![]() The foregoing is not intended as a panegyric. Magpie once described me as having “a bias towards action.” If you lift the curtain behind this genteel rendition (thank you for your restraint, my love), you see a gal who is impatient with things half-done, who leans into responsibility, who puts tremendous pressure on herself and those around her to. I am a planner by nature, hastily moving from one rung to the next. ![]() Though I now feel more at peace with not knowing what the future holds, I am generally predisposed toward the next thing, the new new. The panicked pace of our lives for so many months.Īnd in tiny, quotidian ways and more philosophical ones, too, I find myself struggling beneath self-imposed stress: I feel itchy when dishes are left in the sink, or the laundry is left in the dryer, or the bed remains unmade. The gut-wrenching stress of pouring life savings into a dream, of putting ourselves out there to try something new. The heart palpitations, the breathlessness. ![]() And yet I showed up every single day and put my everything into it.Īnd with our business, too - the many nights of sleeplessness. “Why should I care?” I remember ranting to Mr. In my career as a non-profit executive, I worked long hours and put my heart on the line every single day, even when colleagues and bosses made it difficult to see the value in what I was doing. I had pushed myself into a kind of academic asceticism where I would never permit myself a slip-up, a skipped assignment, a missed reading. I felt over-saturated, unable to enjoy reading for the sake of reading. The reading was burdensome to the point that I took a two-year hiatus from reading after graduating. Were we not paying to be there? Were we not facing the tremendous privilege of reading for a profession versus the bland and meaningless data management I had been handling in my previous job? And yet, it was not easy. Their complaints baffled and frankly annoyed me. In graduate school, I was disappointed to find that many of my colleagues whined about the workload and cheated their way through some of the longer reading assignments. And I remember wondering how I would even go about scaling back - what were the demarcation points when it came to “getting by” versus “excelling”? The notion that I could “shift gears” and lower my output of effort was alien to me. “Just do enough to get by,” said one of my friends over drinks after work one day. The thought of doing something half-assed, or of not putting the full weight of my abilities into my job, was simply unthinkable for me. I took my job seriously and was recognized quickly for it. ![]() In my first corporate job after college, most of my colleagues - all recent college graduates themselves - lollygagged and rolled their eyes at “the joke” of the jobs in front of us. In high school and college, I struggled with body image issues that stemmed, I believe, from a kind of ruthless competitiveness, a drive, an ambition I couldn’t quite channel anywhere else. I was serious and competitive as a child when it came to academics I killed myself for As. I can’t think of a time where I have sat back and laisser les bon temps rouler for more than a day or two at a time. I have always lived my life under a kind of pressure. In short, I look at my life and I think: “You have had it easy.” I would never describe my home life as “high-pressure” or “intense.” My childhood was borderline idyllic. But I do not.Īnd though I have had my fair share of heartbreaks and disappointments and tragedies, my life has by and by been marked by good fortune, privilege, and a circle of loving, nurturing family and friends. I have brave and exhausted friends who do all of these things on a daily basis. I do not perform emergent, life-saving surgeries. I do not track down terrorists and, in the words of my friend who is an FBI agent and has passed afternoons in courses like “evasive driving” (I KID YOU NOT), other assorted “bad dudes” as a deputy of public safety. My thoughts gathered like storm-clouds, and I momentarily suspended my attention from the film to digest.Īside from my stint as an entrepreneur, I would not describe my career as “high-pressure.” I do not litigate. Pressure is a choice! Pressure is a choice. I stopped in my tracks when Hawke’s character says, in a throwaway line that trots by unremarked and unremembered within the confines of the film: Magpie and I watched an under-the-radar film starring Rose Byrne (whose long bob I have taken to countless hair stylists for inspiration) and Ethan Hawke called “Juliet, Naked.” It was a lopsided film: the plot tenuous and lazily-written, the acting superb (Ethan Hawke!), and the script teetering between cloyingly cute and take-your-breath-away memorable.
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