Good boundaries versus getting paid.

Mental wellness is an unpaid gig and our economy runs on emotional abuse.

1.

In recent months I’ve been slapped in the face repeatedly with a hard truth: although I generally lead my life from a place of earned strength and middle-aged confidence, I still behave at times like a (hate to say it) people-pleaser. In some key relationships through decades—with friends, bosses, lovers, business partners, or creative collaborators—I have developed a bad habit of working too hard in exchange for too little. Too little love, too little respect, too little reciprocity, and/or too little pay.¹

In professional and personal contexts of all kinds, I have struggled to get certain basic needs met by people who were never equipped to do such a thing—or never intended to in the first place.

I never saw myself as attracted by, or attractive to, people destined to let me down, but maybe I give off the subtle signals of a former child terrified of abandonment. Maybe it’s tiny clues in my speech patterns, body movements, hormones, I don’t know. But here are some telling moments.

Twice now, I have held part-time jobs paying shit wages and yet voluntarily stepped up to fill gaps as if were a I partner or senior manager. Somewhere in my sad little heart, I must have believed I would eventually magically beautifully automatically earn a reward for my slavishness-masquerading-as-authority. A big reward! from the very people who’d bought me on deep discount.

Also twice, I have been that supposed 50/50 business partner but, in one case, preemptively paid myself less, and in both cases, carried way more than half the workload and managerial responsibility. Oh, there were “reasons” that I remember well, but I’d rather not recite them here because they were stupid, needlessly self-effacing reasons, and also meaningless, and also very very stupid reasons and dum-dum and needless.

During the first summer of the pandemic, I allowed a known fragile person to court me avidly as a friend. Then I did a few things that angered and threatened them—some perhaps fairly, others without justification beyond their right to behave and react however they want. But I was given no benefit of the doubt or confronted with a grievance. I simply caught a full, flagrant dose of their narcissistic dark side, and was transformed from a person they admired, flattered, and even clung to—into an instant scourge and scapegoat. I lost this “friend” but also some important professional relationships as a result of this unwell person’s florid instability and abiding rage.

A few months after that trauma, I hoped for a little kindness from a different friend who’d been caught in the middle. I never asked them to take my side and I tried not to bring up the social rupture too often, although it was hard not to probe for details after I’d been cut off from all communication. This longtime ally voluntarily promised that our friendship would rise above the mess and never become collateral damage. But they later rushed to support the fragile crazy person, then began treating me with subtle mistrust, distance, and meanness. I realized something I’d always known but hadn’t let myself truly see before. This was the second time my “ally” had kinda sorta sided with a volatile person—someone with a traumatic brain injury— who, many years ago, had reacted badly to something I said and decided I was the world’s worst person.

(BTW What is it about the number 2? It’s like I’ve custom-rewritten the famous Joe Esposito deadpan moment from JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY. You shouldn’t hang me from a hook. My mother² hung me from a hook. TWICE! An implied do-over robs its power as a threat.)

OK now, this one really stunk.

Soon after my divorce, I found myself waiting, cajoling, and finally begging for full, honest disclosure from an old friend/new romantic interest about his post-divorce love life. He had approached me as soon as he knew I was available and had been honorably upfront about his non-monogamous, non-exclusive dating status but held back any specifics. It sounded perfect—I had no intention to lock myself up just weeks after the end of a 28-year relationship. As he and I grew closer, he expressed wanting to open up to me further but said he was struggling after many years of strategic, if extreme, privacy. He kept certain unspoken walls around his time, his availability to text or talk or see me, and around and between any other women in his life at that moment.

Heroic me! I decided that was my cue to (1) fall hard for this man anyway and also (2) slice open a whole vein’s worth of empathy when I recognized his “hiding” behavior as similar to my own in some ways, and almost exactly like my father’s. We were two victims of parental narcissistic abuse, yay! on top of all the other ways we were perfect for each other. I looked past our mutual red-flag factory and our near-daily cycle of mixed messages.

The weirdest thing was, this situation was strongly calling me back to another fucked-up boyfriend 35 years earlier. I was the first person that man ever told about his father’s brutal physical abuse. Then he forget he’d told me and was absolutely shocked when I brought it up again a few weeks later. (In the parlance, I’d accidentally unmasked him.) Soon after that, this guy who was so obviously in love with me sent me packing, claiming he wasn’t ready to have a serious girlfriend. He didn’t mention the part about telling me his big secret and then wishing he could take it back, but I knew what I knew then and still know now.

