The rain falls steadily outside, through white mist. It runs down the eaves of my house and drips through the gaps in the deck. Underneath the deck waits a partly finished painting, of an Orca in multicoloured waves. I started it with my friends on my birthday, thinking of the last time I started a community artwork on my birthday. I remember my friend Andrew expressing delight at being invited. I don’t recall which part of the artwork was his. He passed away a few years ago. He was kind and generous when I was stuck in my art and very overwhelmed by a challenging work project. I learned a lot from him. I hold a piece of him here. All these people who exist on the periphery of our lives. I think he struggled a great deal and I don’t think he knew me well enough to reach out.
Raising young children can be a strange kind of loneliness. I am not isolated the way I once was, where days might pass before I realised I had not spoken. I run into a hundred people across the day and see so many lives through the screen on my phone. But so much of it feels brief and disconnected, a performance at daycare, at the chemist, on the phone. I have felt very isolated with my precious ones, their strange needs and vulnerabilities and my own keeping us in a place where I’m always busy and always surrounded by people but always in a role, often far away in my mind planning and problem solving and managing, rarely as present or connected as I hoped to be.
I remember my parents when I was young, the grinding poverty and the exhausting search for viable work. I recall how skilled they were, how dedicated and devoted, and how much it occupied every moment. Work stole my father from me, a little more every year, like a tide going out. I was always chasing and always grieving.
I have signed up to Inklings, a somewhat controversial program intended to support communication and connection between parents and young ones. As with many such things I strongly suspect it’s highly dependent on the relationship between the person delivering it and the parent. I like my person, I feel comfortable with her. I watch Calliope and notice things I haven’t seen before. I gear away from solving all the problems and towards being present. I put music on and simply sit with her and Little Bear, in the rare luxury of cuddles I don’t have to rush away from to do tasks and get to appointments on time.
I was diagnosed with burnout again last year, after a series of crises. Trying to understand burnout through a group lens, through the roles and ways we connect, the culture we create, the values we espouse, and then struggle to live up to. I have been thinking a lot about burnout recovery, and about these tiny moments, micro moments, my speech path calls them, of connection or creativity or rest or pleasure. It’s pausing dinner for just a minute to respond to the child showing me something. It’s holding Nightingale for just a moment before the rush of the morning. It’s watching the mint grow.
I didn’t sleep well last night, despite my exhaustion. Nightingale is in hospital, Calliope is suddenly night weaning, and I’m trying to hold the sky up as best I can. It’s a kind of race, trying to catch the crucial things – ordering more of the essential medication before it runs out, keeping the fridge stocked, remembering to cancel that appt I can’t make, closing the loop on a difficult conversation with a client. It’s often my worst scenario – simultaneous inputs across multiple domains. My brain doesn’t deal with that elegantly, I will simply meltdown however hard I’m trying.
But I’ve been thinking a lot about culture, about how to move away from a culture that accidentally creates burnout, that pushes through and puts needs on the backseat, and links care and altruism to exploitation and exhaustion. I’ve been thinking a lot about workplace culture and how to better name and communicate mine. I’ve been working a lot on our document suite about who we are and how we do things, and why we do them that way. I’ve been thinking about cultures that assume failure and build in fail-safes and protections, rather than requiring perfection. It’s occurred to me that, as I’ve transitioned from an unemployed nobody who couldn’t get a job, through a series of often highly challenging and exploitative working arrangements, through to running my own business and employing a small team, that I’ve stumbled into gaps. I went chasing information on how to be a good boss with disabilities and struggled to find anything. I fell into dilemmas such as – I want to model vulnerability and authenticity, but by the nature of the power I hold in this situation, my own vulnerability lands differently – it can destabilise and stress a team who rely on me for their livelihood, and it can make them less likely to be vulnerable if they’re worried about leaning on me. These are not easy dilemmas to manage.
I have recently come to realise that one of the most destructive elements of the role I have created for myself is that I have built the values of trauma-informed care into every other role except mine. It’s explicitly part of how we engage with clients and how I support staff. It has never been applied to me. I’ve never even heard of the idea that someone with the power, someone at the top is also at risk of trauma. In my case, the gulf between my values and what I actually have power over can kill me. The gap between my aspiration and capacity can be lethal. I have some power, but not all power. I still have to function in devastatingly broken systems, in abusive power structures and the grinding harm of late-stage capitalism. I cannot make things as I wish them to be. I am often heavily constrained from doing good in the world by the very systems set up to protect people. Staff ask for accommodations that I am forbidden to provide. The constraints are also internal. I wish to be someone I cannot always be. I fall short. I have to find ways to embody my values there too, how to be humble, honest, and authentic. How to permit myself the grace I offer to others. I have to accept the imperfections of my own work, and avoid the false promises of purity in favour of the dirtier and more humble path of imperfect learning. I have found this notion of a trauma-informed approach to being the boss a liberating perspective. Gradually, I begin to fold myself into the same category as my staff, deserving of the same protections and the same care. Not pretending that my role or my vulnerability is the same as theirs, but acknowledging it is still real. Power is only one protective factor, against the scars of my lived experience, against the survivor’s guilt, against the constraints of my capacity and my circumstances; there are still rocks to be dashed against and shipwrecked upon.
I woke up at 4am. Calliope has started to settle at nights now, a week away from Nightingale who is in hospital. Poppy is with Rose. We muddle through. I wilt under the bright hospital lights, the sensory assault, the fatigue and demands and painful lapses of good medical care. I crash, and rest, and pick myself up and keep going. I couldn’t sleep but I could light a black candle and listen to the rain. Fold myself under warm blankets and nestle next to Calliope. Think of Nightingale, far from home. Think of the painting waiting for me. The small moments of soul that I am strewing across my path like flower petals. The tiny lamps that light my way home.
Sarah K Reece 