DIY Life Hack: Build Your Own Mortsafe
Are you protecting that work/life balance?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
You must build it. Don your welding goggles and burn-proof gloves, collect the steel and bend your bars, then get out there and build it. Create a clear delineation between your life and their end-of-year financial reports. The bars of “I’m here, but access to me is not an all-day every-day thing.” There must be no heart burglary, no brain steal, no shady and purposeful pilfering of your hours and drive.
On either side.
A mortsafe. You must build it, and you must build it now.
You must build it, lest the accountants of your 9-to-5 put all your hours in their ledger leaving you none for your own endeavors. Work is work and all work has value, but don’t make their work your entire life’s work. Work, as in the paid work that allows for the dreaming hours. Work, as in the rent-paying necessity. Work, as in the daily, the on someone’s dime, the job. Hopefully fulfilling but ultimately not everything, W2-type work.
If you let it, your job (which belongs to them) will consume you. Incrementally. Tiny bite by increasingly larger bite until you are wolfed down and your bones burped out. It is a dine-and-dash affair. A broad daylight great grand larceny. But it is you who leaves the door unlocked and the pathway clear. You who lets it happen. Build yourself a mortsafe that protects you from those body snatchers who mean you no real harm—they just want your knowledge and have paid you for the privilege of access—but rip you apart in the process.
They’re hungry.
You’re hungry.
Let’s stop eating each other.
Find the balance between their work and yours—or more accurately, between their time and yours—and choose to be a superstar in both worlds. The air between the bars of your mortsafe allows for the passage of everything good in both directions, allowing you to devote yourself to the business of work and the work of your business.
A metaphorical mortsafe allows you to work fully and with whole presence and dedication to the task without allowing “scope creep” of one world to the other. Without allowing the detrimental bleed that seeps in and dilutes the bright colors of each. Build yourself a mortsafe. Do it before the resentment, the painful longing, and the bitterness sets in. Before you get fired.
Separate of the church of your mind, body, and heart from the state of your being.
There are lots of materials that go into a metaphorical mortsafe—setting email and availability boundaries, not working every weekend, not absorbing other people’s jobs without compensation, just to name a few. But for me, the biggest piece of a creative mortsafe is the cultivation of self-awareness. It is the ability to recognize when your scales are tipping too low in one direction. The ability to recognize that you’re the kind of person who loves their work so much that you allow it to overtake every aspect of your life. It becomes who you are. In doing so, you devalue your existence. You set the tone for others around you, a tone that says it’s OK to ignore or shelve your life for someone else’s dream.
It's not OK. It’s never OK.
Confession: I am prone to work/life scope creep, with work being the creeper and life being the crept upon. In the past, the scope of the paying job has oozed like a mold into my life, consuming the fresh flesh of my every waking hour. I sort of loved it, even though it made me sick. When this happened, stress bubbled in my veins, and panic sprang eternal. Every day. Every hour. It was exhausting.
Everything suffers in an always-on, always connected to the clock world. Everything. When that happens, you must tap the bars of your mortsafe and remember this: they don’t love you like you love them. And they aren’t your family, no matter what they say to justify their presence at your dinner table in the form of a ding on your smartphone.
If they’re at your dinner table, newsflash: you’re on the menu.
Do not become your employer’s work. Don’t kid yourself that the whole place would fall apart if you left. It’s a business. They might genuinely love having you there, and it’s only natural for them to take advantage when you are willingly giving without the protection of a mortsafe. But there are plenty of talented people in the world. People just like you. Your employer might truly be sad to see you go, but your seat will barely have time to cool before they find someone else to sit in it.
Let’s address the elephant inside this newly constructed mortsafe. The elephant says that we must recognize along with bad bleed, good bleed occurs on both sides of a professional, salaried relationship. Thank the stars! Good bleed is beneficial to both parties. Trust me when I say I would not know how to manage or produce my personal projects—my big-dream sleds—if I’d not had the privilege to observe and be part of large, cog grinding assignments at places where I’ve hung my shingle. On the flip side of that shingle, various employers would not have harvested the many fields of lush grain inside my weird brain if I did not let it grow upon their acreage.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t need a mortsafe. You need to protect the boundaries of the mutually beneficial relationship. Your time and services are for hire, not for sale, and certainly not ripe for theft.
Body snatchers were also called resurrectionists, so let’s steal a little lesson from their corpse-filching ways. Build a mortsafe today. Resurrect yourself on the daily from the safety of your well-defined DIY protective cage. Resurrect your spirit and your soul, your heart and your mind, and work freely and with purpose. The mortsafe will allow your talent to function and perform without fear of dismemberment for scientific study. The devotion and application of your skills will occur willingly and be delivered with great and genuine gusto. Set your boundaries and establish safe zones for your sanity.
Work life is long.
Build a mortsafe before you die from it.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
My much-loved friend,
It matters to have trodden the earth proudly, not arrogantly, but on feet that aren’t afraid to stand their ground, and move quickly when the need arises. It matters that your eyes have been on the object always, aware of its drift but not caught up in it. It matters that we were young together, and that you never lost the instincts and intuitions of a pioneer. It matters that you have been brave when retreat would have been easier. It matters that, in many places and at many times, you have made a difference. Your laugh has mattered. Your love has mattered. Above all, it matters that you have been loved.
Nothing else matters.
Contents of a letter received by English theatre director, Clare Venables, from a friend as she approached the end of her life. A little more about it at the Letters of note post, which is where I nabbed these lovely words.
On Rotation: “Ramblin’ Man” by Hank Williams. Because somedays you just need to feel like you’re out on the prairie, folks.
Interesting what she says about painting and songs going straight to the heart, while what she does (acting) needs to be processed by the brain. I would push back a little on that. Yes, you have to follow a story, but there are moments when a performance goes straight to the heart, regardless of where it is in the story because it feels true. Like there is no acting, just the truth of it.
Via Lost & Found Films website
“Daddy, what was the past like?” Let’s skip to the crazy part, though the whole film is kinda dreamy. Look at that powder room. The narration is absolutely rapturous!
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
this is great