In college, I got fired for calling out of work last minute to finish working on an assignment. I remember the exact spot I was standing on the exact floor of the exact building, my flustered pacing suddenly arrested when the words "taking you off the schedule" piped through my cell phone. Stunned, I returned to the lab to finish the only kind of work my poor time management would permit: the last-minute rush job. In those days, my "wing it" approach to time management never panned out as I expected, and this is one example where it nailed me. I crammed what needed cramming and submitted the work, relieved to at least turn it in on time. The semester continued and I decided that rather than look for another job, I should focus on my schoolwork to avoid spreading myself too thin1.
Once I graduated, I needed to find steady work to hold me over while I looked for opportunities in my field and built up my portfolio. I kept in touch with friends at my old job and in passing, I learned the old manager was gone. One friend suggested I come back and I couldn't think of a good reason not to. So I went back and got rehired. Since I was only gone for six months, everything was just as it was when I left, save for a few new faces. But about three weeks in as we were gathered up front to close the store, I received some reality-crushing information from one of my older coworkers. "You didn't get fired, bro. You left."
Excuse me? I don't think so. I quickly acted out the phone call to everyone as a counter-argument, but in doing so I only reinforced the truth. "Fired", "letting you go", "don't come back", and any variants thereof were all conspicuously absent from the original phone conversation. It would require several poetry laureates to adequately describe the chaos taking place in my Being when this harsh reality set in. This actual reality, as opposed to the one I imagined six months prior. But in examining things with all the benefits of hindsight, one could sum up the motivations of my younger self thusly: I heard what I wanted to hear.
I was tired of juggling school and work, so the thought of cutting work out of the equation was enticing. When I was told I'd be "taken off the schedule", I subconsciously assigned a new status quo of "not working" and assimilated to the false narrative that I got fired. In reality, however, I could have shown up to work THAT DAY to get put back on the schedule, accompanied only by a modest apology for calling out.
The unreliability of perception and memory makes a potent combination. Each is infinitely malleable and can be molded to fit any whim or motivation, from the saintly to the sinister, often without our conscious consent. When I consider all the events from my life I’ve used to shape my identity (each one I'm certain I remember accurately), it's startling to think they may have played out completely differently through someone else's eyes. I got hired at my current company to work on a product that failed despite our best efforts. When the CEO brought me into his office to explain we were sunsetting the product, he assured me I was valuable enough to shift to another project even though the rest of the team from that product had to be let go. I felt relieved and more confident in my abilities as a designer, since "I must be pretty good if they decided to keep me". Moving forward, I subconsciously used that memory to fuel my self-perception. Years later, something happened to shake my confidence and catalyzed the urge to reexamine that brief meeting. I dove back into what I remembered about our conversation and started asking some uncomfortable questions. What if I was never all that good? What if my reality said "you're too valuable to let go" but his reality said "you're barely passable but hiring someone else will be a pain in the ass, so keeping you on is the lesser of two evils." I don't know what his reality was and even if I asked him today, his current personal motivations would taint the memory and perception of his former motivations, rendering "knowing" impossible.
The truth lies somewhere in the aggregate of both realities and knowing that I can't know is critically important to regulating my mental state and keeping me honest. It helps me avoid the peaks of entitlement when my ego gets too inflated and pulls me out of the valleys of depression when I feel demotivated and useless. It's also an amazingly useful tool for building relationships, especially when expectations don't line up with outcomes. Whenever I feel like something happened to me that I didn't want, I force myself to ask the following: "What did I do to directly influence this outcome?" And that question is not rhetorical. I make myself find something. The trick is to drill down through the layers of cause and effect until I come up with anything I could have said or done differently that would have changed the course of events. It's taken some practice, but now I find something ten times out of ten. I don't know if this variety of introspection is a byproduct of seeing my so-called memories crumble in the face of someone else's, being knocked down a few pegs in my career, or simply the nature of time and experience, but I'm glad I found it. I guess it's a good thing I fired myself back in college.
Every time I've encountered the phrase "spreading myself too thin", it's less an indication of the amount of work and more an indictment of the person doing it. People who "produce" are impervious to the mere concept because they're too busy shipping to even question their workload. Me? I've been asked if I was spreading myself too thin by parents, school advisors, and employers alike. Yikes.