Emilie Aries - Bossed Up: A Grown Womans Guide to Getting Your Sh*t Together

Confession: Im a recovering hot mess.

It really began in college, where I operated more like a hurricane than a human beingI tore through my academic career with a voracious appetite for achievement, unbridled ambition, and a complete disdain for rest. When I wasnt in class or writing papers, I was at volleyball practice, working on the student newspaper, or volunteering for political campaigns. Hurricane Emilie, coming through. It wasnt uncommon for me to actually say, Ill sleep when Im dead, about my frequent all-nighters, whether they were for work or fun.

This, I was sure, was what success felt like.

And my report card confirmed it. Like so many young women, I had become quite adept at figuring out what my professors were looking for, putting my nose to the grindstone, and delivering it.

Perfecting, performing, pleasing. These are the skills I refined in school, and these were the skills for which I was rewarded. From gold stars in kindergarten to my grade point average in college, I graduated feeling like I had it all figured out. Give me a syllabus for life, and I was certain I could succeed.

Unfortunately, thats not how life after college works. Imagine my surprise when real life actually began.

Like so many millennials, I had the audacity to graduate right into the Great Recession. As anyone whose early career included navigating a recession-riddled job market knows, I was told Id be lucky to find any work at all.

So you can imagine how fortunate I felt after a few months of boredom at a lackluster (but paid!) political internship in Washington, DC, when I was given the opportunity to take a leadership position as one of fifty state directors of Organizing for America, formed by thennewly elected President Barack Obama. OFA was the first-of-its-kind continuation of a presidential campaign that would serve as a grassroots arm of the administration and work to help pass a variety of policy reforms during the presidents tenure.

All that hustle had paid off, I thought.

I hit the ground running and built an organization from the ground up, eventually recruiting, training, and managing more than two hundred volunteers across the state of Rhode Island, who took charge of organizing their communities, hosting phone banks and voter registration drives, and lobbying elected officials to pass the presidents policy initiatives, including the health-care reform legislation that would later afford me the freedom to start my own business.

But fast forward a few years and the way I was working, well it wasnt working.

Being busy had long been a badge of honor I was proud to wear, but Id finally arrived at the point of diminishing returns. I was reminded of that old economic principle when I finally realized that no matter how hard I worked or how many hours I put in, my to-do list was ever expanding. Chronic overwork left me depleted, exhausted, cynical, and on the brink of burning out.

I was in the office until 9 p.m. or later most nights and habitually worked right through my lunch breaks. I started my days by bolting upright in bed in a panic, my work phone and personal phone in hand before my feet hit the floor, and ended them at political events or networking happy hours (more often they were one and the same). I was in a frazzled frenzy of trying to prove myself worthy of the opportunity Id been given.

Ironically, I was working myself to the bone even without the direct, in-person supervision of any fellow staff in the state. As a single-staff state director, I had a level of autonomy enviable for many of my fellow recent grads, which was great, except I didnt use that power to set myself up for long-term success. Instead, I ran myself ragged, while joking that I was fortunate to be my own boss at such a young age but that I was a bitch to work for. Oof.

Contributing to my misery was the fact that Id gone from being a college athlete to having no real fitness in my life at allfor nearly three years. I bristled at my annual checkup when my doctor asked what I was doing in terms of exercise and my answer was walking my dog sometimes.

During the most intense months of campaign season, I thought to myself, Hey, at least I am somewhat skinny, not stopping to examine the fact that it was most likely because I couldnt find time for lunch. Being thin, I came to learn, was not necessarily a sign of good health. I remember sitting around a healthcare policy-makers table in 2012 when I joked with two fellow female lobbyists beside me that, hey, at least we got some protein in our breakfast from the soy milk in our coffee. Hilarious.

During this time, my once-close friendships took a hit, too. I rarely put in the effort necessary to keep key friendships with my college besties and childhood friends alive. I genuinely didnt think it was a big deal that I felt isolated and alone most days, and told myself that I was making sacrifices for a job I loved.

All this was complicated by the fact that I felt stuck in a completely toxic relationship. When I stepped up into the state director role with OFA, Id just moved in with my boyfriend of a year, a fellow politico ten years my senior, who Id met on the campaign trail in college. He was elected to local office, a passionate advocate for working people working on behalf of many social justice issues I believed in. He was smart and hardworking, and he also happened to be an alcoholic. The former impressed me instantly. The latter took me quite a bit longer to pick up on, and, once I did, I had no idea how to handle it (somehow addiction wasnt a topic covered in all my years of formal education).