Skip to main content

Snail Girl

Throughout my career I have seen women cope with burnout very differently than men. Women are impacted a lot more as the numbers in the story suggest and the decisions they make are more extreme. Leaving a high-pressure job in a large, well-recognized company to take on a role in a small obscure company no one ever heard of is a move I have seen a few times. Some have switched careers entirely to find a pace that fits their needs. Long hiatuses to raise children is not uncommon either. My friend W calls this phase "left to be Mamma". He has been in HR all his life and has seen any number of talented women simply leave when the pressures of raising children and keeping their marriage functional was too much to fit alongside the job. 

W sees these women returning once the kids are older and more self-sufficient and having to prove themselves all over again. All the gains from their last time around having disappeared by the time they return. I know of a few young women who are going full-throttle in their careers because they have the opportunity to do so before other life-events occur. My friend L is in her mid-30s and single. She is going at top-speed but lately she pauses to ask herself if the speed is warranted and what is is getting out of her career is worth postponing marriage and kids - things she does want for herself. 

Then there is R who in the midst of the pandemic finally found the courage to quit her insane job cold-turkey and join a few virtual book-clubs to clear her mind from the accumulated clutter. She works for the National Park Service now in a capacity that is a far cry from her glitzy corporate job but R has found the peace she did not have her whole adult life going as she did from feeder high-school to elite university to fancy job and burning out bit by bit until there was only "ashes of R" left as she described it. She was in her mid 40s finally had enough of it all. For many women the secret to lasting is to go somewhere between crawl and walk pace the whole time - prepare for a laborious marathon from day one, never think of sprinting. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...