“Were you here late last night?” My boss asked at our daily
morning meeting.
“I was here later than I should have been,” I said, thinking
of the 2am timestamp on my story in dropbox.
“I asked you if you could finish the story by the end of the
day, and you said yes. If you aren’t able to finish a story, you need to tell
me. You’re learning to write news and edit audio and code audio. It’s going to
take time, and you do no benefit to yourself staying late. Now, what stories
are you working on today?” she asked, moving on to the day’s news.
Was I just reprimanded for finishing an assignment? I worked
until 2am, but I completed my first story with audio cuts from interviews I recorded.
And the story’s been airing all morning. And I’m not sucking overtime pay. I’m
a volunteer. I don’t receive overtime. And I’m being reprimanded?
The next day, the staff handed the Volunteers two sunboxes
to place in the Volunteer House to counteract SAD when the light diminishes.
Then they reminded us the work kitchen remains stocked with fruit, nuts, and
granola bars for us to eat if we need a snack or if our blood sugar dips. As a
side note, they said the gym where we receive a free membership is extending
its weekend hours.
That was three weeks ago. My boss is still telling me to
leave work earlier.
Besides my parents, I’m not used to authority figures,
especially employers, caring about my wellness. My background in theatre and
academia taught me to do whatever I had to do to get the job done. Health and
sanity were never mentioned. Probably because they got in the way.
In college my bedtime was 4am. That is, if I wasn’t pulling
my weekly all-nighter to write a paper. At my last theatre job, a 12-hour day
was considered getting off early. In both environments, work ended when the
task ended, and you did whatever you had to do to get the job done before the
deadline hit or the curtain rose. If that meant not sleeping for 48 hours, then
shut your mouth and keep working.
And I loved it.
If I entered a semester thinking I could succeed, I’d tip
the scale until doubt spiked my adrenaline to panic as I piled on more classes
and rehearsals than time or sanity permitted. Weekly, I’d shout expletives at
myself with lips smirking as I opened my laptop at 12am to begin a paper due at
9am, buzzed off the risk of not finishing, the challenge of forcing myself to,
and the triumph of body slamming into the deadline, finished paper in hand,
still warm from the printer.
High stakes. Low certainty. Cortisol was my ecstasy.
At the interview for my previous theatre job, the employer
said: You will work 12 to 16 hour days, 6 days a week, no vacations. You will
be hungry, tired, and unwashed, and you won’t care because you’ll be so
exhausted. But every day you’ll be working with a professional theatre company.
What do you think?
“It sounds like touching fire,” I said, “terrifying and
magnetic.” And I wanted to grab the flame with both hands.
Theatre people love to work, and they love to work hard.
They open a vein, drain it on stage, and get off on it. So him telling me that
I would work morning, day, and night in a job that’s all-consuming, that will take
everything from me, that I will fiercely love and fiercely hate and consider
leaving theatre forever and, ultimately, learn more about my craft than I ever
have in my life…well, it was lighting a spark in a powder keg, a spark that
welded an alloy of passion and ambition, an alloy that has always glinted my
eyes at any chance to skid broadside across concrete to do the work that makes
sleep and food and showers and anywhere else in the world unnecessary.
Then I come to KNOM, and three weeks in, I get reprimanded
for working until 2am.
I’m learning what this whole wellness-concerned work
environment means. I’m trying to limit myself to 9-hour days. I’m trying to
take lunch breaks. I’m trying to sleep 8 hours. I’m learning to respect my
health and sanity and to see them not as the wings of my work but to see my
work as one of the passengers among many on the airplane of my life. I’m learning
to abide by what my Dad told me sophomore year of college, that though I may
love my work, my work will never love me and that work needs no rest, but I do.
I’m recognizing that occupying myself solely with my employment whittles the
million capacities of my humanity to a few sinews of my being, a fate that will
leave me dancing hollow round the prickly pear. And hardest of all, I’m
learning to efficiently create work I am proud of while supporting my colleagues
and then to leave work and live a quality personal life within a community.
Masochism is a hard pleasure to break, but concern from the
upper hierarchy for my person beyond my product is a challenging but beautiful
thing to begin accepting.
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| Nome Tundra |
