#58: When you're doing everything everywhere all at once
You're trying to hold down your job/studies while raising your child/pet/houseplants and maybe also doing a couple of part-time jobs but also volunteering for a handful of committees/projects/whatever. There aren't enough hours in the day to do all this well, or even adequately. How do you avoid feeling like a complete failure? Well, friends, obviously you need to drop the committee and stuff. And then you need to rethink what the problem is here (spoiler: it's not you) and what really matters (spoiler: it's not the stuff you're worrying about).
Rachel Aviv's profile of Martha Nussbaum in The New Yorker is here.
References:
Brooks, D. 2016: The Road to Character (Penguin).
Harmon, J. L. (ed.) 2007: Take My Advice (Simon & Schuster).
Palmer, P. J. 2009: A Hidden Wholeness (Jossey-Bass).
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi again, friends. I want to dedicate this episode to Kiwi, one of our beloved cats, who very suddenly became ill with kidney failure and who was put to sleep this morning. We’ll miss you, Kiwi. And I also want to dedicate it to the wonderful, kind people who contributed to his medical treatment via a fundraising page I created. I don’t know yet how much his treatment has cost, and it’s not covered by insurance so I’ve been pretty anxious about it, but I think those beautiful friends and strangers have raised most of it. I am so touched. If any of you lovely kind people are listening to this, thank you so much. In the words of the character, Ricky, from the movie American Beauty, ‘Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in’.
Now. I want to talk, in this episode, about conflicts. About what happens when you’re deeply committed to multiple things, and those things often pull you in different directions, so that giving time and energy to one comes at the expense of neglecting another. This is something I myself experience every day. My entire life is exactly this sort of conflict, actually - it’s not just an occasional tension between different commitments that normally coexist peacefully. I have a full-time academic job, I’m a full-time single parent in the most extreme sense - by which I mean I don’t have a co-parent, and I’m the sole financial support for the family - and, of course, I fit in this podcast and coaching around those other things. I’m spread far more thinly than I’d like, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt like I did something really well, or gave something I cared about the attention I felt it deserved. Plenty of other people experience conflict in different ways. Perhaps you’re also a parent, and trying to balance that with a career. Perhaps you’re in a financially precarious position, which means that you have to throw yourself into excelling at one thing well enough to put you on the path to a secure income in that field while somehow also finding the time to explore other options that you hope you won’t always need to pursue. Perhaps you’re working or studying while someone is dependent on you to care for them, or perhaps you have children or other dependents whose needs are unusually great. Perhaps you’re in an abusive situation that leaves you struggling just to stay afloat emotionally and financially, while at the same time trying to work out how to get to a better place. However conflict might arise in your life, and whether or not your own conflicts resemble any of the examples I’ve just mentioned, I want to include space for your perspective and experience here.
If you’re conflicted in anything like these ways, then rejecting perfectionism is a survival tactic for you. You have to resist it, because even if you had enough hours in the day to get everything done well (which you don’t), and even if it were possible to do anything perfectly (which it’s not), aiming seriously at perfection in any one area of your life is likely to send other parts of your life crashing out of control, and turning you into a burnt out mess in the process.
In 2016, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum told Rachel Aviv - who was writing a profile of her for The New Yorker - that while philosophers such as Kant rejected the idea that there are really such things as moral dilemmas, women know different. In Nussbaum’s words, ‘No woman would make that stupid mistake!’ Being torn between children and professional commitments is a familiar experience for women: historically, of course, we’ve been the ones doing the child-rearing, and advances in equality haven’t quite evened things out, or erased the culturally entrenched view that women are the caregivers. Nussbaum thinks this gives women a special insight into moral conflict.
I don’t want to muddy the waters too much here with reflections on inequality, important a topic as that is. I want to keep the focus on what it’s like to feel pulled in different directions, and to feel that fulfilling our duties in one area of life risks failing in another area. Sometimes that arises from, or is made worse by, inequality, but not always. Any of us can end up over-committed, for any number of reasons. How can we make this easier? And, how can we be compassionate to ourselves when, inevitably, we end up being and doing less than we think we should?
