In the Office

& Other Stories cardigan
Mavi jeans (c/o)
Oak + Fort mules (similar)
Stella & Dot necklace
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I confess: it gets harder and harder to write these mid-week blog posts. Lately, it seems like almost every week I find myself rushing to get a few paragraphs out at the last second on Wednesday evening, knowing that Thursday morning is just around the corner. We shot these photos in my office, which seems fitting since it’s a room that I never seem to leave these days. It’s no secret that my job has changed since 2016, when I first gave an unvarnished glimpse into the daily life of a fashion blogger. In fact, it’s changed more than once. And the pandemic changed everything.

I could write a thesis, not just a blog post, on all of the ways in which our collective tolerance has decreased in the past two years. And I get it, because I’m out of patience, too. But people who are still lucky enough, in theory, to go to work every day, especially in jobs that centre around people, bear the brunt of that every decreasing tolerance. All around us, colleagues are burning out and leaving their jobs entirely, often to be replaced by no one because there is simply no one in the job market to take their place. And so our workload increases. Meanwhile, the people we work with expect things faster and faster because they are at the end of their own rope, likely with ten other people also at their end of their respective ropes breathing down their neck.

I mean, I could write a thesis if I had any energy left. Which I don’t. My energy, like almost everyone else’s, is spent. I give everything I have to work in the long hours I spend in my office. Usually, it still isn’t enough.

We are doing this to each other, and it’s a vicious cycle we can’t seem to break. So we all work longer, harder and just… more than ever before. I spend most of my waking hours in the office. A single day away, which is necessary to use vacation and for my sanity, can be catastrophic to my ability to get things done. My inbox is perpetually overflowing. Recently, I read a book about the science of management, written in the seventies. The author studied five CEOs and how much mail they received in a week. I receive as many emails in a single day, as a mere director, as those five CEOs did, combined, in that week. It’s no wonder that I, along with everyone else with an email address, can’t keep the pace.

But I keep trying. And I keep trying to manage a crushing sense of guilt that I can’t be everything to everyone, that I may actually be approaching the limit of what I can do with the hours available to me. By the end of the my work day, which averages nine and a half hours most days (not inclusive of time I put in on weekends and on those vacation days I need to take), I very often have nothing left. No mental energy. No capacity for original thought. And no space for anything personal, since in spite of my best efforts, my brain stays in the office a lot of the time, even when my body leaves it.

Still, I keep coming back here. I keep trying to write these posts, to hold onto the idea that there is more to my life than my work. Most of the time, that doesn’t seem strictly accurate. But I want to believe that someday it can be again, even if it isn’t right now. And I want to have some life left (if and) when that day eventually comes. Which is why I keep writing these half-hearted posts. I don’t want to give this up, even if I barely have the stamina to keep it going. It doesn’t seem right that this space I love so much should become yet another casualty of my pandemic experience.

But I know that some weeks, these posts just aren’t worth the time I take to type them. Some weeks, it’s an enormous struggle to write a single meaningful sentence. And I wanted to be transparent about why that is – not because I owe anyone an explanation. Because I need to acknowledge for myself that this is hard, very hard some weeks, and I am still showing up. Which is good enough. Not everything has to be perfect. It just has to be good enough. And as long as I keep living in my office, good enough is as good as it’s going to get.

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