A Story About Recognising Your Own Patterns

It is just after eight on a June evening, and the air still stands warm in the office. Through the tilted window I hear the last colleagues walking to their cars outside, wishing each other a good evening. I am sitting at Sabine’s desk, my team coordinator, and catching myself finishing something that she had actually wanted to do.

In front of me is the rota for the residential group. In the afternoon Sabine stood in my doorway with that look I know well. Two colleagues off sick, one handover open, the rota has to be up by tomorrow morning. I said what I always say: “Leave it, I’ll do it quickly.” And quicker it was. In twenty minutes I had finished what would have taken her an hour, because I carry every name and every shift in my head.

Now the rota is up. Sabine has long been at home with her children, and I am sitting in an empty office while the evening sun falls flat across the car park and the last car door clicks shut.

As an area manager for a social care organisation I run four residential groups and a team of thirty people. I am good at what I do, everyone says so. What nobody sees: I am the first in the building in the morning and rarely out again before eight at night. Other people’s tasks pile up on my desk like leaves in autumn, always for a good reason, always because it was quicker that way just then.

I pack my bag and think: today was an exception. A wave of sickness, the rota, these things happen. Tomorrow will be calmer. I have been thinking that sentence ever since I took this role.

On the way to the car I go through the week. On Monday I corrected Tobias’s accounts because he was on holiday. On Wednesday I covered for a night carer who was ill, although there is an on-call service I could have phoned. Every time it was the quicker solution, and every time I am the one who stays too long. It strikes me how normal this has become for me, so normal that I barely register it as a decision any more.

Two days later Frau Renner is sitting opposite me, the coach who has been working with our area since the spring. I tell her about the evening with the rota, at length, a little proudly even, because I solved it. I am waiting for her to ask how I could have delegated better.

She asks something else. “Where else does exactly that turn up?” she says calmly. “This stepping in because it is quicker. Where else do you know it from?”

I want to answer that this is about the rota. Then I stop.

There is Sunday at my mother’s, who has walked less well since her fall. Both my brothers live closer to her. I still drive over, do the shopping, sort out the medication, because I just get it done quickly and nobody has to be asked. There is Anja, my oldest friend, who has been telling me about her separation for months. I listen, I organise, I send her the names of solicitors and call again in the evening to see whether she has managed it. Her worries lie on my pillow at night, and in the end I make most of her decisions, while my own unfinished business has to wait.

Three places. An office, a kitchen table, a telephone. The same movement: another person has a problem, I see it, I reach in, I solve it, and in the evening I am empty. Always the same sequence, over years, without my ever having seen it as one thing.

I sit there and feel something arranging itself. For years I looked at each of those evenings on its own — the sick colleagues, my mother, my friend, each time a good reason of its own. The situations are different; the movement is the same every time. The full evenings are not the problem. It is the recurring pattern that brings me to every one of those evenings.

“You just saw it yourself,” says Frau Renner. I nod. For the first time I am not looking at a single situation. I am looking at the bracket that connects all three.

On the way home I stop at a red light and let the word run through my head once more. Over-responsibility, is what I call it for myself, while the evening sun dazzles on the windscreen. The word sounds almost harmless, and yet it has cost me my evenings for many years.

The next morning Sabine comes into my office, again with a request, again with that look. A report for the regulator, deadline the day after tomorrow, and she is unsure whether she is compiling the figures correctly. My hand is already half stretched out towards her folder. I know the movement now, and I stop it.

“Sit down,” I say. “Show me where you’re stuck. I’ll look at it with you; you write the report.” She hesitates, then sits. It takes longer than twenty minutes. In the end she has built the report herself, and for the first time in ages I finished work at quarter past six.

Nothing about the pattern has disappeared overnight. It reports for duty again on Sunday at my mother’s; it reports for duty when Anja calls. But I see it coming now, before I am in the middle of it, and in that small moment when I see it coming, I have a choice for the first time.

Recognising a pattern does not mean getting rid of it straight away. It means choosing it for the first time, instead of only repeating it.