Week One Done; or Replaceable Me

I’ve finished the first seven days of my LofA from work (Leave of Absence).

The first few days were rough. I felt cast out from the tribe. I wandered the metaphorical desert, still sending emails to people at work, still trying to finish the unfinishable parade of tasks.

I worked hard the first few days, trying to impress people with how much I cared about the job so that I wouldn’t be forgotten, or fired, or unforgiven for that bad semester we just finished. Mostly, though, I wanted to not be proven to have that very quality that all of us know, deep down inside, that we posses: replaceableness.

As important as one might feel at any given job, very few, if any of us, are irreplaceable at our jobs. I am no exception. I valiantly tried to prove to myself and others that I was indeed important. I spent hours crafting careful emails recommending what to look for when hiring my temporary Replacement. I sent reminders and last minute thoughts and Oh, I forgot to tell you… emails to the library staff. But all my efforts were rewarded with silence (from the school administration in response to the emails about my Replacement) or silence (from the library staff, which resulted in me feeling like a foolish mother telling her 18 year old how to use the microwave as I rushed to the door, keys in hand, for my first vacation alone) or stiffly worded rebukes about this or that task I forgot to complete yet again (from the library staff sick of me and my bad semester, my falling-down semester, my semester of failure).

Eventually I stopped sending emails. I stopped wanting to check my work email at all. I was afraid to read more rebukes, afraid to see how many people the latest rebuke was CCd to, afraid of no new emails at all. One morning I asked my boyfriend to check my email for me, but he censored it too carefully and in frustration I took over.

By Friday, when I got a phone call from school I was ready to ignore it. Sure, I stopped what I was doing and listened to the voicemail as soon as it beeped its arrival on my cell, standing in the foyer at Safeway, the sliding doors opening and closing ahead of and behind me, like my own private Maxwell Smart corridor. It was HR telling me who they’d hired as my Replacement and carefully, as if talking to an hysteric, letting me know to call or email with any questions at all because they wanted to keep me in the loop.

But it was too late. I had untied the knot in the loop and slipped the slithery confines of caring. A big reason I needed to take a LofA was that I had grown to feel marginalized. More on that later. But a few days of my LofA had already been spent fretting over how much more marginalized I felt now that I was no longer reporting for duty, and I didn’t want to feel that nasty marginalization any more.

And this morning, first day of week two of my LofA, I am finally feeling cleanly detached enough to clean out my email box, unsubscribe from all my listservs, and set up my Vacation email notification. After I finish, I’ll do those few more tasks I put off, in a passive aggressive snit, last week, and be truly and welly done for another 5 weeks.

Hasta la vista, career.

image borrowed from http://flickr.com/photos/rock_alien/ through the Creative Commons License