The Cost of Belonging
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.
Institutions provide more than employment. They often become our source of identity, connections, purpose, and security. Leaving, resting, or asking for something different can feel like risking our livelihoods AND our sense of worth, but they are so heavily rooted to a place, like a career or office.
And this is where the cost of institutional belonging begins to compound. Because work doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of our lives. The costs are paid elsewhere, like in our bodies, our relationships, and our emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. How could it not?
The work stress and technostresses that we’ve all become familiar with are now compounded with the undercurrents of fear. Maybe not always directly, although for many it certainly is, but workforce instability has created the anxiety gremlins of layoffs, cuts, and reorgs that shape our choices. One consequence of that fear is that our choices become increasingly driven by the need to survive and pay our bills, the economics of belonging.
While that has always existed under late-stage capitalism, there are seasons when choice, adaptability, and imagination feel more accessible. For many, this isn't one of those seasons. It’s important to be in touch with what your season is rather than comparing it to those around you.
As someone said in July’s midyear Grove workshop: “The catalysts for this [career grief] conversation came after realizing that I was quite sick and unhealthy because of my job.”
And another reflected, “I do believe what you said to [in our Grove workshop] was so important and no one taught us. Reduce inflammation, or it will cost you.”
There are impacts that compound over time.
We normalize them because they're common, not because they're healthy. We are not meant to live like this. We are wildness embodied. We are Nature. There is a real cost to living disconnected from ourselves, from each other, and from the many places we belong beyond our work.
This year's Grove Community focus on Deinstitutionalizing Work matters because I, too, have worked in ways and environments that were killing me. Maybe like you, I didn’t always have language for what was happening and I wasn’t clear on the cost, in part because it was normalized and dismissed. It often only became clear in hindsight, in the quiet moments when I could finally hear myself again.
Looking back on my 2020 journals, I don’t think I was only asking questions about work. I was asking questions about belonging and a deep need to develop it outside of the academy. What I believed I owed, what I believed leaving would say about me, and why choosing myself felt like something I had to justify. And also feeling my very tangible failing health.
We deserve relationships with work that are life-affirming rather than life-depleting. Institutions should be places we contribute to, not places from which we derive our worth.
Where have you been experiencing depletion of the body, mind, emotions, and spirit? What do you fear the most if you choose to belong a bit more to yourself? Be honest. Only you know yourself.
Want to explore these questions in community? Join us in The Grove.
