Rehab for Workaholics

I relapsed into a workaholic binge. You know you've been on a binge because you wake up one morning or afternoon in a disheveled room, house, tent, tee-pee, or yurt with dirty clothes thrown everywhere (too busy working to hang anything up or get it cleaned), nothing to eat but leftovers in takeout containers that you can't quite remember when you bought it, and a lapse in memory about anything happening in your life over the past weeks or months but whatever you are working on. You're absentminded, a recluse, except to the people you work with, and you have no personal life. I more or less woke up from my latest binge this past week. I woke up and just started crying. Everything is falling apart at my house but I keep going to work seven days a week to finish a project. It went in. I feel no joy, no sense of accomplishment. I promised myself I wouldn't do this again. Here I am.

There is no rehab for people like me because my habits are encouraged with terms such as "hard-working and dedicated," yet I am as much a junkie as those on drugs or alcohol. You don't think so? Look at the aftermaths of my addiction on my life:

1) Unreliable except to work: people who care about you eventually give up on you  because you've broken too many promises to be somewhere only to never show up. Look at the divorce rate. Yeah, I'm divorced.Check out the kids who never see the workaholic parent and realize somewhere in their childhood that work was more important to their parent than raising them. Yeah, they make secure adults.

2) Spartan personal life: Too busy working to decorate, clean, fix anything, or live. Their domicile looks like a hotel. I'm ashamed to have anybody over. I move 6 years ago and some stuff is sill in boxes.

3) Beyond the failed personal relationships, the inability to communicate with other human beings about anything but work. They don't get they everybody isn't into it like them. I was really bad about this last year, but start a conversation about work and I can go on for hours. One wording: BORING.

4) A wasted life. Believe me, not matter what you build there's a point that you wake up and look at it alone, and its nothing without someone to share it with.

5) Jonesing for a fix. Workaholics can't take a day off; they gotta have a fix. They get jumpy unless they are doing something, anything. Vacations = Torture.

6) Physical disaster. Usually overweight, unkempt, and unfashionable. Defensive about it too. They think other people are just vain. They don't realize what they look like to other people.

Luckily in my last rehab stint from working myself to death, I made friends who will force me out socially and insist on including me in their life. They are saving me.  They are slowly making me build relationships instead of projects and I thank God for them. This blog helps too. If your trying to recover as a workaholic, you learn to structure you time off, and force yourself to do it. You have to learn ways to relax, but most of all you have to learn: once an workaholic, always a workaholic.

Wish me luck. I starting rehab again, one day at a time.

Jann

Comments

[Michele Martin]

I know what you're saying here, Jann--in a way I had to laugh. To the list I would add that you know you're a workaholic when your relationships have been forged through work--you basically don't know anyone if they don't work with you or haven't worked with you at some point.

It's an addiction I struggle with often, as when I'm working that's when I feel most secure about who I am and what I can do. In my personal life, much less so. I hope you're feeling better now. . .