Thursday, May 04, 2017

Emotionality of an Impending End

As the weeks wear on in my pregnancy, I find my emotions running a little deeper than usual. Usually, this would be more of a first trimester occurrence, but the emotions I feel now aren't the hormone packed rush of illogical, sudden, and unpredictable extremes. No, these are far more sensical and ordered. 

I have a little countdown chain on my bulletin board above my computer in my office. As of today, it holds only thirty one little metal paperclips. That's the maximum number of working days I might have in the office if I make it to the end of this pregnancy. And in twin pregnancies, the odds are not necessarily in my favor that I'll cruise through all of those days before two tiny humans decide to make their grand entrance into the world. Thirty one days. 

The gravity of that ever shrinking number has been weighing heavier with each paperclip that gets taken down. I promised a lot of things this academic year. I promised I could accomplish enough to make my biggest programs happen without a hitch. I promised that I'd have solid notes prepared and systems set up. I promised that I'd meet with all my teams and walk them through everything they'd need to know. I even promised myself that I could do it all, and do it with an attitude of personal challenge not personal overworkedness and overstress. After all, I have a pretty good track record of upholding my promises even when I've got little to stand them on. I've kickstarted many firsts here - Homecoming parades, new scheduling models, giant "pilots" of courses with the entire first-year class at once. I've pulled off nearly miraculous J-term experiences, held to impossible budgets, won some folks over to some new concepts that seemed completely insurmountable. So I thought surely, surely I could keep one more string of promises, even with no foundation under them. I could do my job, the busiest most chaotic six months of my job, before I'd need to leave, and expect results similar to my being present. 

And staring down thirty one days or less of possibilities, I realize now that my word might perhaps fall short this time. It's too many projects. It's too many details, that I usually rely on years of experience to just make up on the fly, needing to be figured out and cataloged and advanced in excess. 

Perhaps the most emotional part of all of this for me is that as the years go on, I am realizing the value of making oneself dispensable in their professional roles. I spent probably the first half of my career working hard to make myself indispensable. I'd take on the really hard stuff, I'd make promises and work my ass off to keep them, I'd try new things, things so complex that I knew from the start that they maybe weren't all that sustainable. But I also knew I could do them. So I forged on. 

Somewhere in the middle of my years here, and maybe more recently than I care to admit, I began to realize that my commitment to being the only one who could do what I do was flawed. It forced me to work harder than I had to to create successful programs that relied solely on my experience, skills, and talents, and while that was totally working for me, it wouldn't work forever. What if I disappeared someday? What if I quit? What would become of all of that work, all of the layers of complexity that were designed by and for me? 

Transitioning next door to your former professional life taught me a few hard lessons. When you choose, for whatever reason, to let go of everything you've built and worked and fought for, it immediately becomes someone else's. And that someone else is going to take all the impossible, just-for-you stuff and chuck it. I watched it happen. And it nearly crushed me. But I took a valuable lesson away from it - I need to work toward dispensability. 

The only problem with that lesson is that it came too late. And now, the what if has turned into a guarantee. I will be gone. I will disappear. I will not be the one to execute all of the just-for-me complexities I created. And as much as I want to weasel away from it all, shrink into a corner and let someone else take over, I am still managing systems that are designed for me, not just anyone. And I'm working toward my leave by accomplishing things so ridiculously challenging that I'm convinced I'm one of few here that could actually get them accomplished. While I know that's not really true, I also know that it's still trickier than it needs to be, more complicated than it should be. And that really grinds at me these days. 

As the impending end of my days in the office draws nearer, I so desperately wanted to leave on a high note, walking away knowing I did what I said I would do and did it well. The reality is that I'll be leaving a complicated mess in my wake, one that will burden colleagues, one that will leave many promises broken. I fight battles in my mind, fight back the emotions of failure and defeat, knowing I really did work my ass off, I really did try to make the best of things. I couldn't have done any more. So I waffle between desperately desiring to just escape now, to give up and go home knowing I was bested by my circumstances this time and clinging to some ludicrous hope that I've got one more indispensable miracle in me before I go.