As I’ve been devoting myself to the nonprofit sector, I keep asking myself this. I don’t fully know yet, and that’s been eating away at me. I don’t know how to do a work/life balance, because I’ve never had anything to balance. The only other job I had was a hellish sort of retail mundanity at a Journey’s in my local mall. There wasn’t much to do there- just make sure that people buy shoes so that you don’t get fired or have your hours cut. I wasn’t really enthused to be doing nothing, and almost falling off of ladders stacked on shoeboxes.
This job though. This job is different. In a really, really good way. Unlike my retail nightmare, this isn’t that. I’m not stuck standing and waiting to convince someone to buy something highly overpriced. I’m not meandering, trying to avoid the stares of the old men who roll through to stare down the high school girls. I don’t even need to leave my house, which, considering my health and circumstance, is a very big deal.
For the IFF, I make social media posts. I’m used as a “youth consultant” which basically means I’m the youngest and should therefore know what’s cool. I get contracted out to work on different projects for outside companies, and I’m used as the voice of all Idaho youth.
No pressure, right?
I do get to control my hours. I can work at 3 PM or 3 AM, whenever creativity hits me in the face. I can forget to work all week and then make it up in one or two afternoons. I get to work with people I actually look up to and admire. People who I know like me back.
At Journey’s, I had to unrequited “Friend Crushes”, people who I thought were so very cool that I wanted to be their best friends, but I just couldn’t talk to them at all. Because, alas, I was not cool enough. Danny and Janie (fake names, their real names are way cooler than that). They were both college aged kids, just trying to pay off loans and get away from campus. Since I was 16 and had little to no life experience outside of trauma and grief, it was hard for me to relate. They were drinking and partying, and I was studying for AP Psych. I idolised them in a weird way. I thought they were so cool for having a sense of freedom. They didn’t have to go to class if something came up. They could arrange to work different hours. They could go and get food for us all and come back. They could do so many things that I couldn’t, whether due to not having a phone, not having a car, or not having cash. And they were genuinely nice, to me at least. I think they were scared about me being the youngest in the store.
The Federation is different. Jen, obviously, is incredibly cool, but in a different way. She takes care of her kids and gets tattoos in the same week, and loves her husband. She makes it to the meetings I can’t and sends random emojis to get her point across. She’s been through hell and tells about it at bartops. She’s seen so much and it makes me feel like I’ll be able to see so much and live to tell about it, too. For a while, I was scared of Jen- not intimidated or fearful, but I was worried as to what she’d think if she would hear about all my problems and drama. How would she view that 16 year old me if she knew what got me there? I hope that as I go into my twenties, I’ll be able to still be so genuinely myself, because that’s why people have gravitated so much to Jen.
Ruth, I can’t even begin to talk about Ruth. Ruth makes me think of everything my grandma could have been. She’s wise and funny and isn’t afraid to ask about things when she needs help. She’s able to make things more comfortable with humor and levity, and doesn’t mind delving into the hard topics that need to be discussed. She’s been pioneering the first all inclusive mental health treatment in Idaho, and even though it has been years, she’s still going strong on it. Ruth is the cool type of old person I want to be- not one who succumbed to the pain of the world, but look at how she could help it heal.
I know I’m so lucky to have this now, and I have to savor it. There will sadly, come a day where either myself or Jen or Ruth aren’t at the IFF. There will come a day when things change, and so I know I have to love them as they are now. Emotional labor is what I’m putting in more of as time goes on. I have to devote more of my headspace to solving major problems that youth face- suicide, depression, anxiety, lonliness. Things that will never have one answer. It hurts that I know I can’t heal everyone. It hurts knowing that things can’t be solved completely the first time through. I also know that adults, the ones who care, are trying their best.
For now, I hope to keep diving into what a work/life balance is to me, and how I can adjust it. I need to work more, while also having it infringe on my wellbeing less. I miss leaving the Brickhouse on those chilly Autumn nights. Downtown, the fringes of it, were so beautiful. Darkess, with steeping lights from the campus. Trees extending, towering, over the historic houses. Driving on roads with too many sharp turns and dozens of strange little hipster Idaho stores. I miss being there, too. With everyone. Sharing stories and cheap pizza till we all had to get kicked out for closing time.
I hope I get to go back someday.
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