the work you do, the person you are

on the importance of boundaries

In 2020, I came across a quote attributed to Toni Morrison on an Instagram post. They didn’t say where it was from, so I googled it and realised it came from this New Yorker essay. It might look like an obvious reasoning:

You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

But it ignited a crisis within me. It was my first year as a PhD student, a few months into a pandemic that would go on to kill millions of people, including a dear friend, and a time where although people philosophised online a lot on how it would bring about a new dawn of awareness, the changes I saw in people were actually for the worse. I wondered if maybe I was just being pessimistic, but from my perspective most were acting more self-involved than ever.

At this time, I had became reasonably well-known on social media, at least within my niche of literature-in-English-slash-academic-life. We had a book club. We had read-alongs. We had a community. And yet, that Toni Morrison quote shook me to my core because it felt that what people liked about me was all about the work that I did, not the person that I was. Even my username seemed tainted somehow, because it referred to… what I studied. That was all that there was to me, a girl who talked about English Literature online.

Though I love academic work as well as teaching, I disliked academia from the outset. I wanted to reinvent it, to make room for myself and like-minded people, and I was trying to do that by being online. The thing that is so deeply vile, I think, about academia, is that people who dislike each other with the intensity of a looney tunes dynamite explosion will affect kindness in a really poisonous way all the time. I’m not saying co-workers and fellow students should just be at each other’s throats all the time. The excess is the actual problem. It is not mere politeness. It is people who welcome you with a smile while making you feel uncomfortable to the point of wanting to leave and never come back. It’s people who will take active steps to undermine you but still try to convince you they’re rooting for you. It makes you neurotic. It makes you unhinged and suspicious of everyone. It makes you resentful.

Maybe you’ll tell me every workplace is like that, but I do feel academia has a specific perniciousness to it in a way that almost feels cultish. And as I refused to play the game because it was just too exhausting, I felt the pushback each and every time even from people I thought were my friends. This one person once warned me about “ambiguous friendships” in academia. The thing is, most of them were.

From this struggle between feeling that I had maybe become not much more than the work that I did and refusing to join the cult of academia while remaining in it, something amazing emerged: I became brilliant at establishing and enforcing my boundaries. This is what allowed me to stay sane through the years that followed.

Everyone talks about boundaries, but maintaining them is always a challenge. People are simply used to demanding more than you are able or willing to give. To help me navigate this in a professional capacity, I delineated a few rules that I do not allow myself to deviate from:

1. I do not use WhatsApp to communicate to anyone about work-related issues. I do not join WhatsApp groups. I do not give co-workers my number. The same applies to social media.

2. I do not reply to messages outside of office hours.

3. I no longer let people bully me into participating in events - professional or celebratory - that I do not want/feel comfortable attending.

4. I do not heed unsolicited advice. So many times I suffered from going against my gut instinct as a graduate student. No more.

5. My only measure for how much work I can take on is myself. I do not let others pressure me into doing more/engaging with projects that I feel will only exhaust me.

I realise not everybody is in a position to enforce all of those depending on where you work or what field you are in. However, I do believe that having a thorough knowledge of your workplace’s rules and guidelines and creating your own list is key. Adhering to my own set of rules has made a lot of people pissed off with me through the years, but I feel that it is healthier for them to deal with their own frustration than for me to not have boundaries and end up with an unbalanced relationship with my professional life. My work is not the entirety of who I am. So now when I think of Toni Morrison I no longer feel embarrassed from the impression that maybe I have nothing more to offer than my professional skills. I am the person that I am, and can find the people who like me better for it precisely because I make no concessions when it comes to my boundaries.