Don't Let Work Poke Your I Out
Aligning Professional and Authentic Selves on the Job
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Volume 1, Issues 14
How do you bring your whole self to work? The answer’s more complicated than you’d think. George Herbert Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism would say that you bring both a Me and an I to the workplace. Think of the Me as your professional self and the I as (let’s call it) your authentic self. The Me follows the company dress code and never picks its nose in public. The I is creative, nonconformist, judgy, and slant.
Ideally, the I and the Me cooperate, so you can perform workplace expectations with creative flair. But sometimes at work, the gap between the I and the Me gets so wide you lose your authentic self.
How am I doing after working a 69-hr week? Fine, fine. Was I offended by that boneheaded thing you said last week? Ha, ha, no way, no sir!
Bringing your whole self to work can be especially hard for early-career professionals. Kara Cunningham, a 26-year-old classroom assistant in Chicago Public Schools told me about a time when a big, well-muscled kid in her program—William, we’ll call him—got upset about something or other, started spinning around, and making a ruckus. Before Kara could make sense of what was going on, William jumped her, attacked her. Her coworker pulled the boy off, and Kara pulled herself together. But when she reported the incident to her higher-ups, they told her—I kid you not—to grow a pair.
Kara’s teaching herself to speak more directly to her supervisors. What happens if she doesn’t?
Burnout, Courtney Kalous told me. Burnout is what happens. Lest you think Courtney’s a fragile hothouse plant, I should tell you that she grew up in a house with the staunchest Protestant work ethic: “Kalouses Don’t Quit,” was the family mantra. So, when she landed a job in a faith-based nonprofit, she wasn’t surprised by how hard she had to work. She’d get up at 5:30 AM, crawl to the laptop at the end of her bed, answer emails for thirty minutes, go off to work till 6 PM, meet a volunteer for dinner, and work on projects till 11 PM. The next day, she was crawling right back through her blankets to the Macbook.
When COVID hit, Courtney discovered that, while her Me was thriving, her I had pretty much vanished. Ever since she’s been giving that gap some attention. One day recently, a coworker asked her to take on another project, and Courtney said no. “What happened to the person who used to work here?” her colleague asked. Courtney’s response was a mic-drop: “She’s dead.”
Oof. I didn’t ask how the coworker responded, but something along the lines of, daaaaaaamn, girl, seems about right.
Kara and Courtney’s stories raise questions of how to bring the authentic you and the professional you to work at the same time? Here’s at least a start of an answer in this week’s final story.
A month or so ago, I saw Leah Wideman tweeting, “how can i be burned out from a job i only started 5 months ago?” I messaged her, asking if she was down for an interview. “So down,” she said.
Leah schooled me, let me tell you, about what it’s like to be a 22-year-old elementary school teacher. Most days in her maxed-out classroom, she lives at a storm center of teacherly accountability.
Let’s pan across the classroom. Over here: a kid picking on his mate. Over there: someone can’t find her pencil. Over there: a child with his head on his desk. Why? Something happened on the playground. Over there: well, that one’s asleep. Hooo-kay. “At all times of the day, for 8 hours there are 24 people that are requiring something of me…” she told me, “But I still have to teach this lesson right now. And I have 30 minutes to do that.”
And when, the final bell rings, Leah still has calls to make with distracted parents. How is she with phone calls? “Do not like them,” she says. (Another yes vote for last week’s Mode/Switch.)
I should say that Leah seems to be handling her communication overload pretty well. “I've nailed the teaching... And explaining things to the kids—I've always been good at. Helping kids? Done.” But then, Leah went on to describe communication overwhelm. And that’s when things get really crazy. Her story suggests that communication overwhelm happens when you’re asked not just to do too much, but to be too much.
People with communication overwhelm stare at the floor. They go into the breakroom and cry. They toggle among browser tabs. They stack their Me’s, one on top of the other, like Yertle the Turtle, till they can’t see the I at the bottom. “Managing the 24 personalities in the room while having to consistently push mine down in order to be this person, this presence, in the classroom is so difficult,” she explains. “I just wanna let my fun side out, my ADHD, just let it run wild, 'cause that's who I am. But I can't.”
Leah has ways of coping. She does karaoke on Thursday nights, for one thing. But I’m grateful to say that she does more than cope when communication overwhelm sets in.
A student in her class—let’s call her Mattie—was having a hard time at home and at school. Mattie’s mom is forced by economic precarity to work terribly long hours, and the child’s carrying the trauma of her household’s hyper-busyness straight into the classroom. She’s not doing homework. She’s not taking notes during lessons. She can’t focus. She sits dull-eyed and bewildered.
Leah’s professional self has a weather eye on administrators asking about state assessment standards. That part of her keeps a list of voicemails to leave and emails to craft. All Leah’s Me’s make it seem like there’s no margin for Mattie and her mom. It’s an altogether too familiar story for educators these days—and it’s why a recent interviewee joked with me that her fellow education undergraduates have left the profession to become realtors.
But as I go through my notes, I think that in the overwhelm Leah’s I makes an important move. She told me at the start of our interview—I’m just now noticing again—that she identifies as neurodivergent. She had in fact only recently received an adult diagnosis of ADHD. It had felt like a small, bright revelation, making sense of her own struggles during her college days. When she sat down with Mattie and her mom after school one day, Leah looked, really looked, at the overwhelm of the situation. She sat there with them. She breathed. And from the midst of her own complicated self, she told them to please just take the time needed to get the work done. It was a small accommodation from the heart of one person’s overwhelm to the overwhelm of others. But it’s the small, generous accommodations that bring together the professional and the authentic in life-giving ways.
When you’re feeling communication overload, there are life hacks that can help. But when you’re feeling communication overwhelm—when you’ve got too many Me’s to keep track of at work—Leah’s story suggests treating your own overwhelm as a generous way to be you for the good of others.
Who I’m Learning From
Wayne Booth’s memoir My Many Selves
Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study, especially a recent issue on “The Expanding Job”
Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book: A Novel
Each of these works brings out the layer of identity that so complicates our work and life. Wayne Booth is a rhetorician who creates a shrewd and funny script of all the voices in his head. Anne Helen Peterson speaks from a feminist perspective on how women, in particular, are asked to load up the “Me’s at work. And Jason Mott’s recent novel sketches the self-bifurcation that a white-dominated society can impress upon people of color.
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