Happy Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine's Day. ❤️💝🤍

I have spent twenty-five years in higher education law. I have loved this work. I still do. But I will be honest with you, because that is the only way I know how to write anything worth reading. I have not always loved myself as hard as I loved my career.

For most of my professional life, I said yes to everything. The late-night emails. The crisis calls on weekends. The extra committee, the extra project, the extra title. I made the job the center of my identity, and for a long time, I did not even notice I had done it. It just felt like being good at what I did. When things were going well at work, I felt good. When things were hard at work, I turned that difficulty inward and was hard on myself instead. I called it drive. I called it commitment. What it actually was was dependency. I had built my sense of worth on a foundation that was never mine to control.

Here is what I know now that I did not know at thirty. No job will ever love you back. That is not bitterness talking. That is just true, and it took me a long time to say it out loud without flinching. The institution will move on without you. It has to. The work will get reassigned to someone else within a week of your departure. The title disappears the day you turn in your badge. What stays after all of that is you, and whoever you have been to yourself while you were busy being everything to everyone else.

I learned this the way most people learn hard truths: slowly, and then all at once. Twenty-five years across four universities. Chief legal officer roles that carried real weight and real consequences. Work I am proud of and would do again. But somewhere in the middle of building programs, managing crises, and stewarding institutions through change, I stopped asking whether I was also taking care of the person doing all of that building.

I am building something new right now. A consulting practice that takes twenty-five years of institutional knowledge and puts it to use in a different way. I am also finishing a doctorate, which at this stage of my career is its own kind of humbling. I am learning to advise rather than to anchor myself permanently to one institution. And the most important thing I am learning in this season has nothing to do with law or leadership. It is that rest is not something I have to earn first. My ambition does not get to consume every part of me just because it always has. Being all in on myself is not selfish. It is necessary and overdue.

If you are someone who builds your whole life around work and calls it passion, I understand. I have been you. I know the version of you that cannot imagine slowing down, because slowing down feels like falling behind, or worse, like admitting the work was never going to save you in the first place. I am not telling you to stop caring about what you do. I am telling you that passion without boundaries is just burnout wearing a better story.

So on a day built around love, here is mine. Take care of the person doing the work. Not the title. Not the institution. Not the version of you that only feels valuable when producing something. The person. That is the relationship that outlasts every job you will ever hold, and it is the one worth being loyal to first.