Stress is My Teacher
During the onset of my illness I was working at Amazon. I served in various roles over the course of six years, but they all had one thing in common: high pressure to perform with unclear expectations. Amazon generally expects its employees to act as mini-CEOs of a myriad internal "start-ups", driving innovation and results by building scrappy coalitions, and doing "whatever it takes" to get a new initiative off the ground.
This setup works for many people, and Amazon is configured as a Darwinian landscape to select for those individuals, while actively encouraging everyone else to weed themselves out. Though it got clearer in the final years that I was not a "fit" for Amazon's culture, I persevered there in large part because my wife and I didn't feel God releasing us to leave (though I tried many times). And those six years taught me a lot of things about myself and how I operate.
I have to set my own boundaries
No one is going to know what my boundaries should be but me. While Amazon's jungle took this concept to the extreme, the rule of the world is that it will take as much as you are willing to give. It might say thank you, it might not, but it certainly won't be looking out for your well-being. At best, it will encourage you to look out for your well-being, and may give you some tools to do that, but it will not proactively monitor your health and determine whether your life is configured optimally for your well-being.
“What I learned from a company that emphatically refused to define success for me was that I needed to be responsible for my own definition of success.”
Throughout my career, I’ve enforced a limit of 40-45 hour work weeks. I did this initially out of a commitment to love my wife well and allow space for our infant marriage to grow. Over time, that conviction made me a better employee as I consistently looked for ways to make processes and functions work better and smarter so that neither I nor anyone else needed to "burn the midnight oil" to get things done. I configured things to operate within working hours and communicated that restriction to the business around me, a business that constantly declared urgency and heroized the people that sent emails at 2am and were on-site with customers on Saturdays. And what I found was that this boundary was generally respected when I had the backbone to stick up for it, and could clearly communicate when things would get done, if it wasn't on the most urgent possible timeline. This boundary served both me and the people who worked for me well, and certainly protected me from even deeper levels of burnout.
The other boundary I set was more subtle, and took longer to acquire. What I learned from a company that emphatically refused to define success for me was that I needed to be responsible for my definition of success. I needed to take a step back from day-to-day activities, decide what was missing, what I wanted to accomplish, and then when I did accomplish it, to let people know about it. While I am tempted to believe that people around me want to define success for me, I find they're most often too busy, too tired, too focused on their own crap to care much about mine. It's also the logical conclusion of our branding-centric culture: I'm responsible for telling people what I'm "about," what battles I'm fighting and why, what resources I need to win them, and then letting them know when I've achieved victory or that I’m taking responsibility for my failure. By owning this narrative, communicating it clearly to others, and obtaining their buy-in, I'm then free to operate within the framework that I create.
The reason I call this a boundary is two-fold:
Knowing what I'm "about" and sticking to that framework protects me from the kind of work-grabbing, empire-building behavior that I'll often see from folks who are concerned that they don't look good enough to their peers and superiors. Since they aren't confident that they are wrapped in a narrative that others see and buy into, they're shaping an ad hoc narrative around being a general hard-worker and go-getter, or just trying to build the biggest possible empire so they can be seen as "great."
The narrative about what I am doing also becomes a kind of force field that shapes the world around me. Practically speaking, this looks like either my manager recognizing that something doesn't fall within the scope that I've communicated to her, or some work item being presented to me and me having the ability to respond, "That's a great idea; I think we could partner with [X] team to leverage their data for the first piece of this, and then my team can fill in the gaps." By knowing my scope, and the scope of those around me, I both protect myself and optimize business operations and resources. I chose the phrase "force field" vs something like "shield," because the goal isn't to deflect things away from me (saying "no," and ignoring the concern behind the request), but instead to shape needs that present themselves into the best possible configurations and outcomes for myself and those around me.
