Betrayed

July 21, 2019

I am running a 500 person, four-day conference. The pre-conference event went well; we’re starting the official opening ceremonies now. Everything that had been running smoothly is now up in the air and I’m rushing around putting out fires. I’m a little tired. For the past two weeks, I’ve been at work until 9:00pm or later, working 13-14 hour days. This week at the conference I’m only getting about four hours of sleep. I feel kind of off. I don’t have the opportunity to go work out even though we have a yoga instructor on-site. And I’m kind of hungry. I’m not cooking any of my meals and I keep getting interrupted while I’m eating, so I’m clearing away my half-eaten breakfast to make room for the lunch I won’t get to finish either. Overall, I don’t feel great, but I silence any comments from my body and move on to the next person demanding my attention.

I keep this up for a couple more hours. Then, as I’m standing by the registration table giving instructions to our volunteers for the upcoming break, I tune into the intense pain in my legs. I’m looking at the eager college student awaiting my instructions as my vision blurs and I realize I feel weak. I give her an abridged version of instructions and set her off once I’m able to speak and then I text my coworker/friend that I need her and something is wrong and where is she???  

I have to make a choice. My friend is at a table in the back of the room and I can make it there, I can’t make it all the way back to our makeshift office. At least not alone. So I find her and explain what’s going on while I sit. I wear a heartrate monitor daily and I check my BPM which dropped 74 beats in one minute and I steel myself not to cry yet. She very calmly and casually helps me back to the office and snags me a boxed lunch along the way. As I sit down I can’t help but tear up.

I feel so very betrayed. Of course my body would choose right now to stop working. My body always seems to know when it needs to function the most and chooses that exact moment to malfunction. How could it do this to me? It knows how much this event means to me and to my career and I have to be out there! People need me to give direction to keep things running smoothly. How am I supposed to do that sequestered by my body in the back room?

How can I lead when I can’t stand up?

I feel so angry with my body. It’s keeping me from doing what I need to do, from being who I need to be. And I think it’s intentional. My body knows what it’s doing. So why is it doing this to me?

I’m fairly young, in the grand scheme of things, even if I have had more life experience than my age would suggest. But I’m still at the beginning of things, where I’ve accepted a lot of cultural narratives of how work should be, love should be, life should be, and I place my expectations on those. I measure myself against those. It’s not something I’m proud of, by any means. But I do think it’s the place we all start.

My expectations for how work should be, how a manager and leader should be, comes from an able-bodied narrative. I have many wonderful and great examples of how a leader’s character should be, and I draw from that, but undercutting that is the expectation of how that manifests physically. I haven’t seen many persons with disabilities in leadership and management roles in my own life, at least none who talked about it, and so I feel inadequate and unfit to lead because of my body.

I don’t know how to have my own style of leadership that reflects the character I aspire to in the body I have.

I stand at the relative beginning of my career, facing what I hope to be a long career, and I have the opportunity now to establish that style in a natural and authentic way, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how to have the patience with myself, to pause in moments where it isn’t working and reset with a new tactic. I don’t know how to become comfortable with trial and error. I don’t know that I’m that creative or forgiving of myself. I don’t know how to communicate this with others in a way that doesn’t undermine my abilities as an employee and leader. I simply don’t know. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to turn. I don’t know.

I wish…I wish there was someone who could teach me.

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