heritage industry
I was in a meeting the other day talking about training for health and social care workers and as I clicked onto my website and book Surviving Work in Healthcare I realised that my entire career in the current context potentially represents a waste of time.
On a deep level, nobody wants to hear it.
Halfway through a slide about critical action learning something hit me in the gut like a train. As the words ‘consciousness raising’ came out of my mouth I had the out of body experience of realising in real time that I was no longer of any use. The traditions that form my heritage of adult education combined with union organising and clinical work, now represent the polar opposite of what is required to keep people working in health and social care. That acknowledging the realities of the health care workforce crisis we’re now in may only drive people away. And where, dear consumers of care, would workers being cognisant of the realities of their work leave the NHS and the employability agenda that underpins our education systems?
People have started to call me brave, and this fills me with professional terror.
This public road to Damascus moment hit me with a level of shame and hostility that I hadn’t felt since a teenager. Despite being a hardened public speaker I’d exposed myself through my appeals to relationality as being part of a heritage industry called caring. Eyes looked down, thanks were given for my ‘passionate’ presentation and everyone backed away slowly as the disdain matrix rained down my screen in green binary lights.
At 3am one morning in the heatwave as I was trying to digest this I had a feeling I’d genuinely never had before. I wanted to be in denial, to be in a state of not understanding what is happening. I had twenty four hours where reality had become so hard to bear that in order to function, I needed to ignore it. Not as a conscious strategy but as a pure and primitive act of survival.
I watched a lot of episodes of Billions fantasizing about going into the private sector to earn actual money and I learned how to grow sprouts. Playing with whether to slither out of the matrix to eat sustainable gloop, or run head first back into the black and green where people still go for steak dinners and complain about their second homes in the South of France.
I consider this my Cary Cooper moment when he ditched experiential groups and became the daddy of Wellbeing Inc.
Like many of the people I engage with in psychoanalytic, trade union and mental health networks we are tied together by knowing too much. It’s our survival of staring into the abyss that means you want us on your side when the growing minority becomes the majority staring blink-blink at what’s on the horizon. But in a context where there is no obvious distinction between the good and bad guys, our experiences of existential threat can mean we carry our trauma too closely such that our usually-useful vigilance disorientates. Even the spectres at the feast can miss seeing the writing on the wall.
What I’m calling my emerging “not-mattering” is exaggerated because I’m a woman. As a mum its a familiar feeling to know I’m the only grown up in the room as I scan for sharp objects and matches. But the cosmic capacities of women to hold things together don’t command the audible gasps they should because they are repellent and suspect in this context. You might have noticed that middle aged women have taken up local leadership during this crisis but extremely possible you haven’t and that’s because it’s not in any institutional interests to credit us with the work we are doing. Our leadership is by necessity demeaned because it exists beyond the toddler-institution’s control. We are left then to walk the exhausting thin line between self-righteousness and self-pity totally and absolutely alone. You’re welcome.
Decades of ‘activism’ and political experience digested into crystal clarity has not prepared me for the fear I now carry in the pit of my stomach that I will not be able to digest what happens next. I’m not saying activism is pointless, far from it as the outstanding convenors of the left show us, people I admire such as Lindsey German from Stop the War Coalition and Keith Venables from Health Campaigns Together. But I am saying the world carries on exactly the same as it would without my political hyperactivity and however sophisticated my analysis, the dilemma of what-do-I-do remains.
Grow or give up.
Developmental work, whether its therapy or adult education, is always worthwhile but what is happening is chaotic and reactive and cannot be navigated through manifestoes or to do lists. Despite how much this hurts, in many ways what is happening now is not personal because big change is not planned or shaped by us. And it is in accepting this that I can prepare myself appropriately.
As the systems that shape who-does-what-when expand and contract at exactly the same time, it’s hard to know where the workplace battle lines are now being drawn. And it is in this context that I no longer matter. Not because I’m not valuable but because I am no longer useful to the chaotic and unpredictable systems within which I operate. In this reality, I now believe that the only way of protecting what I value of myself and the traditions I inherit is to stop wasting my time on whatever or whoever doesn’t right now want to know. To withdraw until the political fires have burned themselves out and we can scan the landscape of what’s left. And in the meantime, to protect our heritage industries by entering into a period of recording, reinventing, rethinking and rebooting. To redesign my mattering by changing my optics, my language, my engagement with the digital and behavioural realms in order to exist within this new terrain.
During this disorienting crisis I have learned deeply the importance of intention over outcomes. My intention now is to protect what is worth passing on and reshape it in a form that could be useful when the rebuilding starts.
Surviving work will be taking a break from talking out loud for the next six months. UberTherapy: the new business of mental health will be published in 2023 by Bristol University Press.