The actor Ray Winstone, on “holiday”, sort of.
I’ll be off next week. Unlike 92% of freelancers, I’ve been able to book a week out of town. I’ve also committed to turning off my computer and unplugging from client work. It’s not easy but it’s been two and a half years since I started freelancing. This’ll be the first time I’ve taken a proper week off. That includes our honeymoon when I juggled client calls in the evenings just outside Venice. I need the break. Of course, I’ll still be sending one newsletter out for a client. I’m a realist. But we’ve got the copy written and I’m determined to avoid mission creep. It’s a good job nothing major is happening on the global news front that could change everything overnight.
😙 (whistles nonchalantly…)
I wrote it down so it must be true. I’m going to manifest my rest.
The funny thing is my clients are all cool about it. I told them I’m taking a week away with my family and they said, “excellent.” I realized: It’s not them putting the pressure on. It’s me putting it on myself. Thanks, clients. You’re the best. As for myself, I must try harder to try less, more often.
There’s an irony to nonprofit and purpose-driven work. We talk a lot about valuing human beings, but the sector attracts us, in part, because we’re masochistic. We want to burn ourselves out on the altar of social justice. Our values, it seems to me, are often external to our organizations. It explains the high turnover in nonprofit jobs. Instead, we need to cultivate an atmosphere of more abundance and yes, that does mean paying people better. It also means encouraging people to live full lives outside of work.
I remember leaving journalism to work at an agency. I couldn’t believe I now had colleagues who took time off to leave the country. They had tans. They had children. They had functioning relationships. It seemed outlandish. Journalists tend to compete to see who can burn out faster. Cause-driven people are similar.
The bottom line is that if we take care of ourselves, we can sustain to keep doing work that means something. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we’re saying the causes we care about can do without us. That may even be true, but I like to think I’ve learned enough to be dangerous by now. I’d like to use that knowledge on the side of the angels.
The signs of burnout for me are a loss of humor and a feeling that I’m acting more energized than I am underneath. I do my best writing when I can connect it to deeper feeling. I’m not saying every media pitch I write needs to be poetry. But it helps if you can mean it.
I’ll be back in a week. In England a “proper holiday” is more like two weeks but in the U.S., such a thing would be tantamount to communism. I don’t love living in a culture with such a puritan work ethic, but it has its compensations and I do prefer it to my homeland. England might give everybody five weeks off each year, but I’ve found it’s also still got class issues and too much emotional repression for my taste. New York is more my bag. If I can leave town for a week every now and then I’ll take it. At least here I can scream “I’m walking, here!” at cars turning right into my crosswalk, and people just think I’m blending in.
When’s your next vacation? Going anywhere nice? I hope so. Meantime this newsletter will be on hiatus until the following week. Thanks for your support and understanding. Now, I’m off to find the sunscreen.