Well, without a doubt, the first thing you should do when you find yourself conflicted and over-committed is ask what commitments you can get out of. Drop what you can. Many of us are afraid to do this. We don’t want to let people down. We don’t want to be ‘quitters’. We associate giving up and pulling out with failure, and we already struggle every day with the fear that we’re nothing but failures-in-disguise, which means we could really do without being confronted with clear evidence for it. The thing is, though, quitting isn’t the same thing as failing, and people aren’t as let down as you worry they will be. Sure, withdrawing from some committee or project or whatever might be a bit of a pain for other people, but they’ll get over it. You’re replaceable. Ask yourself: What’s in it for me, if I continue? Be a selfish bitch about it - just temporarily, I mean, as a decision-making tool - because I know that you’re not really a selfish bitch, and that it’s more likely that your problem is not being selfish enough. If you can’t come up with any really clear, obvious reasons why you should be involved in whatever project it is, then you probably ought to drop it. And I say ‘really clear, obvious reasons’ because I definitely don’t want to include vague concerns like ‘well, if I continue with this, maybe there will be some opportunity for me further down the line’. That sort of attitude is just as likely to close off opportunities as it is to open them up, so cut your losses and get out. If you need more help with this, go and listen to episode #49: Say no to FOMO.
Now, perhaps you can dump this committee or that club or the other project, and if so - great, and don’t forget to reward yourself for your important act of self-preservation. But often, our conflicting commitments are ones that we either can’t or don’t want to drop. Perhaps you’d love to jack in your two part-time jobs and free up some time, but you need them in order to finance yourself through your studies. Or perhaps it’s your children or loved ones placing demands on your time and energy, but while you wish life was a little easier, you would never in a million years choose not to have them in your life. Yet, you’re conflicted. You’re overcommitted. You’re not only having to keep a load of plates spinning, you’re also having to serve dinner on them while clearing up the jagged mess left by the ones that have smashed on the ground before your kids run through it in their bare feet. If this resonates with you, what can you do?
Here’s one thing to keep in mind. You’re not struggling because you’re less than you ought to be. You’re struggling because we were never meant to live this way. We weren’t meant to do it all alone, despite what we might tell ourselves and what society seems to expect of us. Here’s another quotation from Professor Nussbaum, this time from an essay in James Harmon’s edited collection, Take My Advice: ‘we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve.’ For Nussbaum, we’re kidding ourselves if we insist that we’re capable of complete self-sufficiency and control.
This is a realisation that was brought home to me a few months ago, when I was listening to a podcast interview with the neuroscientist Russell Foster, who was promoting his book Life Time, which came out last year. It’s a book about our circadian rhythm, and he has plenty to say about things like how much sleep we should be getting and whether scrolling through our phones at bedtime is a bad idea (I expect you really know the answer to that). He was asked for his thoughts about the sleep needs of parents of newborn babies. Everyone knows that having a baby is a good way of kissing goodbye to anything resembling a decent night’s sleep for the next few years. Now, my assumption had always been that, unpleasant as this sleep deprivation is, it’s probably basically ok. We’ve evolved to do this, right? It just wouldn’t make sense if the sleep deprivation visited on new parents - and especially breastfeeding mothers - turned out to be bad for our health. I was expecting Professor Foster to say something to this effect - but he didn’t. Instead, he pointed out that in generations past, the extended family would rally round to help with a new baby. It wouldn’t be left to the new parents alone to zombie-shuffle through those early months on 20 minutes’ sleep a night. They’d be able to rest while grandparents and siblings pitched in. The burden, and the sleep, would be shared. My confident assumption that we’ve basically evolved to dispense with sleep when we’re dealing with a newborn turned out to be premised on the idea that getting by alone, or in very small groups, is normal. But it’s not.
You might be rolling your eyes while listening to this, and saying, yeah, whatever, that’s nice, but how does that help me - I don’t have a street full of extended family members to call on when my spinning plates are crashing to the ground. This is a familiar story, especially for academics, who often end up far from where they grew up as they chase after their degrees and then their jobs. I hope, though, that by emphasising that you were never meant to be struggling in the way that you’re currently struggling, and that your experience of running just to stay still as you exhaust yourself trying to keep up with all your commitments is not a result of your own personal shortcomings - it’s largely a result of a culture that insists that we should be able to get by alone, without help. The sort of culture that had me assuming that parents of newborns had evolved a superhuman ability to go without sleep, and not even considering the possibility that maybe people used to help each other out more than they currently do. The problem you’re experiencing is bigger than you.
