December Days 2020 #14: Self-Care Is Hard
Dec. 14th, 2020 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
I'm going to construct a question based on a statement that I saw on the Twitter feed of someone I follow and respect, and especially the part where he and I might have just had the same basic reaction to something happening, even if our contexts are entirely different. To wit:
Because his story, summarized, is "Sometimes I feel like a bad person because I go to work to support my ability to live and eat, rather than because I have any sort of passion for the work. I would love if they would take seriously the idea of 'I'd like to work less time, have fewer responsibilities, and make more money', but I'm supposed to want more work and responsibilities and not wanting them makes me feel bad and dull and lazy." And there are some good comments there that are reminders that there isn't such a thing as a company that deserves to have its interests put ahead of yours, and that not wanting more work and responsibilities only means that you're a bad worker in the eyes of capitalism, rather than being an intrinsically bad person. He also has some additional things that make him disposed to thinking of himself as un-valuable right from the get go. Others point out that there are a lot of other people who are doing their job because it puts food on the table and provides things that are necessary to survival, like health insurance. And some people who have fully embraced the concept of Slack, as posited by the Church of the Subgenius, doing the things they do to only the degree necessary and no more. (They may not be Subgenii, but the concept fits. I also feel like I might be daying myself slightly here, that I can reach for examples like the Discordians and the Church of the Subgenius.)
There's also the concept of vocational awe to contend with. As explained to the rest of us by Fobazi Ettarh, vocational awe is the concept that certain jobs are sacred, or praisweworthy, and that the primary reason to engage in those jobs is because someone has a great and overriding passion for he work (which conveniently disguises the part where that work is almost always aggressively feminized and demeaned in terms of paying a good wage or in the prestige that it has in its ability to command respect in the wider world). The two are related concepts, in that vocational awe wants you to sacrifice yourself for the cause because it's noble and you're doing a lot of good in the world, so you shouldn't be so concerned about whether or not it pays well enough to actually retire your student loans (and all of the other loans that you'll have to take out in life). Capitalism and corporate culture, on the other hand, wants you to sacrifice yourself for the corporation on the (not at all true) belief that if your corporation does better in the economic arena, increasing their profits and business, those benefits will find their way to you, the worker, in the form of increased wages and better benefits. So those who sacrifice the most for the corporation will be rewarded the most, or so they want you to believe, despite basically every news story that's come out about how the wealthiest people with the most profitable corporations take most of that profit for themselves or distribute it to their shareholders, who are also conveniently mostly the people who are the leaders of the corporation and others who form the investor class that make their money by already having money and loaning it out to people. Who also pay signfiicantly less in taxes on their usury than the people who provide their labor for the corporation that is paying everyone but them.
My anxiety about work, another bout of which I had today, because of circumstances, is probably more related to my neurodivergences than anything else, but there's a certain amount of vocational awe that's been mixed in there, I find, once I examine it a bit more. Because my anxiety is not "I'm not being a good capitalist cog," it's "people are going to hate me because I took some unexpected leave and that inconvenienced them." Which is at least a little related to the bad experiences that I had with my first manager and the gossip mill that went along with it (some grudges last, especially the ones that are related to self-preservation), but also is tied up in a conception of whether something is "bad enough" to warrant the taking of leave. Which is probably at least some amount of toxic masculinity leaking through, in the idea that there is such a thing as "bad enough" to warrant, and also something about being a proper provider for the household that I'm bringing in a significant amount of income for, which is really strongly rooted in specific ideas about who should be in the workplace and who should be in the domestic sphere, ideas that I'd like to belive I don't put truck in, except of course, that they're there all the same, that I should use my status as being the person who is the most able to work to make sure that I keep working.
I will freely admit to hypocrisy here, in that if someone else told me the situation that I have was happening to them, I would unhesitatingly tell them to take the leave, since they (I) have it available and they (I) can make a full week's worth of wage with it, and the leave will be expiring soon anyway, so take advantage of the money that's on offer for this specific situation, even if they (I) am concerned that it's not serious enough to warrant invoking that leave. The matter's out of my hands, anyway. Because I was at least smart enough to mention that I was having qualms about whether the thing was bad enough to my manager, and he did the correct thing and told me to stay home according to the established protocol. So even if I feel like it wasn't bad enough, what's done is done.
This is the sort of thing that ties into both capitalism and wanting to be seen as a good person by coworkers. Because capitalism tells us that we are supposed to be always industrious and producing, because that is our sole value as workers, and any time that we take for ourseves is inherently bad, because a non-producing worker is one that gets dismissed from their work, and without wages for our work, we die and nobody cares about it. And, in this current space and time, taking leave for yourself could easily be construed as making more work for someone else, and when you're in a profession where you have to deal with people, people who could be potentially infectious, the more work that you end up having to do, the greater your potential risk of exposure. For people who have leave pools to draw upon, they can reduce their risk by taking that leave, which ends up privileging the people who actually have leave and who have been people who have been able to store that leave, who are often the most able people and least likely to have children or parners that need caring for that takes up leave. Which, like, there's a whole thing in libraries at this point that pretty starkly acknowledges that the paraprofessional staff are the ones at the most risk, not to mention the lowest-paid of library staff, both in places that are still in the "outside services only" that are processing materials and distributing them to people and in places where their local and state governments have decided that there's no pandemic and that everything should be fully open to everyone, without any masking mandate or other indication that a pandemic is raging and people's lives should be more important than the profits of the wealthy. So there's an additional sort of "taking leave when you don't absolutely have to is increasing the risk and not being in solidarity with the other workers in your location" stuff that's going along with "having the privilege to take leave, even if you don't have to, is something others don't have, so you should only do so when you absolutely have to."
