After storming out of the office, I spent the first couple of days being furious. I got a couple of worried phone calls from my boss and my HR rep, but I ignored it all while I calmed down. What can I say; I tend to be slow to anger, but when I cross that line I stay good and angry for a while. After a day and a weekend, I called my boss and had lunch with him, and the next day called my HR rep and had lunch with her. Both were understanding, worried about me, eager to have me back, sympathetic with my frustrations, and in general very easy to talk to. I got great advice from both of them, but walking away from it, I still wasn’t certain whether I wanted to quit, or come back, or take an extended leave of absence, or what.
I’ve had some frustrations with work for a while now. I’ve been working in high tech for about 15 years, the majority of that time at this company. While I love my team, and appreciate my direct manager, there are still some things that can drive me nuts. I care about my work more than I should perhaps; I try very hard to do a good job and I can get particularly frustrated when the layers above me seem to make my job harder than it should be for no damn good reason. Lately I’ve thought more and more about chucking it all and driving the submarine at Disneyland. Or selling Frisbees at the beach. Or doing massage work. Or becoming a short-order cook. Or a scene shop carpenter. Or getting a piercing and becoming a coffee barista. In other words, maybe this was just the excuse I needed to make a major change in my life.
The other personality quirk that comes into play is that I hate hard decisions. I have a fear of making the wrong move, doing something I’ll regret, finding out I’ve zigged when I should have zagged. It’s easier and I’m happier when I can find a way of looking at a problem such that the answer becomes obvious. And so far, I wasn’t finding that kind of answer for this dilemma.
And then synchronicity happened.
At massage class one night, we were having one of those (for me) frustrating classes where we were doing what is euphemistically referred to as “energy work”. One of the students asked how to handle a situation where he experienced a strong upwelling of emotions while in the midst of performing body work on a client. In my head, I quickly jumped to what my answer to the question would be. “Look, emotions happen. They don’t always follow a rhyme or reason, they just happen. And trying to stifle them or rationalize them away can drive you nuts. The trick is to be self-aware enough that you can recognize an emotional response for being just that. And if you can recognize an emotional response, then you have a chance to decide how you want to handle that, whether that means indulging the emotional impulse, or channeling it into a more productive direction, or setting it aside and choosing to respond when emotions have cooled.”
And as soon as the phrases coalesced in my head, the wave of self-awareness washed through in its wake. Oh, so that’s what’s been going on! I got frustrated, then got furious, then did the work equivalent of throwing myself to the ground and kicking my heels against the floor. Perhaps I had some justification, but it was still a great big emotional hissyfit. In hindsight, this is so obvious it hurts. And perhaps it was blindingly obvious to everyone else from simply reading the original post. What can I say; I’m slow sometimes.
Once I had this kind of perspective on the situation, any questions about what to do next evaporated. No, this wasn’t worth quitting over. I adore my team, and I basically love my job, even if it can drive me crazy on occasion. If anything, I’m embarrassed I wasn’t able to find a way to handle this without throwing a hissyfit. Sigh. “I am but an egg.”
So, I’ll be heading back into the trenches on Monday, hopefully a little calmer and a little more balanced. And there’s the added benefit that equipment for my team seems to have materialized in my absence. *grin* Now I just have to figure out how to explain this to people when I return. I’m hoping I can spread the rumor that I was out of the office in a rehab clinic for sexual addiction.