In any case, six months into my deepening bond with my old friend/new lover, and a few days after my one tearful attempt to find out where I stood in his (possibly crowded?) emotional life, he began semi-ghosting me. When I reacted badly to the unannounced drop-off in his attention, he blamed me for getting upset, went radio silent for days or weeks except for weird little social media Likes, and eventually pushed me away for good. My heart shattered—but hey, his secrets remained intact and he avoided not just accountability but any semblance of narrative logic. Months later I was still trying to figure out how to charm and humor him back into my life—because what had happened between us just didn’t make sense. (Eventually, I pieced together my own version of his untold story, but as in the one previous case of Disappearing Boyfriend, it’s a solution that falls short of satisfaction.)

Since I am writing this anecdote now, you can guess how all that turned out. The other problem with people-pleasing behavior is that it doesn’t work.

And now, the big bomb of epiphanic detonation. Over the past 18 months, I have let go of my healthy exercise, cooking, and eating habits, I have delayed long-planned goals, I have waved away two promising job opportunities, I have slipped into one major depression, I have canceled plans for playing local concerts and preparing future tours, and I have seriously contemplated a cross-country move that would fuck up my life for years to come…all because I’m the eldest daughter and now primary medical advocate of the woman who first trained me to replace my needs with her own.

But after my most recent and most morally exhausting trip to California in August, I saw the light. Yes, my mother was a damaging kind to have, but it was the best she could and would ever do. So where did that leave me in my half-resentful slavishness?

People don’t give you what you believe you deserve, or even what they secretly know you deserve, no matter how hard to try to please them. They only give what they are capable and willing of giving.

My mother probably “earned” less than I’m giving her already, and I suspect somewhere inside her dying memories, she knows this. I have decided to stop short of self-sabotage and still be responsible, even kind. She’ll never be happy about the fact that I haven’t uprooted my life 2600 miles away to be her daily companion, but at least she’s now grateful when I do show up and stand up for her.

In the prime of middle age, I’m going to don a pair of infra-red-flag vision goggles and never again get suckered into extreme people-pleasing mode. I’m as stubborn as the madwoman who raised me but a hundred times saner. Still—please wish me luck in the new year. It’s easy to pledge these things but hard to enact them.

Now let the triumphant self-help-y portion of this essay end and my real point begin.

Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash

2.

There is only one reason I have become a stronger person over time and can still see and correct shitty patterns borne of inadequate childhood: Privilege. As in, the time, money, space, and energy needed to become a better person. I’m not saying only people with some means get to improve their mental health (and plenty of them choose not to, clearly) or that poor people never have the time for constructive introspection or access to the right helpers. But self-improvement is a volunteer gig, an unpaid internship. It may enrich your soul but it’s not without its associated costs. Maybe I should say Emotional freedom ain’t free.

3.

Not a non sequitur:

When a friend recently mentioned that their current romantic interest was going to use a mouse jiggler so they could go hiking and have a date in the middle of the week, I laughed but didn’t think too hard about it. My friend added nobody even cares about the actual work this person does.

It was only later that I let myself be struck. I believe this person, my friend’s friend, is a relatively high-level policy wonk and data-based researcher who’s been working from home since the pandemic. It floors me that such an employee is expected to prove they’re on the clock on a minute-by-minute basis. His bosses don’t care about the work, only that he’s working on it.

I’ve been self-employed or remotely part-time employed in one capacity or another since 1996. I truly struggle to understand how we’ve collectively capitulated to this level of surveillance even in white-collar work. My friend’s friend presumably has project deadlines to meet, perhaps teamwork contributions to submit, and live meetings to be prepared for. Why wouldn’t this be enough proof of their productivity and commitment? What if they’re super smart individuals who get things done in three-quarters or even half the time of their peers doing similar work? I’m sure I’m not the first to ask these questions…I just haven’t had a personal reason to ask them.

