After a long sabbatical to spend time with my family and reclaim my brain, I'm back in the writer's chair. I needed the time off because just when everything should have been seamlessly coming together, it was unraveling. Life remains complicated and busy, and that's okay; maybe that's even how it should be.
Is life truly ever perfect for any of us? With your help, life -- this sloppy, delightful, difficult joy -- is what I'll be writing about. Specifically, family, community and kids.
Those of you familiar with my byline know I've covered a lot of ground in Alaska as both a broadcast, online and print journalist. I've been to whale camp in Barrow, written about fish declines and fish politics, covered the Iditarod, the criminal trial of late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and the 2009 caribou massacre in Point Hope. More recently, I was part of the ADN team covering dysfunction within the Alaska National Guard.
I've also covered everyday life, like Mazzy Star, the old, blind, beloved dog lost, then found, in Alaska's bear country; Mark Elfstrom, the middle school math teacher and wrestling coach with a soft spot for struggling kids and the heart and talent to turn them into lifelong achievers; and Jennessy Andrew, the daughter who maintains a close relationship with her father, jailed for killing his wife (Andrew's mother) during a drunken rage.
By the time 2013 rolled around, my own everyday life had changed significantly. No longer a single woman who'd spend as many hours as necessary chasing a story, I had a partner and three children we'd adopted. Busy now meant something completely different to me than it did a decade prior.
Then, that same year, something unexpected happened.
At the age of 43, I had a baby. That part was expected. Longed for and planned, it was a difficult three-year journey to get pregnant and deliver a healthy newborn. Life was amazing. Her presence was amazing.
Unexpected was what also moved in during the weeks and months that followed. Amazing brought with it brain fog, sleeplessness, endless worry and and a creeping sadness that seemed to get heavier as the baby gained weight and grew.
I was wilting under the weight of all of the stress -- stress I'd willingly taken on. That I was experiencing anxiety was nothing new, but its heightened intensity was. The weird part was, I wasn't miserable. Not yet, anyway. I experienced joy. Deep empathy. A richness of human experience I prized. But all of these seemed to increasingly get lost in a paralyzing haze of confusion and fatigue.
As a child I'd loved words and had a quick wit, the ability to call up the right words just when I needed them. But then, as my daughter Sophia started walking and talking, I found my own words getting stuck or mixed up. Thinking through a storyline -- an essential skill for a journalist -- was at times impossibly difficult.
I grew increasingly anxious and frustrated because this wasn't me. This was Jill trapped in molasses, Jill descended upon by an evil foggy force. I tried to push through.
Repeatedly embarrassing myself at work finally got the "Houston, we have a problem" message through to me. In meetings I'd get asked for an opinion, and offer something marginally coherent in return. Mortifying, to say the least.
Attempts to have conversations with colleagues were equally torturous. I'd hear words come out of my mouth, sometimes garbled, sometimes in the wrong order, occasionally slow and sluggish.
It's one thing to know this is happening to yourself. It's another to know that other people can plainly see it happening. Stress, anyone?
Oh, and there were the tears. The damn tears, a professional woman's nightmare. They'd show up not just when I was sad, and I was sad a lot, but also when I was frustrated or irked. The tears would show up before I could even start sparring in a usually spirited tit-for-tat exchange over a professional disagreement.
For me, it was game over. A difficult turning point.
Realizing I had to make a change, that I needed to be doing less, was agonizing. That I was afforded the time and space I needed to regroup was humbling. To this day I remember explaining, through a burst of tears, to my friend and editor that there was a term for what I was experiencing -- "cognitive slowing," the result of too much stress and an anxiety disorder run amuck.
To be fair, a lot more was happening at home than just the birth of a baby. As I said, my partner and I have three adopted children, one teen and two young adults, each affected by prenatal alcohol exposure, whom we support at home as they make their way through education and life.
We are also helping out close relatives, a dad and his fourth and fifth grader, who have joined our home. That makes a whopping nine people co-habitating under one roof.
As if enough wasn't already going on, early this spring, word came that my newly retired mother had an aggressive cancer to battle. Mom seemed to take it all in stride, but I -- her firstborn -- felt too far away and far too worried.
Suffice it to say, six months later, a little yoga, a few massages, anti-anxiety meds, a swoop-in visit from my worried father, a road trip with my mom, and watching the children in our home for the most part flourish have helped me regain my equilibrium. And we're nervously optimistic about mom, who, after 12 rigorous sessions of chemo, appears to have kicked cancer's butt.
My partner and I still disagree about some of the causes and effects of my distress, and the ensuing, inevitable family conflicts. Was it anxiety and depression, or just normal emotions that fueled (and still fuel) the friction that occasionally rears up between us?
I've decided it doesn't matter how we get to those tense moments, but how we get through them that ultimately counts. I do know that for me, getting through means doing less. Life is stressful. Parenting is stressful. Why pile more on?
This "less is more" mantra was another agonizing paradigm shift. In the era of working super-moms, I kept judging myself to be a failure. Luckily, amid all that internalized judgment, the person I needed to be started to peek through.
I am deeply committed to being available and present for our kids. To do homework. To advocate. To get outside. To play. To paint. To dance. To snuggle. To coach. To discipline. For me, that means scaling work back to part-time, to the middle of the day, to leave time to be the family taxi driver without feeling rushed or grinding up against a deadline.
I love to write. I love journalism. And I love family life. There's no match for the endurance required to make it through, and no equal to the depth of human connection it brings.
Returning to journalism, I'll be focused on all my loves. What a great job -- writing about ordinary and extraordinary people and events, the perfectly imperfect drumbeat of our daily lives.
Jill Burke is a longtime Alaska journalist writing from the center of a busy family life. Her father swore by "Burke's Law No. 1 -- never take no for an answer." Meaning, don't give up in the face of adversity. The lesson stuck. Share your ideas with her at jill@alaskadispatch.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
The views expressed here are the writers' own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints.