Convince Yourself You Deserve It
...or, at the very least, that it's happening no matter what.
I’ve always been put off by the faux flex popular with entrepreneurs, “complaining” about the egregious number of hours they work in a week. This humblebrag is meant to glorify the ambition and work ethic of the braggart, while simultaneously shaming his audience into an inferiority complex. When it’s an employer comparing work hours with staff, it’s often a manipulative tactic to get more labor out of employees. “Think you’ve got it hard? You could be working MY schedule! Grind more, gripe less.”
Lucky for me, I don’t work directly in this kind of toxic environment, but I do work on behalf of many people with the “always on the clock” mindset. By and large, they’re great folks and I don’t want to be accused of understating how difficult entrepreneurship is, especially for people who’ve invested a life savings into making a business work in the post-COVID1 economy.
However, when your job is to serve people who don’t set boundaries for themselves, it’s incredibly easy to drop your own because you want to help. And the more your personal boundaries are worn down by after hours “quick questions” and “sorry to bother you on Saturdays,” the more likely you are to find yourself burnt out, unsure, insecure, joyless and ready to throw in the towel.
Hi.
Welcome.
This is a blog about visiting 30 Major League Baseball stadiums in one year. If you can believe that.
I work a lot, and I swear on the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary on my desk that I’m not trying to impress you or make you feel diminished in any way. In spring of 2022, I started noticing the signs of career burnout, though, of course, I had no idea what that was and just thought it was a bad vibe I could work my way through.
It literally wasn’t until the following spring that I realized what I was suffering with had a name, and only because I was editing a video presentation from a speaker that we brought in to talk to the business leaders in our organization about how burnout affects their employees and them personally (the same people who are “always on the clock.”)
I emailed my boss and said “burnout… it me.” To which I paraphrase her reply, “yeah, no shit. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
She took a two month sabbatical in 2022 and left me in charge while she was driving an RV around the country to recharge and refocus. Upon her return, she went straight to work drawing up a sabbatical policy for all staff because she had such a transformative and beneficial experience. Our board approved the policy and told me to pack my bags for July and August 2024.
That left me with two challenges:
Figure out what to do with two months off.
Don’t quit or get fired.
The first part was actually pretty easy. That’s why you’re reading a blog about visiting all 30 MLB ballparks in a single season and not about, say, renting an off-the-grid cabin to learn the banjo or fucking off to Europe to uncover the hidden history of schnitzel.2
That second part, well, that’s where therapy comes in.
I’m 44, which puts me squarely in mid-life crisis territory (maybe “two-thirds life crisis” if you consider how I eat), but that’s not a phrase that’s ever come up between me and the doc. We do talk about confidence, accomplishment, fulfillment and joy, or, more accurately, the recent absence thereof. We talk about how we process stress physiologically and how anger and irritability are lizard brain reactions to things we perceive as threats, warranted or not. We talk about coping and learning and challenging and growing, none of which I was doing on my own before starting therapy. I just kept digging the hole deeper and deeper. When I realized how far down I got, well, cue Chief Wiggum.
I’m proud to say I’m making progress. I’m prioritizing things that are important and not letting petty stuff get to me as much. I’m setting boundaries and I’m sticking to them. I’ve started feeling joy in my personal life again instead of dreading every dinner out or friend hang as an obligation that I just had to suffer through. And then one day – the final day of the 2023 MLB regular season, in fact – I pulled out a notebook and started jotting down ideas.
I pored over the daily schedules for all 30 baseball teams in July and August, made note of the days when the Dodgers and Angels would swap homestands, figured out what to do during the All-Star break, kept an eye out for day games after night games that would require an overnight drive. After a couple of hours, I had a rough draft that would take me on a 17,000 mile road trip across the country and back. That was the most fun I’d had in more than a year, just sitting there on the couch, the final outs of the season safely secured in a fielder’s glove, and me making my little sabbatical adventure Facebook official.
All that said, I still have days where I wonder if I deserve to take so much time off, and to do it in service of something so trivial in the grand scheme. Sometimes I feel like other people are more excited for me than I am to actually do the thing, and it puts a level of stress on the whole endeavor that runs counter to why I’m doing it in the first place. I also worry whether or not I’m going to be able to pull it off, or if it’s worth the effort and the saving and the sacrifice. I put off even starting this blog because a nagging part of me was convinced that I’d either give up on the trip, leave my job and lose the opportunity, or have a piano fall on my head between now and Opening Day.
But, like I said, I’m making progress. Putting it out in the universe like this makes it real. It’s going to happen. I’m accountable to myself to make it happen. Come next July, whether I’m ready or not, everybody gets my “out-of-office” reply for two months and I’ll be hammering out these missives with ballpark mustard-stained fingers.
Soundtrack:
Fun fact: I tested positive for COVID yesterday. Seemed like the perfect time to start writing. <cough cough cough>
Versions of these alternate sabbaticals were actually considered.