Joy to Effort Ratio

We All Have One. I thought I Knew Mine.

This week’s break from school has given me a chance to step out and reflect on my job in the context of what I want from the rest of my life.

See, I believe that there’s an acceptable ratio of joy to effort that varies from person to person. As a pleaser with a robust, guilt-driven work ethic, my ratio (approximately 1 to 5) heavily favors effort, but then, I also find perverse joy in slogging through adversity with a smile on my face, so it is a ratio that has long felt about right to me.

Maybe it’s the remote learning model of this pandemic year, or the new demands placed on us by our school administration. Maybe it’s because some students have drained me like an old tube of toothpaste. Whatever the reason, this week, I’ve had a minor epiphany:

I’m tired.

I have tried to get jiggy with my class, coming up with prompts to pique their interests and offering to do even more than I already do to support and sustain their writing while caring for their socio-emotional engagement. But all this hasn’t been enough.

This isn’t about laying blame, though I daresay much of it falls on me, the woman who counted selflessness and industry as her chief virtues. It kills me to think that at the end of the day, what I considered noble sacrifice was just a fruitless exercise in self-abnegation.

But hey, I am a writer. Teaching writing, editing others’ work, it is all within my skill set but it’s not my raison d’étre. A writer is, as Joan Didion observed, “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.” Being 2021, my laptop replaces the pieces of paper, but the rest of Didion’s definition rings true.

When I write, the ratio of joy to effort is three to one. My major epiphany is today, that ratio feels about right to me.