massive initiatives with simultaneous deadlines, and little to no support put me in the position I was in. However, at the time, it didn’t feel like that. It felt like a deep personal failure. I cried nearly every day for three weeks before eventually making the difficult decision to request a demotion. And, the worst part of it all? My boss was shocked. She was satisfied with my progress – she hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong.
I still lean on my anxiety, even after what happened, but I am trying not to. I don’t think I should have to make myself miserable to do good work.
To anyone who may be going through something similar, I offer this advice: make your well-being the priority. It’s hard to let go of the things that make us miserable in a world that seems to reward those behaviors at every turn. I don’t believe that we have to live like that to be successful. If we do, we should redefine what success means to us.
