Work Addiction the New American Idol

1 Work Addiction The New American Idol They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. -ALDOUS HUXLEY Bryan (My Story) There was a time when I needed my work-and hid it from others-the way my alcoholic father needed and hid his bourbon. And just as I once tried to control my father's drinking by pouring out his booze and refilling the bottle with vinegar, the people who loved me sulked, pleaded, and tore their hair out trying to keep me from working all the time. Every summertime, for instance, just before we left on vacation, my life partner, Jamey, would search my bags and confiscate any work I planned to smuggle into our rented beach house on the South Carolina shore. But how ever thoroughly he searched, he would always miss the tightly folded papers covered with work notes that I had stuffed into the pockets of my jeans. Later, when Jamey and our close friends invited me to stroll on the beach, I'd say I was tired and wanted to nap. While they were off swimming and playing in the surf which I considered a big waste of time-I secretly worked 11 12 / Work Addiction: The New American Idol in the empty house, bent over a lap desk fashioned from a board. At the sound of their returning footsteps, I'd stuff my papers back into my jeans, hide the board, and stretch out on the bed, pretending to be asleep. I saw nothing strange about my behavior; it's only in hindsight that I say that I was a workaholic. By this, I mean something quite different from saying I worked hard. I mean that I used work to defend myself against unwelcome emotional states-to modulate anxiety, sadness, and frus tration the way a pothead uses dope and an alcoholic uses booze. Since childhood, work had been my sanctuary-my source of stability, self-worth, and meaning and my protec tion against the uncertainties of human relationships. In el ementary school, the subject I hated the most was recess. When a teacher forgot to assign homework over Christ mas vacation, I was the one who raised his hand to remind her. In high school, I wrote, directed, and produced the church Christmas play, also designing and building the sets and acting the lead role of Joseph. Doing everything for the play gave me a sense of control and mastery miss ing from my chaotic family home, where furniture-break ing fights between my mother and my father were a regular occurrence. As an adult, the thought of a vacation or weekend with out work was terrifying to me, and I structured my life accordingly. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, I car ried a full college teaching load and volunteered for com mittee assignments, while also writing books, conduct ing research, and establishing a full clinical practice. Ig noring Jamey's frequent pleas that we "just do something together," I would work in my windowless office in our basement through evenings, weekends, Thanksgivings, and Christmases. I even worked through most of the day of my father's funeral: while my mother and sisters broke bread with our old neighbors, I was in my university office Work Addiction: The New American Idol / 13 twenty-five miles away, working on a project so insignifi cant that I no longer remember what it was. I hit bottom in 1983, when I stopped thinking of myself as an extraordinarily talented and dedicated professional with so much to offer the world and realized how empty my life had become. Up until then, I'd been proud of my workaholism, and well rewarded for it. Jamey might com plain that I was never home-and that when I was, I didn't listen-but my university colleagues called me responsible and conscientious. Jamey might call me controlling, inflex ible, and incapable of living in the moment. But the promo tions, accolades, and fat paychecks that came my way built an ever-stronger case against his accusations, and I used them to further vilify him: Why couldn't he pull his own weight? Why couldn't he be more supportive? Why didn't he appreciate my hard work and the creature comfarts it pro vided? Why was he constantly bothering me with problems that distracted me from earning a decent living? In 1983, after nearly fourteen years together, Jamey who had been trying without success to talk to me about my absence from our relationship and his growing prob lems with alcohol-told me that he had found someone who would listen to him, and he moved out. I was thirty eight. My first book had been published, and I had two more books and several funded research projects in the works. I was also recovering from surgery from stress related gastrointestinal problems. My life was crumbling under my feet, and there was nothing I could do about it. I lost weight. I couldn't eat. I didn't care if I lived or died. I was a chain-smoking, caffeine-drinking work junkie, dogged by self-doubt. I had no close friends. I didn't smile. I felt that my colleagues didn't really appreciate my hard work and were breathing down my neck. My memory got so bad that members of my family wondered if I was devel oping an early case of Alzheimer's. I snapped at colleagues, and they snapped back. I once angrily confronted a college 14 / Work Addiction: The New American Idol librarian, demanding the name of the irresponsible faculty member who had kept, for three months, a book I wanted. She gave me the name: my own. Work had been the one thing that I had always done well, and now even that was failing me. Yet I couldn't stop working. In the summer of that year, Jamey and I reconciled, and in the fall, he checked himself into a treatment center for alcoholism. When I eagerly took part in the family treat ment component to "help Jamey with his problem," a facil itator confronted me with my own work obsession. I joined Workaholics Anonymous, entered therapy, and began my climb out of the pit into a saner life. And Jamey and I started to understand the crack in the foundation of our re lationship. Today, we celebrate thirty-seven years together in sobriety. Now, instead of spending my Saturdays in my basement office, I look forward to weekends of yard work, garage sales, and Saturday-afternoon matinees. When we go to the South Carolina shore or to our remote cabin on the Suwan nee River in northern Florida, I don't pretend to nap any more. I'm fishing off the dock or on the beach now, build ing sandcastles and swimming in the surf. I enjoy and sa vor my life and our time together as much as I had once savored my endless work. But old habits die hard. In the course of writing the sec ond edition of this book, when Jamey yelled from down stairs, I felt, at first, the workaholic's reactive annoyance Don't you know how important my projects are? But this feeling was immediately replaced with love and gratitude · as I realized he was calling me to a big breakfast of French toast, warm maple syrup, and butter. Work Addiction: The New American Idol In a society based on overwork, my behavior had plenty of camouflage. Flextime, twenty-four-hour Wal-Marts, and laptops Work Addiction: The New American Idol / 15 have vaporized the boundaries that once kept work from engulf ing the sacred hours of the sabbath and the family dinnertime. Likewise, the modem, cell phone, and pager have blurred the spatial boundaries between workplace and home: anyone can fax a memo at midnight from the kitchen table, bend over a lap top on an island in paradise, or call the office via cell phone from the ski lift. But work performed in exotic environments is still work, however much we tell ourselves it's play. And when any place can be a workplace and any hour is worktime, some people will work themselves to death, just as some people will drink themselves to death in a culture in which any hour is cocktail hour. Little in our present culture teaches workaholics when or how to say no. Nancy Woodhull, a founding editor of USA Today, is living proof of this trend: I'm not the type of person who can just sit around the pool and not do anything. So I take a Dictaphone to the pool, and when I have ideas, I can record them. Not being able to do that would be very stressful to me. People will say to me, "Nancy, relax, recharge your energy," and I say, 'Tm being energized by getting these ideas down." Having access to a Dictaphone allows you to be more productive. So does having a cell phone, and so does having a computer. You take all these tools and there really is no need for downtime. Anyone can find me, anywhere, anytime. 1 Achieving life balance is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing us in the twenty-first century. Trying to hit the mark, mil lions of Americans are overinvesting in their jobs in such epi demic proportions that we have become a nation that enables workaholics-unbalanced and out of control and unable to slow down and nurture ourselves and our loved ones.

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