The harsh reality of “work-life balance” struck me recently as I contemplated my husband’s upcoming 70th birthday. After four decades building a career that helps vulnerable people access vital services, I’ve spent the past year in an unplanned hiatus, caring for my dying father, supporting my widowed mother and wrestling with the cross-border complications of post-Brexit Britain.

This wasn’t a planned sabbatical with neat beginning and end dates. It was life intervening with messy, contradictory demands that defied the tidy work-life separation we’re all supposed to aspire to.

I’ve realised something uncomfortable: the entire concept of “work-life balance” is fundamentally flawed for those of us whose work isn’t just occupation but vocation.

When your professional identity is built on genuinely helping others at their most vulnerable, the clean division between “work” and “life” becomes not just impossible, but potentially harmful.

What we need instead is work-life integration that acknowledges the reality of purpose-driven careers.

The ghost of productivity past

Growing up in a culturally Calvinist Dutch village shaped my relationship with work in ways I’m only now beginning to fully understand. Work wasn’t just something you did; it was how you contributed, how you justified your existence.

My father embodied this ethos as a professional baritone saxophonist, constantly touring but making superhuman efforts to be present for birthdays and significant family moments.

Then came his heart attacks at forty. His performing career ended abruptly. The orchestra created a position for him managing their music library, which he did so meticulously that they eventually replaced him with a qualified professional librarian. He spent his remaining decades at home, trying, as my mother put it, “not to get in her way.”

What haunts me now is what he remembered at the end of his life. It wasn’t his performances or professional accomplishments. It was the holidays, the time spent in France at my husband’s house in the Dordogne, the connections with family. The work that once defined him faded; the relationships remained.

Yet knowing this, I still check emails during Mediterranean cruises and write articles between tours of cathedrals and restaurants. I still feel guilty not about prioritising work, but about experiencing burnout. The cultural programming runs too deep to be easily overwritten.

The impossible mathematics of modern duties

Last April, my father died after years battling cancer and Alzheimer’s. My husband waited in France with our dogs while I stayed with my newly-widowed mother in the Netherlands. My income dwindled as my responsibilities multiplied.

The arithmetic became impossible: be with my husband or support my mother? Maintain my career or honour family obligations? Return to the UK for work or remain in France where my life is now centred?

Even my daily routines highlight the cultural contradictions I navigate. My non-religious Calvinist background – with its emphasis on efficiency and productive use of time – constantly clashes with the French lifestyle surrounding me.

While I’m answering emails with a sandwich over my keyboard (banned by law in France for office workers!), my French neighbours are enjoying leisurely two-hour lunches.

These aren’t just different habits; they represent fundamentally opposed worldviews about the purpose of time and the relationship between productivity and living well.

Technology once promised to solve this equation. During COVID, I worked remotely from France developing counter-fraud tools for the Cabinet Office, projects Downing Street later called “star performers in the government’s COVID-19 response.” Distance was no barrier to effectiveness.

Yet now, that flexibility has vanished. Remote work opportunities come with rigid requirements against working outside the UK. My security clearance has lapsed because I spent lockdown in France (with the Cabinet Office’s full permission, ironically). The digital tools that supposedly liberate us have become new forms of constraint.

When your personal life isn’t actually a priority

The standard advice about work-life balance assumes we all want less work and more life. But what if work is where you find the deepest meaning? What if your professional contribution genuinely makes life better for those who need it most?

As a cultural Calvinist, I feel no guilt about my passion for work. Developing the national drink and needle spiking advice for Police.UK meant vulnerable people got better support during traumatic experiences. Writing accessible content for Cancer Research UK meant patients received clearer information during perhaps the most frightening time of their lives.

What truly pains me now is not my overcommitment to work, but my forced absence from it. After a year without meaningful employment – and even longer since I’ve had the chance to operate at the peak of my capabilities – I constantly read about organisations struggling with vulnerability-aware, trauma-informed content.

I see problems I could solve, people I could help, approaches I’ve already mastered through both expertise and lived experience. The frustration isn’t about income or status; it’s about unused capacity to make things better for vulnerable people.

The guilt comes not from working too much, but from the physical limitations that sometimes prevent me from doing more. Experiencing burnout while researching for the Metropolitan Police felt like a personal failure, not because I was working too hard but because my body couldn’t match my commitment.

I’ve never prioritised my personal life over my professional identity. Perhaps that’s my mistake. But it’s also simply who I am.

Finding meaning without neat categories

Society loves neat categories: work/life, professional/personal, career/family. But these divisions are artificial constructs that don’t reflect lived reality, especially for those of us whose work directly impacts vulnerable people.

My life defies these convenient pigeonholes. It revolves around my husband and our dogs in France, my widowed mother in Holland and my friends in London. I exist between countries, between relationships, between professional identities.

This complexity brings considerable uncertainty and anxiety: never quite belonging anywhere entirely, always navigating multiple sets of expectations and responsibilities.

My relationship with my husband has lasted 31 years, outlasting multiple career iterations. He understands that my work isn’t separate from who I am. That the months I might spend in the UK for upcoming contracts aren’t a rejection of our life together but an extension of my purpose. That even when physically apart, we remain connected by shared values and understanding.

Work-life integration: a new framework for purpose-driven professionals

Perhaps instead of “work-life balance,” we need a new framework. Something that acknowledges the messy intersection of responsibilities, the way work can be both burden and purpose, the inability to separate who we are from what we do.

What I’m slowly learning – at 57, with decades of cultural programming to overcome – is that integration matters more than balance. That caring for my mother teaches me compassion I bring to designing accessible services. That loving my husband gives me resilience for professional challenges. That professional expertise helps me navigate personal crises. That my husband and I share years of memories: holidays, friendships, the dogs we’ve loved together.

The most valuable skill I’m developing isn’t perfect balance, but the ability to be present wherever I am. To bring my full self to each responsibility without constantly feeling I should be somewhere else. To recognise that careers rarely follow linear trajectories and that meaningful contribution happens in unexpected places. Call it mindfulness, if you like.

Perhaps this forced pause is directing me toward a new expression of my expertise, as a freelance trainer and speaker specialising in vulnerability-aware, trauma-informed content. A way to share what I’ve learned that accommodates my international lifestyle while still serving those who need this knowledge most.

I have considerable expertise to offer, if I can find work compatible with my multi-country existence. The challenge isn’t just finding the right role; it’s finding an arrangement that acknowledges I can deliver exceptional results without fitting into traditional employment categories or geographic restrictions.

This isn’t a neat solution with five bullet-pointed steps. It’s an ongoing negotiation with reality, with cultural expectations, with my own limitations. But perhaps that’s the point. True work-life integration isn’t balanced. It’s beautifully, messily integrated.

And sometimes, that’s enough.