Pearls of discontent

As I am in the process of sunsetting my current work with a very small roster of clients, I have been thinking about what kind of work I want to do more of in the future, and I’ve been paying attention to my irritation. There are so many things that I find irritating! However, this is not altogether awful. Irritation asks for attention: “Hey! Something doesn’t feel right!” 

The things that irritate me, the rough edges I experience in my client interactions, are relational. They involve other people, their vulnerabilities, their ways of working, and their trust in me. And I think some of what I’m noticing is that I am outgrowing certain kinds of professional relationships—not because anyone is doing anything wrong, but because they no longer fit the way I want to work. But I must admit, I also irritate myself. I have become very good at making my thinking disappear into other people's work, and this does not feel OK any more.

Much of the work I have done in recent years has happened behind the scenes: my thinking gets folded into someone else’s document, project, proposal, or decision-making, while my contribution disappears from view. I’m ready for a different relationship to my own intellectual labor. I want to do work that I can stand behind as my work, and where my contribution remains legible rather than disappearing into the finished product without a trace of my involvement.

I want the work to accumulate, and I want my contribution to that accumulation to be visible and attributable. Working is learning and I’m a learner, too. I’m interested in what other people know, how they see things, what their experience reveals, and what I can learn by thinking alongside them. 

I think of pearls: A small piece of hard material enters an oyster, and the oyster responds by building layer upon layer of nacre around it, to protect its soft insides from the jagged bit of sand or coral. The irritant is the stimulus, the self-protective response is not to expel the object, but to surround it, understand its contours, snug up against the terrain, add what’s missing into the concavities, and make something that is surprising to discover and gorgeous to behold.