Once again, I’ve “messed around” as the last hectic week-before-Christmas barrels down upon me as I stagger around, feeling like a hideous underachiever… Gingerly patting the painful stye under my R eye, the scarlet “S” serving as a symbol of my stress. In years past, my eyelid would fester during periods of upheaval w/my ex-husband, the ordinary week-to-week aggravations as well as the tumultuous legal battles. Fortunately those times are behind me, but as the immortal Rosanne Rosannadanna says “It’s always something!” These days I have the financial pit I continue to dig my way out of: my decimated retirement account, back taxes, regulatory red tape, and the ever-present challenge of keeping my skills relevant, clinic equipment up-to-date, staff motivated, etc. I went ahead & bought a therapeutic laser to stay abreast of the latest treatment modalities. (The sales rep demo’d it on the sore knuckles of my R hand; initially it intensified the aching stiffness, but today it seems better. Perhaps I’m confounding its benefits with part of the normal healing process in the hand I slammed against my stairwell banister 3 wks ago, but research & anecdotal reports from my colleagues have been favorable, so W-T-H!)
Watching one of the best Season 1 episodes of Star Trek tonight: “The Enemy Within”, where Captain Kirk is split into his good & evil halves by a malfunctioning transporter. No one is coming along to rescue me or to “make that decision”. I seem to lack my own strength of will to make any serious changes in my diet & exercise habits. I am dismayed by my physical deterioration but even more so by my mental lapses. I will awaken in the middle of the night profoundly disoriented, taking several minutes to realize where I am in the calendar - no doubt the reason for my clumsy stairwell fall. Obviously I’ll keep going until I can no longer function, there’s no other path. My receptionist’s eldest daughter Bayli has her admissions interview for the Texas Tech school of veterinary medicine tomorrow, but that still gives me 4 more years to survive until she graduates. Let me post another excerpt from Dr Deb, which both boosters my resolve & explains why I am unlikely to recruit help from any of my other young colleagues - not in today’s climate!
“I was always very easily triggered when I was young, shoot, I was easily triggered up until about four years ago. Going through the sheer lies and fear mongering of covid forced me to really look inward as to why I felt like I did and why I was so offended at people who thought differently. Thankfully for the past few years I have become an avid podcast listener and I have invested some of my time in listening to messages on how and why we think and feel and where those thoughts and feelings come from inside of us and I have been able to get rid of a lot of trash in my head. Let me tell you something, getting to the place where you can read someones opinion that is opposite of yours and shrugging your mental shoulders and saying to yourself that that is an interesting view and then letting it go, that is a great place!
I wrote a post about how I feel we have gotten lost in veterinary medicine. We have gotten lost to the blinding lights of money and the notion that less is better. I wrote about how I choose to make myself better and push myself to be better so that I can help more animals at a price that people can afford because I went into veterinary medicine to save animals, not turn them away to go home and suffer. There were so many people who were very kind and generous with their comments and then there started to come the younger vet crowd with their anger and accusations. If I take all the angry comments and upset comments and messages and boil it down it becomes obvious that the lie of work life balance has infiltrated the minds of young people to where they do not realize that work is not the enemy but rather what life is all about.
If you are a stay at home mom, you work your ever loving ass off taking care of your house and your kids. My mom was a stay at home mom and it was not an easy job. Shoot, I work like I do so that I can pay someone to clean my house because I hate cleaning house and doing laundry. I loved my kids but I worked hard so that I could hire a nanny to watch them while I worked because taking care of small children is harder than working hard and I didn’t like it. Work is not the enemy, work is what defines joy and happiness in life.
One commenter typed out how I must not have spent time with my kids and how I have horses and I must not get to enjoy them because I am working 60+ hours a week. She is wrong. When my kids were young, I worked and then I spent all the rest of my time with my kids. I never did the “I deserve a break” bullshit, I made those two heathen children and it was my job to take care of them. I worked to provide for us and then I spent all the rest of my time with them. When my son played sports, I was there not only for every game, no matter how far I had to drive but for every practice as well. I was home every night and not out with the girls doing grown up things spending time away from my kids. I bathed them and showered them and laid next to them for a very long time until they fell asleep. I invested my life into my kids because they were a choice that I made to have just like my career.
The end of every day I go out and feed the horses and walk through them and rub the bellies of the pregnant mares and talk to the babies inside. I walk around them and love on the now weanlings and talk to them and let them take away the stress that has been building up for the day. On the weekends I sit with them and watch them and learn from them and allow them to heal the broken parts inside of me when possible. We all get the same 24 hours every day, the only difference is how we choose to invest it. It is that investment that is going to grow and produce fruit in the future. If you are not actually working at growing good things, better things for yourself and your family, you have a problem and your bitterness towards those of us who know that it is hard work that allows one to enjoy life, is on you.
Here is the thing, if your way, if your thoughts, if your opinion on work is really the best way, why do you care what us old people say about work? If your thoughts and opinions are truth for you, it shouldn’t bother you that we have a different truth for us! If your life is really so great why do you even care what we write or say? The real truth is that many people are miserable and that is why they keep spending more money and looking for more time off thinking that it is work that is making them miserable when the actual truth is it is their lack of worth ethic that is making them miserable.
I listened to a podcast with Andrew Huberman and Twyla Tharp who is a ballet superstar that I know nothing about because I know nothing about dance but that woman is in her 80s and still going to the gym every day for two hours and still deeply involved in the world of dance and she had so many thoughts about hard work and the joy that it brings. At 80+ years of age she is a force to be reckoned with and while her life has never been easy you can hear the joy in her words as she talks about what she did and how she does and what she has accomplished. It is hard works that brings that to any life!
If you are trying to get out of work and escape the anxiety of pressure because it feels like it is too much, it is not the job or your boss or your career, it is you! You are weak and you are unwilling to do what it takes to be stronger so you are looking for excuses to do less instead of pushing yourself to become better. You are mad at people like me because we shine a light on your weakness and you don’t like it. You try to tear us down instead of working to build yourself up and get better. You do not have to be like me but you should damn sure want to be the best you that you can be and you will never find that only working the bare minimum and expecting everyone else to do the same so you feel better about yourself. Work is not the problem, mental weakness is the problem. The lies told to you by the people who want to control you are the problem.
If you want to feel better about who you are and what you do, stop giving in to the fear of not being good enough and do the hard work to get better! It isn’t fun! Life isn’t about fun, it is about the legacy that you leave behind you when you die. The people we admire and respect the most are the people who didn’t look for excuses to not do something but rather pushed through the fear and the anxiety and hardness and got better and did better.“
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