Letting go of work you love can bring grief, but it can also create space for what matters. Sometimes the problem isn't your boundaries, resilience, or ability to do more. It's the systems asking too much while providing too little.

What if we measured our lives and work not just by success, sustainability, or meaning, but by how alive we feel? After six days of learning, reflection, and connection, I've been thinking about what it means to recalibrate toward aliveness, especially in times of grief, change, and uncertainty. Sometimes, letting go isn't about moving on. It's about honoring what we've experienced while making room for more beauty, joy, and purpose.

Not everything that lands in your lap belongs to you. This fall, let's revisit the 4D Inventory as more than a productivity practice. It's an invitation to reflect on what we're carrying, why letting go can feel so difficult, and what becomes possible when we release what isn't ours.

I know people were disappointed when I chose to save myself (and my relationship with my kiddo, because I was a single parent at the time).

I had built some lovely work and a community of learning. I left proud of what I had created and how, by the end, I had transformed my relationship to my career in ways that allowed me to show up more whole, authentic, and creative.

I may have disappointed others, but I did not disappoint my inner core self for the first time in my academic work history.

You cannot outwork, outcare, or outsacrifice a decision that has already been made elsewhere. The work is learning to care without making yourself responsible for holding everything together.

“Tamara, were you talking to me in your last blog?”

Friend, I’m talking to all of us right now.

Caring, not carrying, is a BIG one. I heard from many of you that last week’s shares about caring that becomes over-carrying really hit you right in the chest. That’s in large part why I share some of my own story at times. You are not alone. You are actually in great company, and this is why we have these conversations!

By the time I left academia, I was the only tenured professor left in my Higher Education and Leadership program. What had once been a program with a full-time faculty of 5 had slowly been allowed to shrink. Junior faculty had left for better opportunities, and their positions weren’t refilled. Senior faculty took early retirement. I’d write justifications for adjunct funds each semester. They cut our administrative support position. 

And like many people in professions, I did what I had been trained—implicitly and explicitly—to do: I carried more. Picked up more students. At one point, I was on over 20 dissertation committees, chairing half, and advising all the master’s students.

In honor of the season of move-in, orientations, welcome weeks and months, after-work social hours, and axe throwing parties, I offer you the myth that to care is to carry on behalf of others (colleagues, programs, and institutions).

The variations of caring that turn into carrying that I hear often are:

• You’ll make yourself available. Sign up for that extra volunteer slot or committee.

• You’ll absorb their distress as you serve as their sounding board.

• You’ll smooth over the conflict and rescue others.

• If you care about people, you’ll anticipate their needs, soften their disappointments, hold their emotions, and sometimes even take responsibility for things that were never yours to begin with.

Plenty of those patterned responses overlap as trauma responses, neurodivergent masking, value-aligned caring, and definitely racialized and gendered. Raising my hand on all of those.

Belonging isn’t earned. It’s freely available and gifted. What becomes possible now when we remember our belonging?

I talk so much about work, careers, and institutions, in part because I spent 20 years studying and designing them. And I’m particularly interested in how much space work they take up in our bodies, minds, souls, and especially our imaginations, in what we believe is possible for our individual and collective futures.

It’s about restorying our relationships. Of what it means and feels like to come back home. Back into relationships with yourself, with others, and the more-than-human world you are already part of.

You’ve already begun negotiating with your September or October calendar and it might sound like: I’ll get back to _____ when things settle down. Or, of course I have to attend (insert the pile up of meetings and “retreats”).

You’re negotiating with your body in these decisions, too. Your jaw and shoulders are tighter than just a few weeks ago. You’re waking up exhausted. The joy you felt gardening this summer feels far away already. You're more irritable than usual. Your body feels louder somehow, but you translate its language into, "It's just that time of year."

Sometimes the Semester Scaries* are simply new routines or transition anxiety. But more often than not, they’re accumulated costs in your body and soul arriving right on schedule.

In October 2020, my journal said quite bluntly: "I need to save myself. Why do I feel guilty about needing to take FMLA or to quit? What am I making this mean about me? Why do I feel like I need to keep fighting? I need to take leave and sort myself out."

Brigid Schulte in Over Work names how the “crappification” of paid work is killing us. While in English we label this as stress and burnout, in Japanese, the word for dying from overwork - karoshi - feels more accurate, unfortunately. The cost of belonging is pervasive and is a hidden health crisis at all levels.

Let the empathy and humanity of this comment settle in your own body and mind for a second. Notice what comes up for you. Maybe a little shock, maybe it feels a little spot on, maybe some of your own grief (which could be sadness but equally rage).

It could be easy to see her experience as a lesson in overworking (and that’s legit). I also see something deeper. It’s a story about the cost of institutional belonging that comes with indebtedness. How often do any of us conflate getting THE job with the mindset and behavior of continuously proving that we deserve our place - our self-worth so invested in institutional belonging.

Being full-on in the brainstormy stage of a creative endeavor means I’m joyfully surrounded by piles and piles of library books. The middle pile is my active reading pile, aka the books I’m rotating through depending on the moment and my mood.

My summer reading and listening have me thinking deeply about overwork, career grief, embodiment, and the future of work.