Pre-Sabbatical Manure

In July, I’m going to do a thing I’ve been wanting to do for years, and that is to take a one-month sabbatical from Into Account. I’m not going to travel. I’m not going on vacation. The only concrete plan that I have for my time is to write, without any goals in mind beyond this newsletter.

I'm not planning anything beyond that because I’m spending all my planning energy on getting everything done that needs to be done in order for me to have the break. And it’s not because I'm efficient and organized. It’s because I'm not. I’m white-knuckling my way to July.

I have, in the past, been situationally organized as needed. I’ve accomplished things that have required some baseline organizational skills, which I have arduously beefed up with things like planners and lists and text reminders. I got a PhD, which required some organizational skills, especially given that I had the opposite of a coddling advisor. (To be clear, I would not want it otherwise. There was no absence of kindness.)

I was pretty broken down after I finished my PhD. My research, affirmed and well-supported, led me to what I can now identify clearly as grief, intense waves of it, all the more disorienting because I couldn’t see it for what it was at the time. All I could do was berate myself for not having the emotional energy to continue turning that research into academic currency. I can identify that as a moment when my endurance took a hit.

During that time (some of which coincided with the 2016 election, which didn’t help) I also bled out much of my energy attending to the grievances and petty tyrannies of one of the older women who mentored me into advocacy through some top-tier energy vampirism. It took a lot of therapy to help me understand that I did not, in fact, owe her my free organizational labor or emotional availability, just because she had no ability to organize her own work or regulate her own emotions.

While I was extracting myself from her influence and recovering from her emotional abuse, I co-founded a nonprofit, became the executive director, and learned a new profession, a new sector, and a whole host of new skills. I found great colleagues whose skills complemented mine. At some point I stopped having to do box breathing every time I opened a spreadsheet. But my organizational skills, never exceptional, are always the first thing down the toilet when I’m depleted.

The logistics of planning a sabbatical are what has eluded me until now. At any given moment, I’m in regular or semi-regular contact with somewhere around twenty survivors. For some proportion of those, there are other people involved in their cases who might have some kind of rigorously circumscribed contact with me as well. Crafting the right out-of-office message to broadly communicate with every person with whom I’m in professional contact has always felt impossible.

None of this is insurmountable. Most of the people I’ve worked with on a regular basis would respond to my need for a break with generosity and accommodation. But in order to take a break, I need to muster up the time and the capacity to personally contact everyone I don’t want to abandon. (Because when you’re someone’s advocate through a traumatic situation, lack of communication is abandonment. I have done it before, and still feel terrible about it.)

You can see how this turns into a vicious cycle, right? I get too burned out and overwhelmed by digital communication in general to execute the planning necessary to contact everyone I need to contact in order to take a break. I don’t plan breaks, so I don’t get breaks, aside from few days around the holidays when my absence is easily explained and generally pre-understood.

For awhile, I chastised myself for being so grandiose as to think I was indispensable, because that’s the kind of explanation you see people offer on social media to overburdened women who have too many responsibilities. “Stop thinking you’re so important to everyone that you can’t take a break!” the internet screams, and it sounds like wisdom, but I’ve come to believe that advice really only applies to narcissists, who won’t listen to it anyway. Falsely diagnosing myself with a grandiosity problem has never helped me clear my inbox or manage my schedule.

I’ve also been told that I work too hard and need to “prioritize self-care.” Trying to respond to that creates more explanatory obligation, and that feels like work, ergo it is work.

I don’t actually work too hard. The world is full of people who work way harder than I do. I don’t have an enviable salary, but I do have an enviable schedule, because I get to make it myself, and I’m rarely forced to defer to shitheads. In this uber-privatized society that creates endless trauma and devalues care work, my labor is taken for granted, and underfunded, inarguably. But I still have immense privilege, because I’m choosing to do it, and I get to eat and live securely and have health insurance. Which makes me more far secure than a lot of people living in this country right now.

I don’t work too hard. I do hard work. There’s a difference. I think often of the people who have to do both.

