Becoming My Undoing

It's time to release the habits that contributed to my success

When I wake up in the morning, an imaginary stopwatch wakes with me. It tracks my every move, tallying the time that it takes for me to get ready so that I can begin my day. My hope is to beat the clock, to minimize the length of my morning ritual, which includes not just getting dressed, but also journaling, meditating, and taking a brief walk so I can get some morning sun. The entire routine takes nearly 2-1/2 hours.

Every morning, I am tempted to cut back somewhere so that I can begin work as early as possible. I am tempted to put my mindfulness practice off until the afternoon (when I have the break that never comes) and to skip my morning walk (because I’m planning to go to the gym anyway, right?). These things, I tell myself, are not as time-sensitive as the emails waiting to be answered, the classes and meetings still to be prepared, the speeches and books needing to be written. They are not as important as the meetings at my son’s high school or the family errands that need to be done. In other words, every morning I have to fight the idea that my morning ritual is not as important to the work that is central to my vocation as a seminary professor, as a public theologian, as a wife and mother.

One of the perks of being a professor is that I have a fairly flexible schedule. Unless I have a morning class or meeting, I don’t have to be anywhere at a specific time in the morning. But in my head, I need to start work at 9am. Because that’s what it takes to get it all done. And I am a doer.

“Doing” is how I got here. It is how I have survived, how my family has survived. I am the legacy of two grandfathers who were escapees from the Southern sharecropping system. Neither of my grandfathers graduated from high school, but both had incredibly high work ethics. My father’s father, Grandaddy Jake, was a bricklayer whose skillfulness took him around the country, building homes, churches, and fast food restaurants. My maternal grandfather, Joe Lee, didn’t hesitate to work two jobs to provide the life that he wanted for his family. Eventually, both of them bought homes in East Atlanta, Grandaddy Joe and his brood becoming the first Black family to integrate the all-White Fayetteville Street, Grandaddy Jake’s becoming the second to integrate South Howard Street less than two miles away.

While my grandfathers had the work ethic, it was my grandmothers who had the gift of managing and organizing large households. They were the family’s teachers, communicators, and caregivers. Each only had a high school education, but they encouraged their children’s and grandchildren’s academic pursuits. My paternal grandmother, whom everyone called Honey, was an avid reader who perused discount and used book stores to fill her shelves with everything ranging from Alex Haley to Steven King. My maternal grandmother maintained a subscription to The Reader’s Digest that included their condensed book series. Whenever I stayed with my grandparents for the weekend, I would I would pick a book and try to get through it before my mom came to pick me up.

Being the eldest of 8 children and a single mother of two kids, my mother was no stranger to hard work herself. She taught me discipline, including the importance of having a regular sleep schedule and waking early to get the day started. Even as a college student, I was awake by 7am each morning. And I was notorious in my dorms for going to bed by 11 each night. The rhythms and habits that I learned from my mother helped me to survive the rigors of my undergraduate years at Emory, where I made the first-gen college student’s mistake of having two majors and a minor, along with being a leader in multiple organizations and working 10-15 hours per week in the campus job that allowed me to eat and buy books.

By the time I was in graduate school, I had become an expert in multitasking and maximizing every moment. I always carried a book or article printout with me, ready to get some reading done any time that I had a spare moment – at mealtimes, in doctor’s waiting rooms, even while awaiting clients at my clinical psychology practicum. I was an early adopter of PDAs, back in the pre-smartphone era when that term referred to personal data assistants. I relied upon their electronic to-do lists to help me keep track of everything that I needed to do – through my psychology doctoral program, then through my first few years as a psychology faculty member, then back to school for my M.Div., and finally through my vocation as a seminary faculty member and public theologian.

It was in college that I first experienced the impact of stress on my body. I seemed to catch every illness that made its way through campus. And I had this low-grade but ever-present pain in my back, neck, and shoulders that even a yoga class couldn’t vanquish. Unfortunately, in addition to their fierce determination, I had inherited my parents’ and grandparents’ tendency to ignore and minimize the signals that my body was sending me. and higher education only strengthened those tendencies.

Let me tell you the secret to success in higher education (whether as a student or as a professor in the tenure pipeline). You might think it’s being a strong reader or writer, having a natural affinity for academic subjects, coming from a family of educated people, or even enjoying school. Those things help and will definitely get you through undergrad, but they don’t get you through a doctorate or up the tenure and promotion ladder. The real secret to success in higher education is knowing how to sit your butt in the seat and stay there until the work is done (incidentally, this is also the secret to being a writer). You sit through hunger, through pain, and through boredom. You sit when your friends and family are having fun. You become such an expert at sitting that you have favorite places to do it – the places in coffee shops or libraries where you can charge your devices, leave your stuff unattended when you need to go to the bathroom, and eat the snacks that you’ve stuffed into your backpack. You learn to subsist on finger foods that you can eat while typing or reading without making a mess on whatever you are typing or reading on.

The guaranteed key to success in higher education is learning how to live in your head and to ignore any sensation below the neck. You push through and do the work. You do and you do and you do more. And if you are a Black woman or other minoritized person, you do 2 or 3 or 10 times what is expected because you know that you’re judged by a different metric. You do the work until it does you in, until the same habits that led to your academic and occupational achievement also lead to your physical and mental breakdown.

I have been on this self-care journey for 22 years now. For much of that time, my approach to self-care focused on doing. I thought that doing more self-care would balance and enable my other doing. Now I know that what I need is to become undone.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This month marks the sixth anniversary of my second breast cancer diagnosis. It also marks the sixth anniversary of the beginning of my undoing.

I am still becoming undone. It is still difficult to undo the generations of conditioning that tell me that I need to spend as much of my time working as possible. It is hard to release the memories of financial insecurity that lay beneath so much of my striving. But resistance is no longer the Herculean task that it once was. These days, when that old conditioning pops up in my head to tell me that I need to skip my morning self-care in order to get to work, I whisper back, “self-care is the work.”