For a long time now we’ve been hearing reports of increasing surveillance and tracking of blue-collar and service industry workers. On some level, the horrors of an Amazon distribution center³ are simply the logical outcome of more than a century of capitalist worship at the altar of Efficiency. Frederick W. Taylor created the first "scientific" time-management systems for tracking factory workers' time usage, which were soon enough refashioned for office work and schools. His concepts were groundbreaking for the owners and managers keen to boost profits and drive results, no matter how those are defined—and also spirit-breaking for generations of school attendees and their job-holding parents. (The Taylorizing of modern public school is a whole diatribe of its own I’ll save for another day.)

Even the self-employed have succumbed to the idea that success requires blocking out your next day’s activities and tasks in half-hour increments. Ask me how I know this. Ask me how many times I’ve tried and failed to discipline myself to the daily time-blocking provocations of a fancy hardback planner, when a running to-do list on a legal pad, a computer doc for goal-setting, a cheap old-fashioned desk blotter calendar, and a large art notebook and some colorful markers for the big future dream projects work just as well. (Or just as poorly if I don’t use them, but at least I haven’t shelled out another 40 or 50 bucks for a fetishistic saddle-stitched daybook that you can’t throw into the recycling bin.)

The stories have been emerging at an increasing pace since the post-pandemic shift toward work-from-home.⁴ High-tech methods of monitoring employee's time seated at their home desk, or hours spent on Slack, or minutes engaged in Zoom meetings seem designed to turn them into anxious/resentful people-pleasers. Remote workers must begin to feel like they're walking on eggshells as if skulking around to avoid a personality-disordered parent whose rage wire they’re terrified to trip. How different does this make them from the victims of low-level human rights violations in big-box stores or fast food joints, of de facto robotizing in Amazon distribution centers?

Blue collar or white:

It is implied if not stated that you should put the company’s owners’ and shareholders’ needs before your own. This is narcissistic abuse.

It is implied if not stated that the non-compliant may end up financially ruined in a country with no safety net. This is emotional blackmail.

It is implied if not stated that if you can’t play by the rules, you are perfectly free to leave and find better jobs. This is gaslighting.

It is implied if not stated that modern, efficient organizations are “scientifically” managed and if you find them instead to be thinly veiled dog-eat-dog chaos pits lorded over by broken, desperate workaholics avoiding their own buried damage, you’re the one with a bad attitude. This is projection.

These are all boundary violations, insults to your adulthoods, shocks to your unchangeable circadian rhythms, poisoned darts to your initiative, and body blows to your pride. Days, weeks, months, quarters, lifetimes.

Don’t get me wrong. There is work to be done in the world, lots of it unpleasant and repetitive if not downright ugly, and some portion of it will never be managed by small, friendly family-run companies and impassioned solopreneurs. That’s not my point, even if I’m not entirely sure what my point is yet. I will have to give this topic more research and thought. I’m privileged to have time to do so.

But it is implied if not stated that if you hate your job, in fact, hate all jobs available to you for presuming to replace your talent, will, imagination, ebullience, optimism, individuality, and charisma with the way we do things around here, well then, you’re nothing but a miserable little ingrate, lazy spoiled brat, who doesn’t know a damn thing and won’t listen to reason, plus you show no respect to your elders, and you’ll probably grow up to amount to absolutely nothing in this world at all.

You already know what this is.

I was lucky—and privileged—to slip out of this paranoia-based peonage a long time ago, and at my age, I probably couldn’t reenter the surveilled and tracked labor marketplace even if I wanted or needed to. I am probably stuck with the nonconforming life I leaned into 25 years ago. I’m lucky and privileged but also vulnerable for having chosen to live slightly outside the system, where I can assert my emotional boundaries but don’t get paid for doing so.

I’m just as data-mined and privacy-robbed and social-media-addled as the rest of us who are compelled to use smartphones and computers and credit cards in order to participate in humanity and earn a living. But at least I have (for now) escaped the new digital incarnation of Big Brother, more aptly called Bad Parent.

1. One caveat: this last item, the idea of getting paid “too little,” the idea that certain jobs “should” pay a certain amount, is a weird and slippery concept in our capitalism-captured culture, and something I’ve only just begun to unpack in pieces like this.

2. The switch from “father” in the original is intentional here….

3. VICE's detailed recent report on Amazon's brutal system to catch and fire "time wasters"

4. “Your Boss Can Monitor Your Activities Without Special Software” from Washington Post 10/7