The Balancing Act (Or Why My Current Career Path Is Like The 80s Cartoon Jem)

When I was a little girl, I adored the 1980s cartoon Jem.

Jem was a popular animated cartoon and series of dolls about a woman named Jerrica. Jerrica spent her days running a music related company and running a home of foster children. But at night (or whenever she touched her magical holographic earrings and called upon a Great Oz style machine named Synergy), Jerrica became Jem, mid 1980s pop rocker with bubble gum pink hair and the very thickest of eyeliner. Only those closest to Jem – her all-female band with equally bright hair and horrid 80s fashion taste – knew she led this double life.

Five year old me loved the idea that you could be great at two careers and just seamlessly glide from one to the other without too much conflict. Sure, the Jem/Jerrica charade did get tricky at times, but in the interest of good TV, it was always figured out without anyone who didn’t need to know finding out.

Fast forward 25 years, and living a life like Jerrica’s is not too far fetched. During the day, I am a higher education administrator, caring for 16,000 undergrads and another couple thousand grad students. When they succeed, my office rewards them, and when they fall hard, my office punishes them. Increasingly over the years, my job has included handling external interests when students fall hard and trying to promote the much good the unnoticed majority are doing.

At night, I am a sports writer – or at least I try to be. Writing and communicating was the one thing I knew I wanted to do since I was twelve years old, but the foundation was laid long before: I had been writing stories, making handmade books and creating newsletters since I was four.

For a while, I was able to seamlessly glide between working in Student Affairs during the day and being a writer at night. It was fulfilling and felt even glamorous in a way to get out of one job and frantically run to the other. “I just expelled someone and ran a town hall meeting for students, but wait! – a half hour later, I am covering a lacrosse game!”

Just like the cartoon I loved as a child, I was doing two meaningful careers – one that I loved, and another that helped others. And the two lines didn’t cross. The rare times conflict arose, I was able to deflect or solve it before anyone who didn’t need to know knew.

Until lately.

I work for a university very much in the public eye, exposed by some of the very publications I freelance for. Two of the incidents involve one of the sports I write about.

I took myself out of the college hockey writing game for most of this season because of the turmoil, which was hard given that I had finally gotten a gig at one of the sports’ biggest sites, one I had aspired to write for since I started following the game.

But it still felt tricky. Many times this year, the news department of the newspaper I freelance for came calling our office. Since news and sports exist in silos in many traditional newspaper operations, they don’t know me and I only know of them from exchanging pleasantries at the coffee maker. But I still feel uneasy when they come calling my office.

Those instances and others are blurring the lines between my two lives.

It’s also becoming more difficult to physically lead two lives. Every recent step I take to strengthen my writing career has been failing like my attempt in high school to take AP Physics without taking Physics first (where my teacher would look at my homework and say, “I can’t even give you partial credit for this.”) Every step I take to strengthen my higher ed career frustrates my writing career, and vise versa.

When I take on a new writing opportunity or increased responsibility on a publication, knowing I need to do so to further that part of my career, my education job intervenes, and I’m unable to fulfill those duties. My massive failure of attempting to be the associate editor of SBNation Boston for a month is the biggest example of this – that was a role I had wanted for a long time, but I couldn’t manage all of the responsibilities on top of my other work. Stepping down from that role was a giant sucker punch to my gut, and probably the biggest feeling of failure I’ve felt since the AP Physics debacle of 1998.

When try to go above and beyond in my education job, I have to decline a lot of writing assignments. I get home every day around 8pm from my education job, and I’m so overwhelmed by the amount on my plate for both jobs that I can’t focus on much of anything, and find myself asleep with my netbook on my lap.

It’s easy for others to recommend that I pick and focus on one career. Balancing both was so fun and fulfilling for so long that I don’t want to admit that I’m now failing at the balancing act.

I also don’t have a mentor in either career, nor do I have the support from those close to me to help me make a decision. I have a husband who thinks I’m crazy, and doesn’t understand my need to stay up late to get work done. My own family is seven hours away. I am on my own, like I always have been for so many important decisions in my life.

I can’t keep unhappily struggling to balance my two lives. I’ve gotten to the point where the stress from the balancing act is making me ill. I am failing at it, and not making progress in either career. So do I drop my life as a sportswriter, or do I drop my life as a higher education administrator? And how do I deal with the loss of the career I drop?