Reframing the idea of 'work'

Redefining work, 'enough-ness', motivation, trust & confidence

Last week I shared my ongoing challenges with starting a small business as a workaholic post autistic burnout. It turns out lots of you are going through similar struggles, and I want to thank you for your comments and email replies sharing your experiences and perspectives. Many of you reflected on how important it is to not feel alone in these challenges, and I couldn’t agree more.

Hi, I'm Charlie & I'm a workaholic

Today I am sharing a few of the unpolished ideas I’m thinking about when trying to reframe my relationship with work. I’m in the trenches here figuring it out as I go, so this is not advice and I don’t claim for any of these ideas to be ‘the right way’. Your process will be different to mine, because we all face different life journeys.

Redefining work

Historically work has only been work to me if I am remunerated with money for my time. Technically, though, work is not only work if I am paid to do it. The Cambridge Dictionary defines work as “an activity, such as a job, that a person uses physical or mental effort to do, usually for money”.

Whilst work is ‘usually’ for money, it is not always.

I am redefining my own definition of work to include activities I use physical or mental effort to do, but do not get paid for. These include:

• cleaning my family’s home;

• doing my family’s laundry;

• cooking or preparing my family meals;

• planning my family’s holidays;

• planning my family’s social calendar; and

• attending trauma therapy.

Bar the last bullet my husband contributes physical and mental effort to all of these. We don’t believe in traditional gender roles and I know he thinks and feels no differently about me now as someone who is unemployed as when I earned more than he did. But because he is working a full-time job to support us financially, and I am currently unable to work, it makes sense that I am doing the majority of this list.

So whilst I am not contributing to our household by working in the way I thought I would be, I am supporting us in different ways through activities that are work despite me not being paid for them.

For me, it is valuable to remind myself of this because traditionally in society the work to maintain a household and family life has not been respected a much as the working of a paid job in employment - but that doesn’t mean that this narrative is true.

‘Enough-ness’

I ask myself; ‘what does ‘enough’ look like?’

Is it enough to contribute unpaid work, or is it important to me to contribute financially too? Although I am married, is it important to me to maintain financial autonomy? What does financial autonomy look like for me? What amount of money would be enough for me to be content with my degree of financial autonomy? Is it enough to accept paid work is not accessible to me if I want to be healthy enough to be present for my family?

Am I fundamentally asking; if I were to never make another pound in my life, would I be enough?

Motivation

Understanding my motivations for my actions is something that challenges me. Through therapy I am learning to discern between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, positive motivation, and negative motivation.

When applying what I’ve learned about myself to this conundrum of whether or not to go back to paid work and, if I did, what would be ‘enough’ I often feel like I’m spinning in circles.

I don’t know if I judge myself for not being able to do paid work right now because of the ideals I was raised with, or the maladaptive coping mechanism of hyper-independence I used as a young person to feel in control, or the need to prove myself through money to make up for the trauma I experienced in childhood.

And then I catch myself.

I don’t have to figure it all out to know what I want my motivation to be. What I want my relationship with money to be. What I want my work life to look like.

These are all things that define my future, rather than explain my past. My past is in the past and whilst it’s certainly useful to understand narratives through therapy, breaking the pattern involves making new choices based on new motivations in the here and now.

(I hope this is making sense?!)

What I’m trying to get to is that our motivations for taking certain actions can change. So rather than focusing on why I did things in the past so I can do the opposite now, I am trying to focus on tapping into what I want to motivate me going forward.

• Does my emotional stability and availability for my family and friends motivate me?

• Does a clean home and home-cooked meals motivate me?

• Does a paycheck with my name on it motivate me?

These are the kind of questions I’m interrogating whilst reminding myself there is no right answer and the answers are likely not to be all-or-nothing.

Trust

Living with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, especially with triggers around topics such as work and money, means that I will likely always find it difficult to trust the decisions I make.

But at a certain point I have to try to trust myself, my husband, and the universe anyway. Because the worst thing I can do for myself, I believe, is to not make a decision and live in limbo.

I don’t want to waste my life unemployed but worrying about whether or not I should go and get a paid job, and I don’t want to waste my life working a paid job and worrying that I’m making a mistake.

Confidence

A word I have become enamoured with lately is ‘confidence’. If you, like me, find ‘trust’ to be a difficult word to get on board with precisely because it entails an element of putting faith in people or plans or a future outside of yourself, you might also prefer ‘confidence’.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, confidence means ‘the quality of being certain of your abilities or of having trust in people, plans, or the future’.

If there’s one thing I can do, it’s be certain of my abilities. I know myself well enough by this point to make a list. And if I can do that, surely I can identify what my abilities lend themselves to?

Instead of thinking; ‘what should I do about returning to work?’, I can ask myself ‘what am I able to do about returning to work?’. As someone with multiple disabilities who seemed to function as someone who was able for a while, this is likely to be emotionally confronting - but I sense it is the way to come to a truly honest and sustainable conclusion.

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Thank you for reading this week, and I’d love to know if any of these ideas have been on your mind too - or, if you feel like sharing, what other seeds are being watered in your mind garden?

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Take care,

Charlie Rewilding 🌱 xoxo