Hey Rockstars,

Yesterday, I was driving home and called Sarah because it had been a while since we’d had a proper rant about work. Which is surprising, considering that most of our hangouts involve sitting in the living room complaining about some moronic comment we’ve received or the latest fire drill demanding our attention. What a life—when we’re not 100% working, we’re 50% working and 50% talking about work.

I always wanted this life. I used to look at people with demanding careers and significant responsibilities and think, “Wow, they really have their lives together.” But I’m beginning to suspect that having your life together involves considerably more anxiety than anyone lets on.

For context, Sarah recently lost her work phone. Fortunately, someone turned it in to WMATA, and she eventually got it back, but for approximately two weeks, she was without it. Now, depending on your relationship with your job, you might consider two weeks without a work phone an unexpected vacation. No constant emails, no calls, no notifications interrupting your evening. Personally, I think that sounds terrifying, and Sarah evidently agreed.

You see, Sarah is frequently on call, and she’s often the person everyone turns to when something goes wrong and needs to be fixed immediately. She’s the person who handles the fire drills, figures things out, and makes sure everything continues running as it should. And without her phone, she had to find another way to remain reachable.

So she started sleeping with her laptop next to her. In her bed.

And because I’m an excellent friend, I naturally reacted by telling her how ridiculous this was and explaining the importance of establishing healthy boundaries between her personal and professional lives.

Just kidding. Of course not.

I understood completely.

My work phone is with me everywhere. Even now as I’m typing this blog post, my two phones are stacked on the left of my computer. The work phone is on top. I check it regularly, even when I’m not expecting anything, because I like knowing that I haven’t missed an email or a message or some unexpected development that requires my attention. It takes a very particular level of inner peace for me to leave it at home, and I’m very rarely operating at that level.

And the funny thing is that I don’t necessarily need to have work to do. Sometimes nothing is happening. I could be out with friends, getting coffee, or doing something entirely unrelated to my job, and I’m perfectly happy. But having my work phone nearby is comforting. If something comes up, I can handle it. If I need to look at a document, I can open my laptop. If someone has a question, I can answer it instead of having to go home first.

In fact, I think the possibility of being unable to respond might stress me out more than actually having something to respond to.

Which is quite the discovery to make about yourself.

And before anyone suggests that Sarah and I simply need to establish better boundaries, I would like to respectfully ask whether you’ve ever worked in a profession where the entire point is that people rely on you to handle things when they need handling. Sometimes something genuinely needs to be done at 9 p.m. Sometimes you get a message from a partner asking you to figure something out, and you figure it out. That’s part of the job. It’s not necessarily a personal failure to “protect your peace,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.

I also don’t particularly want to spend this essay complaining about a career I voluntarily pursued. I worked hard to become a lawyer. I wanted the responsibility, the challenge, the opportunities, and the ability to work on important, complicated things. And I still want those things. I have free will! If I decide one day that this life is no longer what I want, I can make a different decision. For now, though, I’m here because I want to be.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally look around and wonder what on earth I’m doing.

I’m working on a document right now that has so many redlines that I think of the 2,000 words on the page, only 10 are untouched. There’s something about that much red text that makes a project feel infinitely more chaotic than it actually is. Even when I know precisely what needs to be done, the sight of comments, deletions, insertions, and formatting changes makes me feel like the entire document is staging a rebellion. So in a fit of rage, I accepted all the changes. I can now look at the document without feeling personally attacked by Google Docs… at least until the next 2,000 tracked changes.

Taylor Swift really said it best when she said “get it off my desk.”

There’s something reassuring about making a problem feel manageable. And perhaps that’s part of why Sarah and I like being prepared for the next emergency. We can’t necessarily control when someone will need us, or what they’ll need, but we can at least make sure we have the tools to handle it. And honestly, sometimes I love this about my life.

There are days when I look at what I’m doing, the people I work with, and the responsibilities I’ve been trusted with, and I feel incredibly proud of myself. I think about how much I’ve learned, how far I’ve come, and how many things that once seemed intimidating are now things I can handle. I like being good at my job. I like solving difficult problems. I like the feeling of being trusted to figure something out when the answer isn’t immediately obvious.

Sometimes I genuinely feel like I’ve curated this extraordinary life where I’m ambitious, independent, capable, and doing exactly the kind of work I once hoped I’d get to do. I’m thriving. I’m walking around feeling like the main character at the beginning of a Hallmark movie before she moves to some random small town and meets some dude who owns a novelty seasonal shop and has no concept of a 401(k).

And then there are other days.

Days when I’m tired, the emails keep coming, the document is still covered in redlines, and I begin to suspect that I have girlbossed a little too close to the sun.

Those are the days when I wonder whether I really needed to be quite this ambitious. Could I perhaps have developed a more relaxing interest? Mattress testing? Lego building? Something involving a little less urgency and considerably fewer Outlook notifications?

I think what’s funny about this is that I can experience both versions of my life in the same afternoon. I can be genuinely excited about a project, enjoy a challenging conversation, feel proud of the work I’m producing, and then, three hours later, be sitting at my desk wondering whether it’s socially acceptable to retire at my age. I actually asked a partner the other day whether it was acceptable to retire at 31. His response? “Hahaha oh man.” No reassurance whatsoever.

You may remember that Sarah and I once found ourselves unexpectedly awake at an ungodly hour because our apartment building needed us to move our cars out of the garage. Since we were already awake, we decided to get coffee and briefly cosplay as morning people.

This was a remarkable experience for both of us, primarily because we discovered that there are people who voluntarily wake up early, get dressed, and go to work before 8 a.m. People who seem cheerful about it, even.

At one point, Sarah looked around at all these functional members of society and said, “This is the life my mom wanted for me.”

I thought that was hilarious, and I still do. The idea that we had stumbled upon the lifestyle our mothers dreamed of for us simply by being awake at a reasonable hour was enough to convince me that perhaps we’d been approaching adulthood incorrectly all along.

But I’ve been thinking about that sentence again since our conversation yesterday.

Because here we are, two women with demanding careers, significant responsibilities, and the independence to build lives that look the way we want them to. We have jobs that challenge us, opportunities we worked hard to earn, and people who trust us to handle complicated things. I imagine our mothers are quite proud of us.

And yet, one of us has been sleeping with her laptop in bed, and the other is deriving emotional comfort from removing tracked changes in a Word document.

This is the life our moms wanted for us?

I’m not really sure what the takeaway is here. I’m not about to announce that I’ve learned to disconnect, or that I’m making a solemn commitment to put my work phone away every evening. I haven’t, and I’m not.

For now, Sarah has her work phone back, which I imagine has brought her considerable peace of mind. And I’ve cleaned up enough redlines on my document that looking at it no longer makes me want to close my laptop immediately.

Sarah also wanted me to clarify that she no longer sleeps with her laptop in bed. Wonderful! Progress!

Except she then explained that she now sleeps facing three glowing screens, all of which beep when she receives notifications, and her laptop remains on all night.

“But proximity wise it’s further!” she assured me.

And you know what? She’s right. The laptop is technically farther away, and I have been informed that this is an improvement. Something about the radiation being farther away. I’m not entirely sure that’s how any of this works, but I’m happy for her.

So I think we’re both doing pretty well. And at the very least, it’s comforting to know that whatever peculiar relationship I have with work, my bff has managed to develop an equally ridiculous one.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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