This is not good thinking, Complete selflessness and being concerned solely for others is not a sustainable position to take. The Giving Tree ends up as a stump, after all. And, all told, I suspect that others would rather I end up taking leave and keeping them safe than trying to tough it out or believing it's not important enough, only for it to turn out to be exactly the wrong thing and that I would be responsible for potentially spreading it to others. There are plenty of very good reasons why this is the right decision to make and they have excellent justifications, like "leave is for use," "taking leave to protect your own and others' health is a good," and the other sorts of things that I would absolutely deploy in a heartbeat if it were someone else that I were talking about or talking with about this situation. So why is it so hard to do that thing that keeps getting talked about, where you treat yourself with the same kindness, compassion, and fierceness that you would treat others? (Because it's easier to do things for others than to do them for yourself, when you've been socialized that doing things for yourself makes you selfish and an otherwise terrible person, when you see so many examples in the news of people behaving selfishly and using their privileges to hurt others and you don't want to be them, intentionally or accidentally.) That's the basic point of self-care: treat yourself like you matter, not any particular sort of consumerist anything, although those consumer things might help someone feel like they matter or that they have intrinsic worth, rather than worth relative to other things, like how much money you make or how many hours you spend at work or how much you've bought into vocational awe or trickle-down corpoate economics.
And it's not like I'm not going to be able to do the programming commitments I have for this time, unless it turns out that the decision to take leave was, in fact, absolutely warranted and the thing has hit me so hard that I won't be able to perform the virtual programming. So, in that regard, at least, I'll be able to not feel completely terrible about this leave decision.
It's just hard to not catastrophize about how it's going to look to other people and how understanding they'll be about it. Logically, they'll be fine with it, illogically, they're all going to hate me about it, even though there's no evidence for that. Guess I believe at least some set of lies still, even if I know they're lies. Fucking brainweasels.
I'm going to construct a question based on a statement that I saw on the Twitter feed of someone I follow and respect, and especially the part where he and I might have just had the same basic reaction to something happening, even if our contexts are entirely different. To wit:
What's the lie that capitalism has told you today?
Because his story, summarized, is "Sometimes I feel like a bad person because I go to work to support my ability to live and eat, rather than because I have any sort of passion for the work. I would love if they would take seriously the idea of 'I'd like to work less time, have fewer responsibilities, and make more money', but I'm supposed to want more work and responsibilities and not wanting them makes me feel bad and dull and lazy." And there are some good comments there that are reminders that there isn't such a thing as a company that deserves to have its interests put ahead of yours, and that not wanting more work and responsibilities only means that you're a bad worker in the eyes of capitalism, rather than being an intrinsically bad person. He also has some additional things that make him disposed to thinking of himself as un-valuable right from the get go. Others point out that there are a lot of other people who are doing their job because it puts food on the table and provides things that are necessary to survival, like health insurance. And some people who have fully embraced the concept of Slack, as posited by the Church of the Subgenius, doing the things they do to only the degree necessary and no more. (They may not be Subgenii, but the concept fits. I also feel like I might be daying myself slightly here, that I can reach for examples like the Discordians and the Church of the Subgenius.)
There's also the concept of vocational awe to contend with. As explained to the rest of us by Fobazi Ettarh, vocational awe is the concept that certain jobs are sacred, or praisweworthy, and that the primary reason to engage in those jobs is because someone has a great and overriding passion for he work (which conveniently disguises the part where that work is almost always aggressively feminized and demeaned in terms of paying a good wage or in the prestige that it has in its ability to command respect in the wider world). The two are related concepts, in that vocational awe wants you to sacrifice yourself for the cause because it's noble and you're doing a lot of good in the world, so you shouldn't be so concerned about whether or not it pays well enough to actually retire your student loans (and all of the other loans that you'll have to take out in life). Capitalism and corporate culture, on the other hand, wants you to sacrifice yourself for the corporation on the (not at all true) belief that if your corporation does better in the economic arena, increasing their profits and business, those benefits will find their way to you, the worker, in the form of increased wages and better benefits. So those who sacrifice the most for the corporation will be rewarded the most, or so they want you to believe, despite basically every news story that's come out about how the wealthiest people with the most profitable corporations take most of that profit for themselves or distribute it to their shareholders, who are also conveniently mostly the people who are the leaders of the corporation and others who form the investor class that make their money by already having money and loaning it out to people. Who also pay signfiicantly less in taxes on their usury than the people who provide their labor for the corporation that is paying everyone but them.