What am I going to suggest you do about all this? For the sake of your sanity, your mental wellbeing, and your health, you need to reframe what you’re doing. The things that you think are important probably aren’t. This goes beyond rejecting perfectionism - it’s about accepting imperfection and outright damage as business-as-usual inevitable. Parker Palmer has written of ‘embracing brokenness as an integral part of life’. Don’t even try to keep all those plates spinning. Let them break - they’re going to, anyway. Clear up what you can, tell your kids to put their shoes on before they walk through the shards, and then have a box of plasters handy for when they ignore you.
Let’s go back to something I just mentioned: the things that you think are important probably aren’t. David Brooks begins his book, The Road To Character, by drawing a distinction between what he calls résumé virtues and eulogy virtues. Here’s what he says about them: ‘The résumé virtues are the ones you list on your résumé, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being–whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.’ Brooks notes that ‘[m]ost of us would say that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé virtues’, but, he argues, you wouldn’t guess that by looking at the way society works, and at the choices we make in our daily lives. I mean, sure, we need to be good and honest and all that, but who has time to worry about that when we’re trying to hold down a job or get a promotion or a degree or a mortgage or pay the electricity bill or be able to afford food next week? And that’s completely understandable. These are pressing concerns, and often they’re time-sensitive. But what’s urgent is not always important, and vice versa. This, I think, is an important perspective when it comes to being compassionate and supportive of ourselves at those times when we’re going flat out and still not keeping up, or maybe when we’ve crashed and burned and are lacking the energy even to try. Being able to say ‘I do what I can to hold it all together, but sometimes things go wrong’ is probably not going to impress anyone in a job interview. But it makes a half-decent eulogy. So, what does this tell us about what’s important?
Well, here’s one answer to that. It’s not just a matter of saying, ‘Ok, so the résumé virtues are not as important as we usually think they are and the eulogy ones are way more important’. The two are intimately connected. Without the eulogy virtues, there’s no reason to care at all about the résumé virtues. Why are you going all-out to do well in your career, after all? What’s it for? I’ve mentioned before that I have had several coaching clients who have climbed the career ladder all the way to the top–and then they’ve stopped, looked around, and asked, ‘Why am I doing this?’ They were so focused on getting to the next stage and then the next and the next that they didn’t pause to zoom out and reflect on why they valued climbing the ladder in the first place. And that’s important, if you don’t want to achieve your dreams and then realise with horror that you don’t even know why you bothered. Now, whatever reason you come up with for caring about résumé virtues like productivity, publications, degrees, grant successes, and so on, those reasons aren’t themselves going to be résumé virtues. Something like productivity isn’t valuable for its own sake. We value it because - whether we reflect on it or not - it’s instrumental in helping us achieve something else. Something like making a contribution to the world. Fulfilling our potential. Proving our worth. Testing our limits. Whatever. These are all the sorts of things that coaching clients come up with when I ask them to dig down into what they say they value and explain why they care about it. And these look very much like Brooks’ eulogy virtues. They’re certainly not the sorts of things that stand or fall depending on how good you are at holding together all those parts of your life that you feel constantly slipping from your fingers. When it comes to being a good person and living a full, authentic - if integrally broken - life, nobody cares whether or not you volunteered for this committee, or met that deadline, or used whatever citation format that journal editor prefers this month. It can help here to try out what’s sometimes called the ‘5 by 5’ rule when you’re stressed about having slipped up. Ask yourself: Will this matter in 5 years? If not, don’t spend more than 5 minutes worrying about it.
So, yeah. Get rid of the commitments that aren’t serving you, the ones that you’re holding onto through a misguided sense of FOMO or through fear of disappointing people. But when you’ve done that and you still find yourself conflicted and spread thinly and with way too much going on, know that this isn’t a reflection of your worth. This chaos is not there because there’s something wrong with you. It’s there because this is what living a full life looks like in the circumstances you find yourself in - which, for many of us, involve being removed from those who we’d naturally turn to for support, and just to compound things, trying to get by in a culture that tells us we should be doing it all alone. You’re allowed to be broken. I believe in you.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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