Body of Work: When Work Becomes Worth

A family of doers

I come from a family of doers. My mother worked seven days a week as the founding director of an adolescent, residential rehabilitation program. She did grocery store runs, drove clients to appointments, and picked them up from police stations. My grandmother taught middle school Language Arts in Philadelphia and held in‑person duties as the First Lady of her husband's (my grandfather's) large church in New York City. My father, a full‑time social worker, coached my younger siblings’ sports teams, volunteered, stayed active in his church, and on many Saturdays drove my sister two‑plus hours each way for horseback riding. If there was something that needed doing, someone in my family was doing it.

When I was little, I went to my mother’s office every day after school and often stayed there with her into the night. When I lived with my grandmother for two years, I rode the train with her every weekend from our home in Philly to our other home in NYC. At my grandfather's New York church, I was in the children’s choir, the junior usher board, whatever needed doing.

Last summer, when my dad came to town to visit, he spent much of the week laying stones in my sister’s yard and running errands for a convalescing friend. If there was a program, a service, a project, or a need, my family was there. Volunteer. Work. Help. Show up. Do, do, do.

How I learned to keep doing

From them, I inherited a deep belief that good people keep doing. Rest wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a priority. The story I absorbed was simple: If you have time and energy, you use it – for work, for church, for family, for someone else. Somewhere along the way, that family story stopped being just about them and became the way I measured myself.

Unsurprisingly, as an adult, I carried their script into my professional life. In my early years as an educator, I was often the one who said “yes” to the evening event, the additional chaperoning duty, the last‑minute class coverage for a colleague. If there was a gap, I stepped into it. Lack of free time felt like evidence that I was doing enough.

Over time, “yes” became my default setting. I answered emails before daylight, squeezed check‑ins into the margins of my day, and treated lunch less like a break and more like a convenient slot for one more conversation about work. If there was a student in distress, a colleague with a problem, or a project that needed attention, I wanted to be available.

Hard work and not needing much of a break felt like part of my identity, and part of my worth. I knew how to be useful; I was much less practiced in how to simply be.

For years, I treated my body as the engine for all that doing – something to fuel and push so I could keep up with my own expectations.

When my body said no

Then my body scheduled its own interruption: surgery. I was out for four full weeks. No late‑night emails, no last‑minute stepping in, no quiet satisfaction of being the one people could always count on. I turned on my out‑of‑office reply and, for the first time ever in my professional life, I disconnected.

What surprised me most was what didn’t happen. The school did not fall apart without me. My office kept humming. Meetings happened, decisions got made, students learned. The work went on. People were kind: they checked in and they sent flowers, texts, and cards. But no one needed me in the way I had long imagined I was needed.

That realization landed in two layers. On the surface, I was relieved; I was grateful that I could focus on healing without trying to manage people and problems from my couch. Underneath, though, I was disappointed. I had quietly built a sense of worth on being indispensable, on being the person who could always do more. If the world kept spinning without my constant effort, who was I then? And what was my value?

Surgery forced me to do what I had never willingly practiced: stop. Not pause briefly and later make up for lost time, but actually let the work happen without me. My body insisted on a different pace long before my mind was ready to choose it.

What my body has been teaching me about worth

In recent years I have been listening to my body as a kind of teacher, tugging on my sleeve every time I treat constant doing as proof that I matter. My body can tolerate skipped meals, late nights, and weekends that dissolve into work, but it always responds: it stiffens, aches, and pushes back in ways my younger self often ignored. This isn’t betrayal; it’s information. My body is inviting me to move through my days with more awareness and choice, to notice when I’m on autopilot, and to remember that my worth is not measured in output, that I am more than what I produce.

When the learned family script and ambition were my north stars, I modeled a way of leading that quietly said, “Your value is in what you produce” – even though I believed something different in theory. Learning to listen to my body is part of learning to lead in a way that makes room for other people’s bodies and boundaries, too.

Maybe you also come from a family of doers or from a workplace where going, going, going is the air everyone breathes. Maybe you’ve learned to treat your own effort as evidence that you deserve your place. If so, I wonder what your body has been trying to tell you lately – in its fatigue, its tension, its interruptions – and what might shift if you began to trust that you are a human being, not just a human doing.