For some time now, a year maybe, I’ve had trouble sleeping. It’s the variety where I fall asleep easily enough, but I wake up a few hours later, anywhere between 2am and 4am, and a thought flickers across my brain – and snap! I’m awake. There is no returning to sleep for at least two hours after this has happens.
The thought-culprit is generally work. I’m the records manager for
an environmental division, and we’re migrating our records management system to
another platform. It’s exhausting and tedious in a way that library school didn’t
really prepare me for; this is IT work, essentially, but that’s what Records
has become. Information Management. The minutiae of keywords and field lengths
and naming conventions and compatible filetypes has consumed me for years now,
but never so much as with this migration, which has been challenging, to say
the least. Finding ways to fit our square pegs into these round holes has been the
work of multiple teams and we’re all very tired.
The pandemic has made it easier to focus on this project,
actually; I’m pulling lots of ten and twelve hour days, something I didn’t do
when I had to drive downtown to the office. The state definitely gets more work
out of me when the commute is taken out of the equation. But it’s also upset
the balance of my life, and that’s what is giving me insomnia.
I think. Could also be my obsessive personality that takes
everything I do as a personal reflection of my worth as a human. Can’t search
for a Spanish-accent é character in this database? This is unacceptable,
Kay! How could you
allow us to use such a product?!
I don’t know if this is an
American thing, taking work so personally. But it’s typically the first
question you get when you meet someone: “What do you do?” It’s another way of
asking who are you?
This is the third time this week I
woke up between 2 and 3am. I’m plagued with panicked second-guessing of every decision
I’ve made. I am responsible for the accurate ingestion, search, and retrieval
of these documents. If the public can’t find a record, if staff doesn’t have a category
in which to file a document, I am to blame.
It’s just
records, I hear you say. Give me a
break. This is not life or death.
And I know that. But it’s my job.
And my job is my identity. It is who I am.
Is that valid, though?
I’m in physical pain. All the time
lately, it seems. I have a knot in my right shoulder that I have massaged away
once a month; it’s back by noon the next Monday. The headache I used to get
daily has expanded downward along my brain stem to include my entire neck.
In May, I tripped on a box in my garage, banged up my left leg, and opened a Pandora’s box of klutziness. Since then I have taken a wrong step and rolled my right ankle three times.
The first
time hurt like hell, and it swelled up for several, several weeks; but other
than that I was fine.
The second time, I fell on the
concrete walkway to my backyard garden and skinned my shin in a lovely Fifth
Element water-stone pattern. Also managed to break a big hole in the bottom of
my watering can.
At this point I stopped wearing flip
flops.
The third time was about two weeks
ago. I stepped out my front door to take a walk and – down goes Frazier. It was
so agonizing I cried, which was super alarming because usually only emotions
can make me cry. I had to talk myself out of having my roommate drive me to
urgent care, because this is America and I didn’t want to pay a hundred dollars
to be sent home with an Ace bandage and an order to stay off it for a while. The
nice doctor in my Kaiser chat agreed that wrapping it was “reasonable” and to
go in if it didn’t improve.
So now I wear an ankle brace most
days. I’m guessing I damaged it more than I thought that first time. It’s been
a couple weeks, the bruising is gone, and the swelling is down. I am
systematically replacing all my cute sandals with orthopedic old lady shoes
with sturdy rubber soles. I am the owner of six pairs of compression socks.
I thought I’d have to get older
before the fear of falling would set in, but here we are. I’m not even fifty,
and I’m falling apart.
Can I blame all this on the
insomnia? Hard to say, but I imagine it’s all related. The exhaustion has
permeated to the soul level.
Tuesday night I woke up at 2am,
lay awake for about an hour, then got up to make a cup of tea and think about
my life.
I’ve always been an early bird. When
my normal pattern is functioning, I’m in bed by 10 and up by 5; dawn is my
favorite time of day. The insomnia has given me a new appreciation of the
middle of the night. It’s so quiet. Even if I lived alone, it would feel wrong
to turn on a bunch of lights and disturb the dark too much; it is a time to
think, to just be.
Who am I?
I am not a records manager. That’s
what I do. It’s not who I am.
This is such an obvious statement
that it should hardly count as a revelation, but it was.
I spent an hour sipping my tea and
writing down what I wanted more of in my life, and none of it was work.
I recently took a vacation to visit friends in New York, a trip I make every year. We sat at the dining room table and ate cheesecake and laughed and laughed about inconsequential nonsense. We sat on the deck and watched the sun set over what used to be a corn field but now is a bank of new houses, and then we piled in the car and drove to Cape Cod for five days.
I’ve never been to Cape Cod. It was very much what I expected, only with a lot more pine trees. We rented
a little beach house in Yarmouth and had adventures. Walked in the rain,
collected seashells on the beach, visited lighthouses, went on a whale-watching
tour and saw humpbacks and porpoises, perused the shops of Hyannis and
Nantucket. It was relaxed and absolutely glorious. I did not think about work
for several days, until we were waiting for dinner one night and I checked my
email and responded to the question of how many characters were required for
the EPA# field.
Knock it off,
Kay. You’re on vacation, came the
response from my colleague in the Water division.
Still. Mary was covering for me,
but she didn’t know the answer to that question! They needed me! Me!
Sigh.
The list of things I want more of
in my life looks like this:
Friends – connections with people I love
Family – a friendly relationship with my brothers
Order – lack of clutter, fewer things
Animals – my pets give and receive my love
Adventure – new experiences and places
My work is interesting, challenging, and important. What I do matters now and will matter years down the road. People don’t think much about records until the town floods and suddenly nobody’s sure where their property boundaries are, or a developer wants to put a building up and needs to know what was buried there in 1989. They come to us in what is invariably a desperate hurry, they’re grateful we can provide their records or answer their question, and then they go back to forgetting that we exist.
That’s fine. It’s foolish to allow
others to define your worth. I enjoy helping people. I love finding the needle
in the haystack. Others might use words like tedious and boring, but
I call it rewarding.
Nevertheless, it’s just a job. It’s
not a falsehood to say if you died tomorrow they’d have your job posted before
your obituary. Loyalty and dedication are great, but at the end of the day this
is not who I am.
Which comes back to the insomnia.
I don’t think I’ve been snapped awake by a non-work-related thought in years. When I was a little girl I’d wake up on my birthday or Christmas and jump out of bed because I was excited and full of anticipation. Now the thing that jumps me out of bed is anxiety.
Anxiety is the adult version of
excitement.
Even jumping out of bed to get
ready to catch the plane for vacation isn’t excitement. It’s anxiety: finish
packing, feed the animals, tidy up, leave a note for the house sitter, when
should I call the Uber, triple check I have the tickets, is two hours before
the flight enough time?
Anxiety starts with the job and
bleeds into all of life. And it’s time to let go.
Let go of allowing work to dominate my thoughts, my routines, my plans. Let go of all that is not who I am and put it back to what I do.
Who I am is a woman who is enjoying
a cup of coffee on a chilly fall morning, planning what I’ll need for my
brother’s birthday dinner tomorrow, and anticipating – dare I say with excitement
– the running of the Preakness later on today. Today is all we have; it’s
fruitless to worry and fret and waste energy on thoughts of what may come.
I don’t know if anyone else needed
to hear that, but I needed to write it down.
Cheers,
Kay
