Yesterday morning I woke up angry.

I had the feeling I had lost the past several weeks of my life to work. It was like I blinked and weeks had passed, and work had been done – and wedding planning and some sleeping – and not much else.

I happen to love my job. I work with an incredible team of people and the work is interesting. It’s early days of a new program we are developing, which I really care about and think could be impactful.

I like my role on my team, my boss is great, etc.!

But the volume and pace of the work is too much since we’re understaffed, and I’m not the only one who has been putting in long hours.

Putting in long hours is one thing, but I find myself thinking about work pretty much every waking hour, even when I’m not working.

The challenges we’re facing at work have been all-consuming. I constantly find myself puzzling through them. At night, my mind seems to run off on its own, looking for solutions to one problem, then another, and before I know it an hour has passed and my husband has long since fallen asleep.

I started feeling angry due to the blink-and-it’s-over nature of the past weeks. Month? Months?

And how I’m not exercising as much as I’d like to, sleeping as much as I’d like to, seeing friends as much as I’d like to. I’ve even prioritized me-and-my-husband time less, and I hate that.

I’m still seeing friends and my little nephew, still planning my wedding, still occasionally surfacing from work to look briefly around at my apartment or the world outside it. But each week feels like a blur, and I can’t remember the last time I cooked a meal or baked a batch of brownies, both things I normally love to do. Or grocery shopped! (Shout out to my husband for holding down the fort on that and many other fronts.)

All this made me think of Kate Baer’s incredible poem, To Take Back A Life, from her incredible book, What Kind Of Woman.

If you don’t know Kate Baer, please go and find her work. (You could start with her erasure poetry on Instagram, which never fails to amaze me.)

Here’s her poem I’ve been thinking about:

To Take Back a Life

First, you must learn desire. Hold its
fruit in your hands. Unmarry it from
the hunger to be held, to be wanted, to
be called from the streets like the family
dog. You are not a good girl. You are not
somebody’s otherness. This is not a dress
rehearsal before a better kind of life.

Pick up your heavy burdens and leave
them at the gate. I will hold the door for
you.

-Kate Baer, What Kind Of Woman

I think she was writing here, as she writes often, about life and motherhood and relationships and burdens and lightness.

But the poem still resonates with me as I’m thinking about life and work and relationships and burdens and lightness.

(Inner voice: too dramatic? Hmm. Maybe. It’s not like you lost years of your life or something.)

I logged a lot of overtime hours in the past few months and now I’m at the point where I want to get my working hours back to a more sustainable level.

I’ve burned out quite badly in the past from work. This was after spending three and half years pouring myself wholeheartedly into helping run a Youth Center in Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. I’ve written about it before:

On working in Zaatari: Why I Moved Halfway Across The Globe At 22

On burning out from working in Zaatari: When I Finally Got Overwhelmed By My Humanitarian Job

The burnout I faced after quitting my Zaatari job was deep and took awhile to unbury myself from. I wrote about it, “During those months, I undertook the Herculean task of pulling myself, hand over hand, out of the deep well of burnout I had gotten myself into over the previous years doing humanitarian work.”

But the lasting gift that came out of that time was the sort of extreme, never-again life lesson I learned about giving my whole self over to my job and coming out on the other side totally depleted.

I’m a firm believer this is not good for me or my company. I don’t think my old firm appreciated it when I quit the Zaatari job, and I like to think, at least, it would not benefit my current team or company if I burned out and quit!

So then, the question before me: how to do the job I love in a reasonable and manageable way to I can keep it for the long haul?

How to take back a life?

I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear yours as well. Mine are: commit to swimming at 7:00 am every Tuesday morning at my local pool. I love swimming as an alternate workout to running, my go-to, but I’ve been doing it only sporadically in the past few months.

Run more regularly. The more I exercise, the better I feel. Maybe I should put a half marathon on my calendar, to motivate myself to log more miles?

Make plans with friends in advance, so I actually log off at a certain time. I find if I don’t have something planned ahead, my to-do list will keep me hunched over my laptop later than I mean to.

I also want to commit to 30 days of journaling as a grounding practice and to (re)connect with my creativity. I plan to join Suleika Jaouad’s 30-day journaling challenge, which started yesterday and runs throughout April. (Suleika Jaouad! Another beautiful soul, if you haven’t come across her work yet!)

What else should I try?

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PS. Every time I write about working overtime, I feel the need to write several disclaimers. These are: I know this is not the most anyone has ever worked, by a stretch. Many of my colleagues probably log more overtime than I do, and some of my friends who are medical residents work 12-hour days, nights, and what have you. I am lucky to have a good job with good pay that is flexible and remote. And so on. Why the compulsive need for disclaimers?