Reading 03: Work-Life-Family Balance
The importance of work-life balance isn’t something that I ever thought of prior to college. After all in high school, I just wanted to go the best school possible, with the smartest kids, where I would be pushed and work the hardest. In some ways, I still have that mindset while looking for jobs, but I’ve definitely grown in my understanding of what I want in life and how I want my job to affect my life overall.
When I did an SSLP the summer after my freshmen year, I lived with a host family. My host mom was around 32, had just had her third kid, and was a physician at Yale Hospital. To me, she was everything. We had a lot of frank discussions about being a well-educated successful woman with kids and a family, and the challenges that come with it. I think because she was the perfect role model — old enough to have her life “together” but young enough to be relatable and not a parent — I found my own vision of my future becoming a lot like her life. It was then, after seeing the joy of family and the emotional connection they all shared, that I realized how important having a family was to me.
This is strange for me though, because that future vision seems in many ways like a different version of myself, since the person I am now would always put professional development over a relationship or potential to have a family. Although work-life balance is important to me regardless of whether I have a family or not, I think that this is the time in my life to go anywhere and do anything. As I search for jobs, I think about the location, the kind of work I would be doing, and what fun things I could do on the weekends, not how far from home I might be. It’s weird for me now to think of a future reality where I am tethered to a place or to people, despite the inevitability of that happening (and the fact that I do genuinely want it to happen!) And although I plan on continuing working and still pursuing career goals, I’m sure my priorities will just be different.
I think for many people, you reach a part in life where personal and professional fulfillment is overshadowed by the lives of those you love. I imagine once I have a kid, having a challenging and fulfilling professional life will never be as important as their well-being. And even crazy, fleeting 21 year old me is at peace with that. But that’s the way the world works. And for now I’m just going to try and enjoy the years until that happens.