Last thing I'll say is that I can attempt to do all of the things I've outlined above and still not achieve the outcomes I want. Not all of it is within my control; other people have to buy into and synergize with my narrative. In my last years at Amazon, I was spearheading a large initiative to create something new for the company, something I knew they desperately needed. I did all of the things I knew I needed to, and still failed to get buy-in from the leaders around me that my vision was truly what the company needed. They were willing to let me try, without much support, and when it appeared to them that I had failed, I quickly found myself "under the bus." It's there that I'm thankful to the God who upholds me and doesn't allow me to be put to shame, who works all things together for my good, no matter how painful they are while they're falling apart.
I have to listen to my body
During the time that I was getting sick, my understanding of what was happening to me was completely out-of-whack. I touch on this in a post about My Journey to Chronic Lyme Disease but, generally speaking, I thought of myself as a slightly sick person who was making their experience of that illness manifestly worse by being anxious and depressed. I viewed my struggles as being something to "push through" in order to not let the depression and anxiety win. I viewed my weakness as something to be overcome. The result was that I regularly pushed myself to the point of crashing, which saw me leaving work early, exhausted and weeping, to lay on the couch for a day or two, recovering.
“I saw that I was violating my relationship with my body as it tried to communicate its limits to me.”
In leaving the high-stress environment of Amazon, I finally got some distance from pressure-to-perform and felt free to simply listen to what my body was saying in response to the activities of life, whether that was work, exercise, socialization, etc. I found that by pulling my foot off the gas when I started noticing certain signals in my body, I could reduce the severity and frequency of crashes. What's more, by treating anxiety and depression as signals from my body in its illness, rather than factors leading to it, I had even more insight into the type of rest I needed at any given moment, whether physical or spiritual.
While I am definitely weak, I find that my weakness is a kind of parameter that I can choose to operate within, rather than one to defy. In realizing this, I saw that I was violating my relationship with my body as it tried to communicate its limits to me. Interestingly, this relationship also mirrors the one that has long existed between my heart and mind. I idolize the thoughts of my mind as though they are the only things that matter and attempt to force my heart into compliance with its ideas. For example, I know the Bible teaches me not to be anxious, and so I berate and cajole my heart as I notice anxiety creeping in ("stop doing that!"). However, my heart is not something to be manipulated that way; it must be loved into submission to whatever is good for it. And the love that it needs is the perfect love that God gives: by sending his Son to die for me, he gave me forgiveness, grace, and acceptance. By learning to live in love with my heart and body, the way God taught me to love through his own example, I've learned to listen to my body’s feedback the way one listens to the instruments of a car, and respond accordingly by giving myself what I need.
“Stress now teaches me where I’ve over-extended my concept of what I’m capable of, and where I need to reshape my space or the narrative around it to rein it back in.”
By combining this new understanding of my limitations with earlier realizations about how to construct my own narrative about what I was doing and why it was important, I found that I could take charge of my limitations and turn them into strengths. Stress now teaches me where I've over-extended my concept of what I'm capable of, and where I need to reshape my space or the narrative around it to rein it back in. One of the fundamental elements of my narrative these days is a circumspect view of my capacity, and when life becomes more demanding than I have resources for, it's a sure sign that it’s time to reshape my narrative to account for my current capabilities.
Here I'd like to reiterate two things:
It's funny to me how readily the world seems to accept these boundaries once I've shaped and articulated them (telling folks I have Chronic Lyme Disease certainly helps, even though it often makes me nervous that doing so will impact me negatively),
I have no guarantee that I will always find that level of success in the future. I am in charge of how I shape and present myself, God is in charge of how I am received, and I have to trust Him with his role according to His promises.
If you find yourself anywhere like where I found myself, chronically sick and struggling to get your feet underneath you in life and work, please don't take this as a checklist to absorb and emulate. These are the things that I needed to learn in order to thrive in the particular set of circumstances handed to me. You may not be in a job that allows you as much freedom as I've had to define my own success, and you may not be able to leave a high-stress job if you’re in one. You will likely need to learn different lessons to help you thrive, and my prayer is that you will experience God's great grace for you in your journey.
