Permission Slip: 2021

At 12:45pm today, I hit send on an email, then ran up to my kitchen to scavenge for sustenance. I found my husband standing at the counter, throwing chicken into the air fryer for both of us. While I set up on the other side of the kitchen and chopped celery stalks, we smiled at each other in acknowledgement—that we’d both finally come up for air after nearly 4 straight hours to the grind.

It’s funny how we both work in different industries, doing very different roles, but we have become coworkers of sorts. Sharing out space and, though not having the same specific task-oriented issues, sharing “office” concerns that everyone is facing around change and work-life balance.

On Monday, our children went back to school. For the first time since March 2020, our two kids are in school, in person, 5-days a week from 9am-5pm. Wow. I must acknowledge that we’ve been extremely fortunate to have had some breaks through the quarantine—from brief daycare stints, to part-time in-person learning last year, to super-amazing grandparents and babysitters; however, this is the first time that it is sustainable (knock-on-wood), and we can finally, finally think about what it’s like to work (and parent) “normally.”

As I started to inhale my plate of chicken, hummus, and vegetable sticks and get back to work, I decided to stop and take a few minutes for myself and jot down these thoughts, so I can remember this moment in time. A moment when I felt the need to work tirelessly to make up for not being “100%” over the past year and a half. I was reminded of an exercise from Brene Brown where she encouraged workers to write themselves a “permission slip.” Brown said:

Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to be our brave authentic selves – to be brave and afraid at the same time; permission slips are a way to state our intention for how we want to behave.

I don’t think this has ever been truer. Earlier, before we left the kitchen, my husband laughed and said that he feels like “Rain Man,” with so much happening in his head, ?getting so many things accomplished at once, and so much done without distractions and interruptions. And while it’s great that we’re cramming an insane amount of work and productivity into as little time as possible, is this really what we want “normal” to look like?

So I forced myself to slow down and write a permission slip. If this is truly to be sustainable—the new “normal”—then I need to remember that even though I CAN work 8 hours straight with only short breaks for the bathroom and to inhale lunch, it’s probably better that I don’t. Even though I CAN take back-to-back calls for 4 hours straight, doesn’t mean I should. Even though my kid’s school could call at any minute and tell us the kids need to come back home due to a possible COVID exposure (!!), I can’t let that dictate my work… or my life. I need to give myself permission to have a work-life balance (again) and to take things one day at a time.