working in the office sucks

I WANT to write more often.

To do this I need to figure out why I stopped writing to begin with. I haven’t given it much thought, but my gut tells me that hitting the brakes had a lot to do with being tired, which had a lot to do with going back to the office for work.

Working in the office requires a larger mental bandwidth. Being in the office means having to speak up more, it means bearing witness to office politics in action, and — to paraphrase the wise Taylor Swift — it means being a part of narratives I would very much like to be excluded from. Working in the office sucks.

Working in the office has been consuming most, if not all, of my energy. Having people walk by my desk, being invited to useless meetings where old, white, penis-wielding creatures speak so confidently about things they know nothing about — the office is a boxing gym and I’m a good ole punching bag. I go home with fresh bruises every day, and two days a week is not enough to recuperate.

I am left with no time to do anything else because all I do — and I couldn’t have said it better than Rihanna herself — is work work work work work. I am always working or thinking about work. I am exhausted all, the, time.

On the cheerier side, working in the office has introduced me to people that I am happy to have met. Some of them I now consider friends, some mentors, some mentor-slash-friends. Anxiety slaps me dizzy sometimes whenever I (over)think about whether these newfound friends really like me or not. It often feels that our connections are forged not by mutual interests but by shared trauma, a bond that can either be as strong a Gorilla Glue or as flimsy as spit.

Self-awareness helps though. Because I now know that working in the office has been yanking the one block of wood holding together the wobbly Jenga tower that is my sanity, I am now better equipped to protect myself from always toppling over and breaking down.

I need to work less. I need to care less about work. I need to not measure my worth based on my work. Because, ultimately, I am more than my work. (I need to tell myself this over and over until I actually believe it. It’s harder than you think. It’s harder for people like me.)

I am also a blogger, aren’t I? I don’t make money from blogging, but I enjoy doing it. So the next step to writing more often is to, well, write.

But what do I write about? Maybe I’ll figure that out as I go.

I will most likely write about myself and my life as a burgis migrante living on the other side of the world. I don’t think I have the energy, much less the skills needed, to write about Big Things like politics or the economy or capital-c Culture, but I’m sure there will always be bits and pieces here and there that speak of these grander thoughts. 

Also, I don’t feel like committing to a writing schedule just yet. I refuse to write posts in advance and put them in a blogging pipeline. This is not an industrial operation; I only wish to write for myself. I want to write to escape, to free myself from the woes of work and of life, because god forbid this Real World TM is a lot tougher than Paramore described. It ain’t fun, fuckers. Not fun at all.   

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Feature photo by Marvin Meyer.