Workaholic

Okay, okay, I'll admit it. I'm addicted. Not only to chocolate and reading and British humour, but also to working. My contract says I have to work for 24 hours, but most weeks I easily make 30, often more. Why? Because it's fun. I like my job, I like the people I work with, I like sorting out the difficult backlog and dividing projects up into smaller bits and seeing those smaller bits completed and finally the big thing completed and having happy co-workers and managers when the thing that they didn't have the time or energy for to fix is finally done. But it's more than fun, it's addictive.
I've always been that way, having things done and handing stuff in at least 2 days before the deadline. Whenever we got an assignment in which you could choose your own topic, I thought about it on the way home and e-mailed my topic to my instructor as soon as I got home. Even if it was week 3, and the essay wasn't due until week 16. And then I would finish the essay itself somewhere around week 14, when others were frantically trying to come up with a topic.
So it's the truth: I like to work. I like to be busy, to create things, to think things through, to solve problems. I'm a workaholic.

Which is nice, most of the time, especially for your co-workers and group mates. It's sometimes less nice for your blood pressure, or the amount of sleep you need, or your social life. And sometimes it's less nice for you yourself, when you get a burn out or suddenly find yourself at 2 am working on some report that isn't due until next week, realising you haven't seen your friends in over a month and haven't cleaned your toilet in even longer.
I've never found myself there, I do seem to have some sort of track-keeper that goes off when I've been working too much, and makes me relax and take my mind of things for a while. Also, as I mentioned before, I really like my job, so it doesn't always seem like 'work'.

The thing is, when I don't like doing something, it really hits me hard. When I try to find excuses not to prepare things, or arrange things, or contact people, which makes that I find myself unprepared or grumpy or sleepy at an important moment.
This was the case with my teacher training. I liked doing it while I was doing it, teaching, but the whole preparation and filling-in-forms and reading difficult didactic textbooks really wasn't my thing. So I didn't put any time, or energy, or effort into it. I just tried to wing it, which is not something you can do in front of 30 12-year-olds. At least not until you've had some practice.

So I quit. This is really weird for me, because I hardly ever quit anything studywise or workwise. Actually, make that never. But for the first time, work was costing me more energy than it was giving me. It made me grumpy and demotivated and tired and trying to avoid the work I had to do. So quitting was the only way forward.
And I feel really good about it. It feels like a weight has been lifted, and I'm finally free to move again. Ironically, the first thing I did was accept a really big assignment from my publisher, which I will have to do in my own time. But that's okay, because I like doing it. And now, I can do what I like to do 5 days a week!