All work and minimal play make Julie...

When you have a job like mine, which demands a lot of your time and your mental space even outside normal work hours, you tend to develop a bit of a skewed view of the importance of your work and how much it means to you. (Note: this is exacerbated if your boyfriend works at the same place.)

Why do we work? So we can get a paycheck, of course, and also a sense of purpose and the feeling that we're being productive in the world. Some of us work because we love it, because we're doing what drives and inspires us. Some of us don't -- our work exists to fund the rest of our life.

But what happens when you realize that your job, which isn't your dream job, is no longer just funding the rest of your life -- that it's seeping in and expanding and overtaking the rest of your life to the point that it nearly consumes it? (Note: this is partly your fault, of course. You should be better about pushing back on things and not taking your work home with you even in the mental sense and not being such a perfectionist.)

When that happens, you're going to have to make some changes, I think, to your work life. Because work life is just life, isn't it? And there is more to life than work.