Ganb8te 5 - Escaping the abyss

[gan]

Well it’s G&T on the balcony time again. Not H related just me related. Sorry all but you are about to witness a mini meltdown. Probably precipitated by a colleague making an unknowing reference to “whether I had to sacrifice my personal life and family” in order to get my promotion last year...but lets face it I’ve been down for days and this was coming. And yes, I managed to hold back the tears as I replied to his question.

I feel like I live a double life.

In the day - I’m an up and coming academic. I supervise or co-supervise something like 6 graduate and undergraduate students and do my best to make them do well in what they do, help them advance their research, connect them with people who will make their life easier. Twice this week people have referred to me as the "cool supervisor” or something similar. (Not hard though as most of the people on my floor who have offices (like me) are men with silver hair [with no offence to the lovely men with silver hair on here]). In the past 2 weeks I gave a lecture that got applause at the end and I lead an experiential learning activity that got positive reviews by 98% of students. We’re planning a media release for Fs sake, it was that awesome! I try hard to be a good colleague to my peers, getting things done that are asked of me and doing it with a smile as much as possible. And I do all this while trying to draw the line on work vs life - rarely working on nights or weekends and usually turning email off on weekends….only to find on Monday that my workaholic colleagues have spent their weekend catching up on the emails they didn’t respond to during the week.

Yet here I am, at night, alone, reaching out to you wonderful people whose lives have been thrown into similarly nebulous territory.

At our last meetup H said that I am amazing (just not compatible)...and I think I am actually. It’s hard for me to write that as I feel like it’s arrogant. Trouble is, being amazing at my work doesn’t make me amazing at home. Labug, Mozza, Calibri - if you are reading - you have all spoken about how the attributes that make us great at our work don’t necessarily make us great partners. How do we reconcile this? I actually value the attributes that make me good at my work. I think they make me a good person. My relationship with my work is one of few things my H has said out loud was an issue. Help me grow here…

(others welcome to comment, too