In my twenties, I had to do a lot of work on the idea, the yearning, or maybe the premonition or dread that I needed someone or something to save me. I really liked romantic fanfictions where one character rescued and soothed another but, in my own life, I didn’t look for a savior from other people. I didn’t want another person to save me. I wanted to be saved by my own ambition.

There is a lot more out there about supporting secure attachments within romantic-sexual relationships than to almost anything else in the world. There’s a reason for that. Nuclear families are prioritized in part to encourage our isolation from one another. When it comes to our relationship with work, we are encouraged to somehow balance a zealous enthusiasm, a speedy productivity, with a check out apathy. We are invited into engaging with and then disconnecting from our work at will.

But our attachments don’t quite work like that. We can attach to other people but also to animals. We can attach to animals but also to trees. We can attach to trees and also to places. We can attach to places and also to concepts. We can attach to concepts but also to our ability to create new things. We are capable of attaching profoundly to the power and impact of our labor and there is nothing wrong with this.

And, yet, it is tricky to build a secure attachment to our work. I say that it is tricky, not that it is impossible.

Work is magical. It is the process of transmuting something as we discover it into something that becomes, temporarily, a part of us. Maybe this is just my sixth house Moon but I love to work. And, only in my thirties, am I beginning to learn how to love it and how to let my labor love me.

It is tricky to build a secure attachment to work because, to get us to work, the capitalists literally hold our survival resources hostage. Our ability to buy food, to get healthcare, to live in housing is dependent upon our ability and willingness to work. How’s that for a coercive relationship? If that happened in any other relationship? If our ability to buy food, get healthcare, and to live in housing is dependent upon a relationship? We’d be rightfully creeped the fuck out.

And then there’s the spiritual weight that work in a Protestant society carries—we go into work looking for what someone like Max Weber might call a calling.

I went into work very often not with self knowing, with knowing what I needed, and in seeking to love and support the person I almost was but with the intention of trying to save myself. I wanted work to complete me. I wanted affirmation and a type of celebration that I didn’t yet know how to give myself. All of the things that you typically hear about traumabonding were there in my relationship to my old workplaces—I was hopelessly sensitive to critique, I often was very efficient and tried to become the ideal worker in the beginning of a relationship with an organization, and I couldn’t for the life of me deal with conflict or difficult conversations.

I don’t blame myself. I don’t blame myself for traumabonding to work but I did have to accept that this was happening to realize that work wasn’t something that could save me.

I think this can happen in other ways too. Sometimes, it’s not that we strive to be saved by work but that we find ourselves, in trying to save a workplace, enabling the code of ethics and sets of behaviors found there. I’ve found myself there too though not as often as the other way around. That’s just how it ended up happening for me.

Oh, to live after or during trauma and to know that your boss isn’t your mother, that our ability to fit into a predesigned role is not supposed to be what gets us chosen, and that punishment is not something that you should need to anticipate at work. Oh, to live in trauma and to also know that keeping a score of all of the bad things that have happened at work will not always help us find footing in the conflicts that we desperately need in order to heal.

I’ve been watching a lot of Peaky Blinders lately. I notice that Tommy Shelby has what looks like a traumabonded relationship to his own business/gang. He’s a veteran from World War One, a Romani Englishman who recently started assimilating into British society on account of his military service. It’s the type of mobster show where they drink and smoke all the time. We never see anyone in the show eat any food.

But the first time we see Tommy Shelby eat? A tree branch foraged from the land. He’s on the run from himself because he thinks he may have cursed his family. He rejects the food on the market and he eats only from his own hand.

What could it be like to not traumabond to work? We’d have to let go of the idea that we must apply ourselves until we are chosen by some higher power to fill an existing role, for one. We’d have to enjoy learning for learning’s sake, having faith that what we build within and beyond is important enough that we must never figure out how to do it perfectly. We’d have to know how to get to know ourselves deeply so that our labor can support the people who we already are. We’d have to not be coerced into working. For us to truly bond to our ability to create and support and work, not working must also not be a condition that could possibly kill us.

Here’s to the workers who thought that we needed to deceive in order to survive, those who have tried to earn pride with ambition, and those who assumed that by rescuing others again and again that it would somehow someday finally be your turn to experience a rapturous feeling of being saved. We are still responsible for class struggle. We can still become available to loving our labor and to loving ourselves as working people. Tommy Shelby, too, was a Communist before the war.