I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

On the Great Resignation, healing, meaning, and a new path forward

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

Well, I wake up in the morning

Fold my hands and pray for rain

I got a head full of ideas

That are drivin' me insane

It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

-- Bob Dylan 

In May 2020, in the midst of widespread lockdowns and mass unemployment, I wrote an essay called Essential Work for Inessential Workers. In it, I bemoaned the restlessness and anxiety of not having work. 

I compared the abrupt loss of direction and purpose to the scene in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, in which “Alice is walking down a bright pink path through the dark forest, and here comes a dog with a broom for a snout from the opposite direction, brushing the path away. He erases the path before her, then behind her, then beneath her, until she finally sits down on a rock and weeps, terrified, lost, and alone.”

I wrote:

“When Alice sits down on the rock, she reasons with herself through her tears: ‘When one is lost, I suppose it’s good advice to stay where you are until someone finds you. But who would ever think to look for me here?’”

“Maybe we can use this time to look for ourselves,” I wrote. “To look at ourselves.”

I think many of us did just that, whether we knew we were doing so or not.

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In March of 2020, my theatrical dance card was full. I was understudying Twelfth Night at the Guthrie Theater, about to play Sister Aloysius in Doubt for a small professional theater company, and would be going straight from that to my debut assistant directing job, again at the Guthrie, for the Pulitzer-winning play Sweat. 

We all know what happened next. The bottom fell out, the dance card was wiped clean. There were some early, naive attempts at rescheduling before it became clear that we wouldn’t be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a dark theater again anytime soon. 

After a couple of months, my writing work came surging back — magazine article assignments, pieces I pitched to new publications, projects for clients new and old. I ghostwrote my first book. I traveled and worked from Airbnbs in other states. I started this newsletter, pole-vaulting over gatekeepers to see if I could build an audience for my writing by myself.

All the while, I kept having dreams about theater. Every other night, it seemed, I dreamed about it. I dreamed about being  in the rehearsal room, about walking onstage and finding my light, about searching for my script backstage, trying to remember what play I was in, what role I was meant to be playing. 

We’re in the midst of what the media has dubbed the “Great Resignation.” People are quitting their jobs in droves. Labor shortages have hit seemingly every industry, from health care to child care, from retail and hospitality to logistics and manufacturing. The supply chain is effed. The economy is like a car that sat outside through a Minnesota winter and is struggling to start back up again.

In an article about the Great Resignation for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes:

“As a general rule, crises leave an unpredictable mark on history. It didn’t seem obvious that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 would lead to a revolution in architecture, and yet, it without a doubt contributed directly to the invention of the skyscraper in Chicago. You might be equally surprised that one of the most important scientific legacies of World War II had nothing to do with bombs, weapons, or manufacturing; the conflict also accelerated the development of penicillin and flu vaccines.

If you asked me to predict the most salutary long-term effects of the pandemic last year, I might have muttered something about urban redesign and office filtration. But we may instead look back to the pandemic as a crucial inflection point in something more fundamental: Americans’ attitudes toward work. Since early last year, many workers have had to reconsider the boundaries between boss and worker, family time and work time, home and office.”

Deepak Chopra says, “All great changes are preceded by chaos” — something the past couple years have delivered in spades. Emergency struck; we went into triage. Now we’re waking up, discovering what was rearranged while we were in a state of shock. Trying out our shaky legs, finding that, perhaps, we want them to carry us in new directions.

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An actor’s job is to slip identities on and off. In the spring of 2020, all my lines and costumes were taken away, and I was left to figure out who I was without them.

This fall, as theater slowly started to creak back to life, I was surprised to find myself ambivalent about returning. I was offered a role with a theater company I adore, but I backed out of it before signing the contract. 

I don’t know yet all the reasons for this shift, but it feels like it has something to do with a new sense of agency, and a realization that my worth is not incumbent on performing, in any sense of the word. 

Here’s the thing about being an actor: Almost nothing about your career is under your control. Someone else programs a season, chooses which plays to produce, decides how they’ll be cast, and how rehearsals will be scheduled. The supply of actors always exceeds demand, so there’s a pervasive sense of scarcity that leaves many of us actors with a constant low-level anxiety — eyeing each other’s careers with hunger and envy.

Being free of all that for 19 months has been a revelation.

Performing can also, of course, be transcendent. When you’re telling a story you care about; when you’re holding an audience in the palm of your hand; when you feel yourself channeling energies that are bigger, wilder, more powerful than anything you tap into in normal, daily life…

That’s the good stuff; the stuff I still dream about. The theater dreams keep on coming, even as I revel in the greater freedom, flexibility, agency, and financial reward of focusing on other work. One thing I know for sure: When I do go back, it will be on my own terms.

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We all know stories of people who made big life changes in the wake of a serious illness — quitting their jobs after surviving cancer or getting divorced after getting sober. It feels like we’re collectively going through something similar. 

Even though many of us individually avoided the worst physical effects of COVID, as a communal body we’ve been through the wringer, psychically and spiritually. And we’re making big changes as a result, sloughing off what wasn’t working, boldly rearranging our circumstances to align with a newfound sense of purpose and meaning. 

I interviewed a handful of doctors for an upcoming article on long COVID in Minnesota Monthly. One of them told me that the majority of long-haulers she’s seen were all type A personalities who’d been firing on all cylinders before they got sick. Working multiple jobs or overtime, taking care of their families, priding themselves on their ability to run on fumes. Now they’ve been forced to slow down and rest, reevaluate their identities as high achievers, and find new sources of meaning that will facilitate healing. 

That sounds for all the world like America to me. A communal body that suffered a painful blow, and needs time and a chance to integrate the experience in order to find a sustainable path forward. 

Our supply chain is clogged like arteries full of clots. Our workforce is like mitochondria — the energy-producing powerhouses of our cells — that have been wiped out. We can’t just jump up and go go go. Everywhere around us, inflation smolders like inflammation, a fever that won’t quit. Our neurology is scrambled, as the left side of our social body no longer shares a common language with the right. 

There’s healing left to do. A new identity to unearth. Lessons to absorb on the cellular level and invite into consciousness. 

Dr. Wayne Jonas is an integrative health expert and author who asserts that 80 percent of healing from any illness and injury is attributable to organic processes and the mind-body connection. He proposes renaming the placebo effect, the “meaning effect,” since the meaning we create from the ritual, context, and content of any given treatment (whether a drug or alternative practice such as acupuncture) accounts for most of our physiological response to it.

There are natural, organic healing forces at work, but they need our participation. If each of us is a cell in this collective self, then we each have a role to play. I think we’re all being invited to wrestle with purpose, identity, meaning, and connection. I think this work is foundational to our collective healing, and to designing a new direction for our collective way forward. 

When Alice’s path was erased by the broom-snouted dog, she had been in hot pursuit of the White Rabbit. After she gets done crying on the rock, the Cheshire Cat appears in the tree branches above her. He asks if she still wants to follow the White Rabbit. “Oh no,” she says. “I’m done with rabbits!”

But she still doesn’t know which way to go. He pulls one of the branches like a lever, and the trunk of the tree he’s in swings open like a door, revealing a brightly lit new path out of the dark woods. 

It leads, of course, to the court of the Queen of Hearts and all the trials that await Alice there. There’s no direction free of ordeals. But there’s also no way home but through.