Last night, while Eric and I were unloading groceries, I got some messages that felt urgent-ish, and picked up my phone. After a few minutes, Eric said, in the gentlest, least judgmental way possible, hey, what are you doing to make sure that you’re not having to respond to messages like this during your sabbatical?

If anyone deserves that explanation, he does. I described my plans. I felt calmer than I had ten minutes earlier, when I was activated out of my mind by some dumb thing a church leader did.

I can feel the burnout in my strained relationship with inanimate objects, how my everyday clumsiness too easily hits on my hair-trigger nerves. I’m a klutz and always have been, in the most comically horrible way. I am forever dropping things, breaking things, and swearing about it in ways that suggest I’m attributing active malice to said items. I know this is not cute. It’s just my struggle.

When life is too much, this whole problem with everyday object-wrangling turns into a daily struggle to not melt down in tears over really basic shit. Like dropping my keys, which I do at least once a day. Or trying to carry too many things at once while just, you know, walking through the house. One day during a particularly stressful year of graduate school, I remember trying to get into my car to drive to campus, loaded with god knows how many books and papers and folders and digital devices and probably at least two meals. The toxic but hilarious friend who was with me at the time, witnessing my frustration at all the uncooperative items I was shoving into the car and dropping on the pavement, shook their head and said, “I don’t know how you survive in the wild.”

Yesterday morning, derailed by another mundane professional outrage, I left the house, got in the car, and started driving. My only concrete plan was to buy composted cow manure for the garden, but that was just a pretext—I could have waited until the weekend. Instead, I drove all over town, looking for errands to run. Shopping makes me frantically irritable since the pandemic, but somehow I managed to acquire four bags of manure and eight dollars’ worth of spindly, discounted herbs from a local pop-up nursery. When I got home, I saw one of my neighbors with her abusive, garbage monster of a husband, who always gets out of jail and comes back to inflict his presence on the neighborhood as well as his family, and I turned the car around without getting out and drove off again, because I was feeling very not today, Satan about faking niceties with that fucker for the sake of communal safety.

I went to the Middle Eastern grocery store, where I bought tea, phyllo dough, feta, and lunch. For me, all of this constituted a shopping spree, and I felt accomplished for getting through it without wanting to roar at anyone like a feral animal. (The notable exception being the abusive neighbor, but the temptation to verbally eviscerate that guy is constant enough that I can turn it down to a low buzz.)

Driving around town and running errands is not my usual escape hatch on a stressful work day; usually I go outside and hang out with the plants. But Northeast Kansas has hit that stage where the mosquitos are just starting to flex the power that will become total dominance by mid-July, plus the ragweed around here is a thicket of bastards. Every trip outside requires bug spray and sunscreen, and every minute I spend unshowered after spending any real time outdoors is a contact dermatitis crisis event.

This weekend, despite the predicted high temperatures, I’m going to go out and spread that cow manure on our community garden plots, which are nearly done with the lettuce and radishes and arugula and ready to host what I hope will be late summer crops of chard, beets, and kale. I’ll make some spanakopita with the piles of lambsquarter and Ethiopian collards that I harvested last night, and some sauerkraut with the excess of cabbage in the fridge. If I get ambitious enough, I’ll make vareniki with the sauerkraut that is already in the fridge and freeze it (or as my grandmother called it, kraut beroggi, though I would never touch such a thing when she prepared it in my childhood, as I could not figure out why anyone would corrupt chewy dough with anything as foul as sour cabbage).

And once my diffuse rage has been adequately soothed by filling dough with piles of green stuff, I’ll pull out my planner and plot my way through to the beginning of July.

A few things that are queued up in my newsletter pipeline:

• An conversation with Quaker public minister Dr. Windy Cooler, about all the ways that church policies don’t prevent interpersonal violence, and what alternatives look like

• Reflections on the Surviving the Law conference (it was pretty incredible)

• My pitch to get people to care more about Munchausen by Proxy abuse, and how MBP intersects with other forms of child abuse in the threat posed by the right-wing “parents’ rights” movement, which weaponizes litigation to undermine child protection laws (if you’re curious, start here)

 Happy Solstice, friends! More to come soon.