It’s the hope that kills you
Recently I’ve started to wake up and repeat the words ‘everything is broken’ in preparation for the day ahead.
This is my mantra designed to manage my disappointment as my day at work unfolds. To put the little sparks of hope n’ love in their impossible place and allow me to celebrate the joy of the increasingly remote possibility of the completion of an actual work-related task.
I am constantly calculating and re-calculating the costs of working life. The decision to go to work feels like an exercise in applied maths rather than a professional transaction. That most of what I know is now not valued. Social, relational, political ideas why on earth would you. Add to that the slow-drip-drip consequences of working in a public system of bureaucratic violence and I just can’t make it add up in my mind whether working is worth it.
Since validation and professional achievement are now a distant memory I have like most public sector workers retreated into survival. As a single parent to a child in full time nursery the maths have been off for years. I have drifted into a shrug-like-state in calculating the balance between being a loving parental object while maintaining my employability.
It feels like every time I go to work I’m just rolling a dice.
Strikes are a good time to reflect on our dysfunctional relationships with work. Having been in this industrial dispute movie multiple times, and anticipating the disappointment of compromise and resentments that follow I now believe I should not have clung so hard to my professional lover. Gutting as it is to admit I am constantly navigating coercive control, a job that’s just not that into me combined with the inevitable failure associated with impossible demands of ‘exceptionalism’ in the academy.
Sunday nights I no longer sleep and my stomach aches while I watch Antiques Road Show.
Thing about strikes which is writ large right now for most of us is that the people who need to strike the most are asked to do it at precisely the time we’re least able to afford it. Bluntly speaking losing 50% of my salary when I’m already overdrawn the only question is whether I’ll have to go to a food bank to survive it. 18 days of unwaged protest representing 60-80% for the many part time and hourly paid academic workers, most of whom are women and people of colour.
The point at which you do that calculation is about the time when the chest pains start.
The love of a phenomenally-high-earning-twin and kind parents will I hope allow me to avoid not-eating and make the complex calculation of compromise.
Over the last year I have come to believe that I would have been happier if I’d allowed myself to fall off the work-wagon when the pandemic hit. When the nurseries closed and I suspended being able to think deeply I tried to rearrange things in my mind. To accept the sum that in these pre-school years the point of working is simply not to hurl myself off the employability-cliff. Professional pennies in heaven and all that. But what I now see are the costs to his precious body and mine of having a mum who was made raw by chronic over work and playing the 24/7 exceptionalism game was just too high.
Let me walk you through Monday’s calculation.
Alarm goes off alarmingly early to allow for 2.5 hour commute to work
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Three changes of pants later son declares he’s not getting dressed. 11 minutes lost negotiating pants.
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Son declares he’s being bulled at nursery. After further investigation unclear who is hitting who. Monsters and people who are dead appear to be root cause. Tell son that after half a century of life I can confirm that the best way to deal with aggression from people who don’t matter is to walk away.
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Within spitting distance to nursery son shouts out “BE. HAPPY. MUMMY”
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Mummy shouts back “mate you’ve got more chance of me buying you a motorbike and a packet of matches. Don’t ever say that again.“
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Chest pains start
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Skunk related traffic accident on one of Swindon’s most dysfunctional roundabouts. TICK. TOCK.
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Arrive late at Swindon train station to be met by (thankful) 30 minute train delay. Station manned by military and police.
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Loss of vision in left eye as migraine starts.
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By some miracle arrive at work. Meet Nigerian mature student. She says she thinks the UK is more broken than her home country. She says she’s sad that her NHS salary is being used up to pay for my strike days but says she respects my decision. Proceed to give research informed lecture about the impact of Covid-19 on workplace inequalities and the role of HRM in not making a bad situation worse. Appeals to humanity and democratic leadership successfully made.
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I start to breath again as I remember I’m working with humans.
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On the train back I see on social media that the regulation of the therapeutic profession has taken a great and unthinking leap backwards in the introduction of SCOPED. This is an intentionally boring programme of regulating counsellors and psychotherapists but in a way that involves a profound deepening of professional inequalities. Anyone who didn’t have the money to pay for top drawer London training, with several years of 450 unwaged hours of clinical work is dropped down the professional food chain to fight it out for jobs n referrals in a sector where 4% of therapists regularly access food banks. After years of denial and ignorance, and despite all the evidence based campaigning by progressive groups as soon as there’s a question mark over our own professional ranking, we’re all ears. Therapy twitter goes on self-interested fire. Fantasies of becoming a self-employed therapist this year officially CRUSHED as the profession turns in on itself. An era of cannibalism now reins.
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Angry hunger pains.
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Get back to Swindon with potentially enough time to pick up son before moral judgement and nursery closes. Parking ticket awaits thanks to lack of internet access within 10 miles of the station.
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Just as we tumble into the house all gym shoes and artwork-of-no-small-genius someone in my professional sphere calls me wanting something from me that I don’t have the resources to give. Before our coats are off they make a demand on me, one where there’s no gain to me or my son, and because of this an appeal is made to my female status and my obligation to WORK HARDER. Gaslighting in my own time. I’m lost for words and hand the phone to my son, go out and do the recycling and a little self-pitying sob. I come back in to find my son eating a bowl of sugar. He gives me a little cuddle and says with a 4-year-old’s surgical emotional clarity ‘Mum, you just walked away. You’re a good girl!!!’. Stickers a go-go.
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I breath in deeply for the first time that day as I realise that as an ancient survivor of work my bottom line for a good day at work/on strike is just not-having-a-stroke.
The world is held together by wonderful, wise and exhausted middle aged women. In any sane society we would walk into work to a round of applause and a big fat financial collective bargaining settlement. Instead we have to hide what we know for fear of envious attack, quietly square impossible equations for survival and absorb the gaslit attack that says it’s all our fault.
We are all devalued in this crisis. But what I know about love’s survival is that it’s down to us to love ourselves enough to demand the resources, rest and recovery that we now need. Without waiting for signs of hope, find the place that allows you to do that today. The battle for love lies ahead.
Social & Political Issues in Counselling & Psychotherapy: Holding space for difficult conversations - National Counsellors’ Day, 24th June. Surviving Work will be talking about how ‘It’s the Hope that Kills You’. Book here.