Protestant Work Ethic Summer
I was blindsided by the way my Christian upbringing affected my relationship with work.
Something very strange happened to me the year I started freelancing.
It was the spring of 2021, and a year's worth of stimulus checks and pandemic unemployment payments were beginning to dry up. Friends and former coworkers poked their heads out of isolation, asking around about job opportunities. Ready or not, it was time to get back to work.
I didn't want to return to the service industry job I was doing before COVID. I had picked up a part-time gig doing SEO copywriting. At the same time, there was a growing audience for my artwork, which had really blossomed during quarantine. I did the math and realized I might be able to make it as a self-employed artist.
It felt cathartic to send that resignation email to the copywriting farm. I was tired of spending hours writing fake product reviews for hamster bedding or posturing as an expert on rifle scopes. Instead of meeting tight deadlines for little pay, I could focus on my artwork. Shouldn't that feel good?
"Shouldn't this feel good?" I repeated to myself, curled up in a ball in the middle of the couch at 6 PM. It was another summer evening that rhymed with most evenings of the past few months. My partner Tom came home to find me unshowered, stomach empty, legs jittery. When he asked how I was doing, I stared miserably at my open planner. I had spent the whole day working, I thought; but I wasn't sure, because it didn't feel like working.
I started the day by skipping breakfast. I deserved it because I had stayed in bed an hour past my alarm. I opened my computer and sunk another hour into this and that, little business matters that needed to get done, but which had no tangible effect on the physical world. I skipped lunch because I needed to feel like I was doing something, now.
I didn't take a single break during several long hours of rug tufting, because I had procrastinated sitting down to work until noon, and my cramped wrists were only collateral damage. I was afraid that even if I stood up for a drink of water, I'd get distracted and waste another hour. Eventually, I logged five and a half hours of tufting in my work tracking planner. I thought about Tom, who had worked eight hours at his normal 9-5 and didn't complain.
Tom stroked my back with compassion and asked if I wanted to walk the dogs with him. I hadn't left the house in days, but I still needed to write a few emails, so I said no. I sent the emails, closed my computer, and then felt terrible about making him walk alone.
From an outsider's perspective, I did a lot that summer. I finished two tapestries for my residency that were taller than I was. I'd done that while balancing deadlines for many commissioned drawings and paintings. I packaged and shipped out Etsy orders every week. I kept a budget, filed taxes, took phone calls and Zoom meetings, and applied to open calls. I even taught two weeks of full-time art camp.
It probably won't surprise you to know that I burned myself out as often as I worked hard. If I pushed myself one day and checked everything off my enormous to-do list, I almost always spent the following day collapsed in a self-loathing heap, fully dissociating into my phone screen.
I didn't feel like I had earned the right to freelance. I felt guilty about every customer who collected my work. If they knew how little I actually "did," they'd know I was a fraud. I was a labor organizer sitting on a big secret: I was actually lazy.
Of course, I was aware of the irony of my labor work. When I wasn't berating myself over my own work ethic, I was volunteering to help host a friend's union organizing meetings. I talked to her coworkers about their right to rest, to feel comfortable, and to enjoy truly idle time outside of the job. I had no problem saying this to other people. I just couldn't say it to myself.
My therapist, Emma, had a gentle approach to this conundrum. In our sessions that summer, she encouraged me to dig deeper and find where I picked up my toxic dogma toward work. Some of it came from ADHD; a diagnosis I'd only known about for a year. Still, I had spent my whole life feeling shame and guilt over my time blindness and procrastination.
When I tried to trace back my earliest memories about work ethic, I pictured myself at the conservative church I attended into my early teens. This was strange because I didn't remember the Calvinist church saying much explicitly about labor. As I explored further, I realized it did have plenty to say about guilt and suffering.
If you're new to Calvinism, it centers on the theory of predestination. God already knows who's going to Heaven and Hell, and people don't actually have much free will in that sense. Its central ideology is so complex and redundant that it's honestly impenetrable for me as an adult. I do, however, understand why Calvinism attracts some of the worst nerds of any religious community.
Anyway, like most Christian denominations, Calvinism also places great emphasis on the idea of original sin: that people are born into inherently flawed bodies in a naturally wicked world.
As a child attempting to use this framework, I thought that because the flesh is evil, I should feel guilty about any physical desire that didn't seem to be from God. This included anything of a sexual nature, which set me up for a painful relationship with my own body. However, my conflation of Godliness with complete self-denial went even further. I felt afraid of pleasure in its broadest interpretation. I was afraid that if I wasn't in pain, I must be doing something wrong. I was afraid to rest.
Protestantism's culture of shame is very convenient for capitalists. I don't think it's a coincidence that "prosperity gospel," along with a strong fetishization of suffering, shapes the dominant mode of spirituality in America. By contrast, in Southern European countries where most religious people are Roman Catholic, the interplay of work and spirituality looks more like long afternoon naps and copious days off for feasting and prayer.
I learned the hard way that the ideology of shame doesn't just vanish once you unpack your religious holdings. It's the moral framework with which I was raised. For that reason, I've always felt a depth of connection with anyone raised in Protestantism, regardless of whether they kept the faith as an adult. We were programmed with the same source code; one that doesn't leave your body, and which bleeds out into every facet of life in complicated ways.
As I listened to stories from ex-Christians and deconstructed believers, I fully expected my indoctrination to bleed into things like sexuality and gender identity. I was blindsided by how it would affect my relationship with work.
At one point in therapy, I broke down trying to tell Emma about nights that I laid in bed as a teenager, feeling heartache over a Sufjan Stevens song about Jesus.
When you wear your clothes
I wear them too
I wear your shoes.
And the jacket too
Rest in my arms,
Sleep in my bed,
There's a design to what I did and said.
I was sixteen years old and already so tired of a life of self-inflicted punishment. I disciplined myself for every small mistake, every moment of time wasted, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life this way.
I was trapped in relationships with people who reflected my cruel inner voice back at me. With so much shame in my head every day, I could barely fathom a Jesus who existed as compassion; who wore my clothes, missed my deadlines, and disappointed my family with me. I couldn’t imagine a Jesus who would offer me rest. I just lay there and wept for how badly I needed it. I wished I could believe I deserved it.
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I've been freelancing for a year and a half now. I would love to say that I've defeated the evil inner voice and stopped burning myself out all the time. In reality, I stopped seeing Emma when my insurance expired at the end of Protestant Work Ethic Summer. Since then I've tried to continue on my own slow path toward self-compassion.
My planner now has bullet points for "shower, eat, take vitamins, drink water," and I've gotten better at remembering to do them every day. Here and there, I’ll have a "nothing day," when I recognize that I've pushed myself too far and I make a genuine effort to rest and recharge without hating myself.
I can already feel the damage in my hands from years of abuse, so I'm taking more breaks and stretching while I work. I signed up for a yoga studio because I'm trying not to hurt my body anymore. I can't afford to lose my motor abilities before my 30's.
I do my best to remember that no one is keeping track. Work, or don’t work; it doesn’t mean anything existential beyond earning what you need to live. There is no morality attached to how much of our time on earth we spend laboring.
Unless, of course, you don’t work because you’re exploiting the labor of other people’s lives. Like I said in a recent Jacobin interview: if there’s a hell, it is for billionaires.
Wow! Thank you
Thank you for writing this and sharing it. I own several of your prints, and have experienced the brutal burnout of feeling like I am lazy or should exist only for others/to produce/to organize. Everything you are putting out publicly is a gift.