Overworked 2

Faith: For me the overwork comes partly from a deeply lodged anxiety about not having access to the world, of being left out, and being left behind. I trace this back to very embodied situations of my childhood growing up in a restrictive religious commune in the middle of “nowhere” (or what I considered nowhere) in Paraguay. We had virtually no access to the world, no electronic communications like telephone, TV, radio, daily newspapers, only a few hours of electricity a day, no cars, no trains, and only emergency bush planes every once in a while. We wrote handwritten letters to our relatives in Europe. I grew up in a completely analog and handmade world with a really strict work ethic-- and then came to the US when I was already college-age. I felt so strange in the popular culture of the US of which I knew nothing, and in the media-scape I found here.

I too am spending my life working and working. It is self-chosen work but always accompanied both by pleasure and by deep anxiety that there is so much more to do than I will ever be able to do. It is as if the long silences of my childhood created a backlog of ideas and curiosities and longings that still drive me forward.