Thinking about mental load lately as it applies to the workplace. My full-time job is technical, I am a front-end software developer, but because I'm at a startup where the number of employees is countable on one hand, I have to remember how like three different codebases work, all using different tools/stacks and I'm basically in charge of UI/UX design. Here's where the slippery-slope comes in.
To be a good UI/UX designer, you have to understand your users. We are an education product; our users are teachers and students. My background before this job is working with high schoolers, I have basically worked with high schoolers in a leadership capacity since freshman year of college when I just stopped becoming a high schooler myself. So naturally I started becoming invited to calls about school outreach, pilot programs, etc. and because I potentially wanted my work to be closer to education, I said yes.
I was also part-timing with the high school program I worked in throughout college, because the program directors have their own day jobs among other things in their personal lives to keep afloat. More or less, I feel like I was holding the program together, because after I left, they essentially aren't running the program anymore.
Before I left, one of the students in that program approached me about opportunities at my current company, and I essentially (on top of my daily technical work) organized and supervised a project for them to do in my company's lab while also driving the student to and from the lab, which was something I was used to doing in aforementioned program I was part-timing with. One thing led to another and tomorrow I am doing this again, except this time it's about 100 miles round trip, to give them the opportunity to present their work, which for the past week I have lost considerable sleep over due to logistics and responsibilities that I assumed the student understood but apparently they did not.
I am no longer working two jobs but I can't believe that I have somehow managed to still be a part-time teen supervisor/shuttler. And an overwhelming amount of high-stakes deadlines to deal with in the meantime.
I know this is a FRACTION of the mental load that actual moms and teachers have to deal with and I am seriously re-considering any ambition I ever had to work with youth or to be a teacher at all. Maybe if it were my only job, I wouldn't be so hung up about it. For now, well, my manager is texting me why the twelve test environments he created yesterday in our cloud platform aren't working. No, I don't get paid extra for any of this.
I'm posting this to tumblr because it is the only blog I maintain at this point that is not-fully-connected to my professional web presence (somehow, a contractor that I worked with found my GitHub and followed me even though at work we use GitLAB)...
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