Resisting the Hustle

By Gabbi Figueroa

As a person that has always leaned towards the neurotic side of functioning, I have been struggling to accept peace over the seemingly necessary hustle of graduate school. It cannot be denied that to hustle is to survive through certain aspects of graduate school. Various self-imposed and departmental deadlines loom overhead while we are continuously growing our knowledge and expertise. We engage with various academic enrichment activities tied to becoming better practitioners of our craft while continuously juggling various projects and responsibilities. In short, we are beyond busy, and we must move and think quickly if we want to be able to sleep a decent number of hours.

After talking with seasoned graduate students in my department, I see that most of us carry a sense of urgency regardless of where we are in the program. Even as a first-year student, I feel ready to run at full speed with excitement while simultaneously feeling exhausted and needing to rest. To be clear, I do not believe it is an unwarranted sense of urgency. Rather, I can see all the reasons, including those listed above, why we as graduate students need to push ourselves past our limits in terms of speedy productivity.

For me, receiving pressure to progress quickly and work constantly causes my pre-existing anxiety to feel validated. Positively reinforcing the idea that my worth is tied to the amount of work I complete. A thought that has continued to come to mind is, “if I can be productive, then I am successfully engaging with my role as a graduate student, thus I have value.”

I tried to push against it, but I still found myself working longer hours on projects than necessary. I was working inefficiently by pushing myself past my wall of productivity to prove to myself that I was working hard to earn my keep. However, after digging a little deeper into the colloquial understanding of the hustle, I see where my rigidly negative view of hustling hindered my ability to make peace with myself.

There are both positive and negative aspects associated with the hustle of modern day. The negative aspect of the hustle is a feeling you may empathize with. It is classified as pressure to hurry and complete tasks in order to move forward as well as an urgency to pursue projects with a goal of completing them swiftly. On the flipside, the positive aspects of hustling are the promotion of productivity and the motivation to push oneself forward despite inevitable setbacks. To hustle is to progress quickly, which can be advantageous throughout a career that is based on the ability to push our minds beyond previous understandings.

I am not trying to persuade you to perceive hustle culture as either positive or negative, rather I want to share how shifting my perspective to see hustling in a more adaptive light is helping me cope. Once I accepted that working to the best of my ability does not necessarily mean being the most productive during every moment of every day, I felt a positive change to my workflow. I am not a machine. We are not machines. I allowed myself to take more breaks, and I forced myself to do things that foster my sense of self including cooking new recipes and painting again. I also gained a new perspective on what it means to work hard with purpose and put in as much time as is necessary to complete the task without going overboard.

I hope these words encourage you to reevaluate your workflow and find a method that is tailored to you and your needs. I have learned through this exercise that a negative feeling or inclination to push against a behavior pattern does not necessarily mean it is completely detrimental. Rather this reinforced the idea that flexibility fosters growth. I no longer resist the hustle, instead I embrace the positive aspects of what it means to hustle and push back against feelings of inadequacy born out of false notions. To help with this, I put a message to myself on my desk that reads: “You are enough. You don’t have anything to prove to be worthy”. This quote reminds me that my worth is not tied to how hard other people think I am working. My worth is inside me, and it cannot be taken away. Just the same, it is essential for you to know: You are worthy. You have nothing to prove to be worthy.