Work Heals

Work Heals

I have seen more people celebrate breaks than I have seen people celebrate work. Cheat day for those dieting is the loudest, and public holidays are the bomb to staff and students.

In our world, a person who loves to read is a Bookworm, one who loves the gym is a Gym Rat, and one who loves education is a Nerd.

We create and use these labels with more than enough denigration. It is almost as if we are trying to shame people for being excellent while simultaneously being jealous that we are not them.

Now, I am not endorsing obsession. However, a certain level of enthusiasm and passion is required to build excellence in every field. So, when we shame people for putting in the work, we are shaming excellence.

The downside of our consistent disparagement of excellence is the endorsement of mediocrity.

How Mediocrity Kills Us All

Whatever you endorse will happen again, and whatever you ignore is considered permissible. This is a social pattern that exists because communities keep us alive and can even determine the quality of life we get on many levels.

We celebrate overwork in some environments which results in people glorifying fatigue, mental breakdowns and depression. The same is true for environments where the bars are low or non-existent — those who try hard are frustrated and are likely to give up.

What is rewarded in your community? As an individual, what have you been rewarding?

Some of us have not verbally approved things but have permitted them by our silence.

Recently, a high school student told me how her school was having tutorials so students could get Cs in their examinations. Not As or Bs but Cs! Do you know how low the bar must be for the school circular to carry a notice informing the students to gain mere Cs?

It is easy to notice decadence like this in our education system but we miss them in other areas were there are no grades.

For example, we seem to have normalized not preparing for our relationships and the result of that shows in our divorce statistics. Yes, some marriages are toxic but some others, were just lazy to do the work.

The downside of this is the growing number of emotionally imbalanced children on our streets with Mother wounds and Daddy issues. This excludes their exposure to more sexual abuses and other traumas even.

We do not realize it but not doing the work when it is our turn is costing us generations of sanity.

While we have found ways to help people contain and heal some traumas, this world still has more trauma cases than it has therapists.

It’s a communal work

There is no world in which only the professionals can fight our crime rate, train our kids, get them off the streets, reduce the abuse and help everyone heal — the experts are not enough.

This means everyone needs to see how they contribute to the mediocrity and get to work.

A book club in your neighbourhood will at least stop five kids from ending up roaming the streets for hours. A gym or sport centre means energetic and emotional kids have a place to expend that energy without harming anyone and adult supervision means they do not harm themselves.

Better a bookworm than a drug dealer. The next time you feel the urge to shame someone for being passionate about what they do, think of all the havoc they could wreck if they sent that energy to the wrong place.

The next time someone attempts to shame you for being excellent, think of the beauty what you are doing creates and leave that mediocre conversation.

Work Heals

For many people, work was the constant thing in their lives even when it felt like the rug was pulled from under them. Depressed but they had to get into work every day — it was the only way they knew what day it was.

For some, the children needing them was how they did not die when their partner did. For some, their gym was their escape when they could not articulate their feelings.

It did not take away the pain but these things did not allow them to drown like they would have.

I am a therapist and would always recommend professional help but I will be illiterate to sweep away the pillar routine work provides in all our lives.

When in emotional distress, a routine work (any sane legal work) has the ability to keep you grounded to a degree.

Even during Covid, people started schooling not because they wanted certificates but because they needed grounding. For some people, it was having sex with their romantic partner that said, “I have got you”.

Yet, as pleasurable as sex is, you do not have sex for eight straight hours but can expend mental and emotional energy at one task for eight hours straight. What then makes you think that work will not dissipate the negative energy in your thoughts as well?

One of my favourite physics laws, the first law of thermodynamics says, “energy can neither be created nor destroyed but it can converted from one form to another”. Emotionally, it means you cannot destroy the intensity of what you feel but you can put it to work elsewhere and get a more refined result.

Work cannot raise your energy levels to new heights but it can give you a stability and dissipate the chaos in your mind so you do not lose more than you have already lost.

Today’s piece is your permit to stop apologizing for loving work the way you do. However, we have got to balance that.