Balance

Mango trench
Mango dress
Rouje boots (similar)
Sezane handbag
RayBan sunglasses
ASOS beret
Hart + Stone necklace (c/o) (similar)
Aurate NY bracelet (c/o)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Prefecture des Bouches-du-Rhone – Marseille, France

Marseille, October 13, 2021

Dear friends,

Three weeks before our last trip to France, I took a job that I’d sworn up and down for years I didn’t want to do. I think I meant it, at the time. I was still in my twenties when I received my first promotion to management. The experience was eye-opening; I often referred to myself as a highly compensated baby-sitter, a description that didn’t paint a particularly flattering picture of my team but was nonetheless accurate. When I left that job behind, I gladly said good-bye to vacation approvals, bereavement leaves and acting as referee in squabbles between colleagues.

…but in the end, I came back to it. The truth is, I like a challenge. And leading people, especially educated people, building relationships with them based on mutual trust and respect while simulatenously convincing them to follow you, not just because you’re in charge but because you’re the right person to make decisions in the interest of everyone, is nothing is not a challenge.

I don’t talk much about my work in this space. While I firmly believe that you can have as much as you want, by which I mean you can be successful in a high pressure corporate career while still pursuing outside passions like, in my case, content creation, I can’t prepare a how-to guide on it. I would never try to. There is a balance to strike, one that involves some sacrifice, and what every person chooses to sacrifice will be different. For me, that balance means keeping those two lives largely separate. When I’m working, my job gets my full attention. That means I rarely pick up my iPhone during the work day, and my presence on instagram is virtually non-existent.

It also means that when I shut my work computer down for the day, or set my out-of-office notification for a period of vacation, I don’t log back in. I leave my email box truly unattended. I don’t send messages to my team and, as much as they can, they respect my personal life enough not to send messages to me.

Which is why, as I lay in our hotel bed in Marseille, full of the most delicious Italian meal from a place called Gigi – the polenta! The risotto! – and one more glass of wine that I really needed, I’m surprised to see a series of text messages come in. It’s after 10 pm in France. While I suspect no one is truly checking the time difference before sending these messages, the timing is less than ideal. (I’m tipsy and too stuffed to think, just for a start.) That job I took two years ago isn’t the one that I have now. Back in Canada, there is a manager in charge of our team of fifteen; she reports to me and oversees the staff, while I’m responsible for the client portfolio. Whatever this is all about, it seems to me that my input, especially now, isn’t likely to be very helpful.

The truth is, the reason I didn’t ever want this kind of job again is that I know the balance can never be perfect. I can set every boundary and someone will always still get through. There will always be some need I can’t leave unattended, some problem no one else can resolve. In the iPhone age, there is no amount of distance I can put between myself and work, even temporarily, that makes me unreachable. And my own natural impulse, which is to help, can be near impossible to overcome at times. Tonight, here in Marseille, I answer the text messages. I don’t promise solutions. But I don’t ignore the request, either.

Even back in 2019, I knew this was where I’d end up. What I didn’t know then, only three weeks into the job, was how I’d really be able to manage it all. Now, two and a half years later, I can answer that question simply enough: imperfectly and with a lot of effort. Finding and striking balance looks different every single day. It’s an exercise that begins again every morning. And doesn’t end when I leave the office. For me, it’s worth it to be able to do everything I want to do. But it’s not, and never will be, easy.

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