My anxiety about work, another bout of which I had today, because of circumstances, is probably more related to my neurodivergences than anything else, but there's a certain amount of vocational awe that's been mixed in there, I find, once I examine it a bit more. Because my anxiety is not "I'm not being a good capitalist cog," it's "people are going to hate me because I took some unexpected leave and that inconvenienced them." Which is at least a little related to the bad experiences that I had with my first manager and the gossip mill that went along with it (some grudges last, especially the ones that are related to self-preservation), but also is tied up in a conception of whether something is "bad enough" to warrant the taking of leave. Which is probably at least some amount of toxic masculinity leaking through, in the idea that there is such a thing as "bad enough" to warrant, and also something about being a proper provider for the household that I'm bringing in a significant amount of income for, which is really strongly rooted in specific ideas about who should be in the workplace and who should be in the domestic sphere, ideas that I'd like to belive I don't put truck in, except of course, that they're there all the same, that I should use my status as being the person who is the most able to work to make sure that I keep working.
I will freely admit to hypocrisy here, in that if someone else told me the situation that I have was happening to them, I would unhesitatingly tell them to take the leave, since they (I) have it available and they (I) can make a full week's worth of wage with it, and the leave will be expiring soon anyway, so take advantage of the money that's on offer for this specific situation, even if they (I) am concerned that it's not serious enough to warrant invoking that leave. The matter's out of my hands, anyway. Because I was at least smart enough to mention that I was having qualms about whether the thing was bad enough to my manager, and he did the correct thing and told me to stay home according to the established protocol. So even if I feel like it wasn't bad enough, what's done is done.
This is the sort of thing that ties into both capitalism and wanting to be seen as a good person by coworkers. Because capitalism tells us that we are supposed to be always industrious and producing, because that is our sole value as workers, and any time that we take for ourseves is inherently bad, because a non-producing worker is one that gets dismissed from their work, and without wages for our work, we die and nobody cares about it. And, in this current space and time, taking leave for yourself could easily be construed as making more work for someone else, and when you're in a profession where you have to deal with people, people who could be potentially infectious, the more work that you end up having to do, the greater your potential risk of exposure. For people who have leave pools to draw upon, they can reduce their risk by taking that leave, which ends up privileging the people who actually have leave and who have been people who have been able to store that leave, who are often the most able people and least likely to have children or parners that need caring for that takes up leave. Which, like, there's a whole thing in libraries at this point that pretty starkly acknowledges that the paraprofessional staff are the ones at the most risk, not to mention the lowest-paid of library staff, both in places that are still in the "outside services only" that are processing materials and distributing them to people and in places where their local and state governments have decided that there's no pandemic and that everything should be fully open to everyone, without any masking mandate or other indication that a pandemic is raging and people's lives should be more important than the profits of the wealthy. So there's an additional sort of "taking leave when you don't absolutely have to is increasing the risk and not being in solidarity with the other workers in your location" stuff that's going along with "having the privilege to take leave, even if you don't have to, is something others don't have, so you should only do so when you absolutely have to."
This is not good thinking, Complete selflessness and being concerned solely for others is not a sustainable position to take. The Giving Tree ends up as a stump, after all. And, all told, I suspect that others would rather I end up taking leave and keeping them safe than trying to tough it out or believing it's not important enough, only for it to turn out to be exactly the wrong thing and that I would be responsible for potentially spreading it to others. There are plenty of very good reasons why this is the right decision to make and they have excellent justifications, like "leave is for use," "taking leave to protect your own and others' health is a good," and the other sorts of things that I would absolutely deploy in a heartbeat if it were someone else that I were talking about or talking with about this situation. So why is it so hard to do that thing that keeps getting talked about, where you treat yourself with the same kindness, compassion, and fierceness that you would treat others? (Because it's easier to do things for others than to do them for yourself, when you've been socialized that doing things for yourself makes you selfish and an otherwise terrible person, when you see so many examples in the news of people behaving selfishly and using their privileges to hurt others and you don't want to be them, intentionally or accidentally.) That's the basic point of self-care: treat yourself like you matter, not any particular sort of consumerist anything, although those consumer things might help someone feel like they matter or that they have intrinsic worth, rather than worth relative to other things, like how much money you make or how many hours you spend at work or how much you've bought into vocational awe or trickle-down corpoate economics.
And it's not like I'm not going to be able to do the programming commitments I have for this time, unless it turns out that the decision to take leave was, in fact, absolutely warranted and the thing has hit me so hard that I won't be able to perform the virtual programming. So, in that regard, at least, I'll be able to not feel completely terrible about this leave decision.
It's just hard to not catastrophize about how it's going to look to other people and how understanding they'll be about it. Logically, they'll be fine with it, illogically, they're all going to hate me about it, even though there's no evidence for that. Guess I believe at least some set of lies still, even if I know they're lies. Fucking brainweasels.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-15 04:22 pm (UTC)Even accepting the viewpoint that companies can't let employees build up too much vacation time "because it's a liability" (which has lately been worked around by the superficially positive "unlimited vacation time" which easily becomes "less vacation time because of social pressure"), there are more pro-employee ways of managing that: accrual caps.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-15 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-16 02:13 am (UTC)Wishing you success.