Confessions of a Workaholic

Hi, my name is Catherine…and I’m a workaholic.

I don’t mean this in the good “wow-I-love-working-and-I-find-everything-I-do-so-fulfilling” way. Whenever I meet people like this, I’m amazed. We all know them: the people who look at you with bright eyes at 1AM and say things like:

Oh, how I envy you.

“Wow! I love reading 400 pages a night! The material is just so interesting!”
“Did you know that cellular respiration makes twenty nine ATP molecules??!”
“I hope I can meet with the professor tomorrow so they can tell me more about these awesome pre-colonial African political systems!”

Unfortunately, this is not what I mean by workaholic. I feel this way about a few subjects, sometimes (yay for being a Child Development major!) but for the most part, even if I find something interesting, doing the work is utterly exhausting. And, even worse, it can be terrifying. For my entire life, I’ve been so obsessed with getting good grades that the prospect of not doing well paralyzes me. It’s a circle of doom: I’m so scared of not doing well that I can’t enjoy my work, and even though I generally do well anyway, I end up hating it, exhausting myself, and sometimes even making myself sick. This is what I mean by workaholic: I work pretty much all the time and feel extremely guilty when I’m not working, but I don’t enjoy it. It doesn’t sound very fun, does it? It isn’t.

And, as much as I believe in and write about the importance of self-confidence and dignity (ex) (ex), this is my weak spot. Sometimes it truly is hard for me to believe that my worth doesn’t depend on my grades. It sounds silly to say it, but it’s true.

The reason I’m writing about this is that I’ve noticed that a lot of people I know seem to share this problem, especially in college. On a college campus, school is your life, literally. You live, eat, and sleep right next to (or in?) the library where you study and the buildings where you go to class. Your friends are ambitious and smart; somehow they all seem to be studying more than you, although you aren’t sure how that’s possible. They also have a lot more fun than you and aren’t nearly as stressed out.

Of course this can’t be true, because so many people I know feel this way. We’re all stressed out! We’re all workaholics, to some degree. Obviously I'm not trying to say that grades aren't important, or that we shouldn't work hard. I just don't think it should be necessary for me to lose all respect for myself when I'm too tired to keep working. It just isn't healthy. There has to be a balance, right?

Part of the reason I’m taking a semester to live at home and study at Carnegie Mellon instead of Tufts is to figure out how to fix this problem. And I’m determined to fix it, because I know that school actually can be fulfilling, and that it must be possible to both get good (enough) grades and enjoy life. For me, this semester is about reclaiming my happiness and asserting myself in the face of my anxieties.

If you’re a workaholic like me (and I know that a lot of people are) then listen up: it doesn’t have to be this way. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. In any case, one thing that I know for sure, at least intellectually, is that my value as a human being (and yours) goes far, far beyond academic performance. I’ve been trying to remind myself of this every day, so that I can learn to respect myself regardless of how much time I put into studying every day.

I’ll let you know how it goes! If you have any words of advice, feel free to comment or send me an email.