I Hope to Disappoint You

Self-care often means letting people down and being okay with it.

When I was a teenager, I decided to do everything right. It was a trauma response. I thought that if I strove for perfection, then maybe “How can someone so smart be so stupid” would no longer be lobbed at me every time that I made a mistake. I thought that if I tried to live above reproach, then I could no longer be accused of being a liar. Or at least, I figured, I would be able to protect my self-esteem. If I always told the truth, if I always followed the rules, if I always put in my best effort, then I wouldn’t have to worry that the insults were true. I would know that I wasn’t stupid or a liar or sneaky or any of the things that I was accused of.

It’s the same strategy that I – and a lot of Black women – utilize in our careers. When I was in graduate school preparing for a career as a psychology professor, I knew that the playing ground would not be level. I’d heard enough stories from Black faculty who had been denied tenure despite meeting all the institutional benchmarks. I knew that I would face doubts about my capability, about whether I had actually merited my doctorate and my future academic position. So I over-prepared. Like an olympic high jumper, I didn’t want to just clear the bar; I wanted to soar over it. I accrued extra clinical hours to ensure my competitiveness for psychology residencies. I stayed in my program an extra year so that I could conduct a high-level dissertation project using a cutting-edge statistical technique that even my stats professor didn’t know. I got both my masters thesis and dissertation accepted for publication before I applied for my first tenure-track position.

By the time I went on the job market, my vitae was impeccable. I had crafted a systematic program of research, teaching, and clinical work that made me the top candidate for every position I applied for. In my first year, senior colleagues often marveled at how I seemed to be good at everything. I could hold my own with my quantitative colleagues, but also had experience in qualitative research. I managed to get licensed faster than colleagues who’d started before me, and I set a departmental record for applying for and receiving a federal grant in my first year. My mentor once told me that I wrote so beautifully that she wondered about getting me to help her out! On top of all that, I was a consummate team player who didn’t hesitate to do my part. I even took on extra work “for the sake of the program.”

That shit almost killed me.

When I embarked on my self-care journey over twenty years ago, I did not change how much I did for the sake of others. I cut back a little on my commitments, but mostly I changed the order in which I did things. As airline safety videos instruct, I put on my own mask first so that I could better help others. Starting my mornings with meditation, prayer, and exercise allowed me to be more focused, energetic, and present for others during my workday. Self-care was the fuel that empowered me to keep going at the level of high-octane productivity that I was used to.

Eventually, I began to realize that I had to do less. I also realized that I was not good at discerning what “less” meant. But even more than that, I have learned that my biggest impediment to living within my limits is that I do not like disappointing others. The fear of disappointing others is primal. Humans are social creatures. We are meant to derive part of our identity and self-esteem from group belonging and approval. Historically, we couldn’t survive without fitting into a group. Frankly, that’s still true, no matter how much Western individualism tries to make us think otherwise. For some of us, though, disappointing others can have dire consequences. If we are victims of abuse or systemic oppression, it can mean criticism, being yelled at or hit, poor performance evaluations (even if you’ve actually met the job requirements), loss of jobs or income, and so on. We learn to adapt by pleasing others. And those habits stay with us even when we are in settings of safety.

I’ve reached the part of my self-care journey where I need to be a disappointment, and not just to strangers or acquaintances, but to people I care about, especially my colleagues and students. I have to disappoint their expectations about my accessibility and availability. That means:

• Working with my office door closed more often so that I can actually get work done.

• Restricting my daily time in meetings to three hours so that I spend less time sitting.

• Restricting my office hours and meeting availability to afternoons to minimize context switching.

• Doing “just enough” for assigned tasks and responsibilities that are not central to my job description or my sense of purpose.

• Giving myself permission to leave overly long meetings.

• Resisting the sense of false urgency that is often communicated by anxious institutional leaders.

• Embracing my power to say no to “for the good of the community” invitations (i.e., missional gaslighting), especially since the health and well-being of faculty and staff rarely seem to be included in the communal good.

• Not worrying about reaching “inbox zero.”

• Leaving things undone so that I can activate rest-and-digest mode in the evening to get better sleep.

• Managing my own anxiety when I start to fear that doing any of these things might result in students and colleagues liking me less, evaluating me poorly, or even retaliating in some passive-aggressive way.

This week, I have to submit my annual faculty goal form, identifying what I hope my year will look like in terms of teaching, research, institutional support, and service to church and community. I’m not sure what I’ll put on this year’s form yet, but it will be something along these lines: I hope to disappoint people and to empower my students and colleagues to do the same.