Called In Anger

In which our Hero is asked to stick around after a meeting

Early in my career as a consultant, I fell upon bad times. The day I left that client, I figured out what depression actually *meant* because suddenly I wasn’t anymore, and the shedding of that weight made me feel taller, freer, and able to breath.

That’s my personal reference for “depression” now. I don’t really do sleep in and I don’t do mope all day. For me it’s more of an emotional compression and a Death’s Head grin. And it’s something that I’m working very hard to keep off me these days when I’ve been in this extended stress situation.

And apparently I’m failing.

Hollywood has commented more that I seem to be in a bad mood some days. Nocturne says that she finds my style of cranky to be really funny, which is horrible for my dignity but good for us. But the “oh shit” moment was when my manager on this project stopped me after a meeting and asked to speak. And when the others had cleared the room he asked if everything was okay because I’ve seeming kind of tense lately.

Shit.

I’m…

To the manager, I gave a list of plausible sounding short term tensions that would make me have cause to be a little snarky. He’s a little harder than average to fool because the folks I work with regularly here have had time to get a long baseline, but on the flipside, my long baseline is a fairly cheerful character so if I’m moderately less stabby (with thanks to Dallandrah for that adjective), I will probably seem “normal” enough to pass.

It’s not the project. Well, it is the project work too. But it’s also the accountant and the taxes and the client and the lifestyle and the everything that I’ve whined about before and get no satisfaction about whining about again.

But yesterday, I spent about 75% of the day in a black-cloud-over-my-head rage. Because I was working on a presentation to review the technical design. Except the review was with… my team, who were the ones helping me design this. So it was kind of for the managers who just haven’t been paying that much attention I guess, but it’s the wrong task and wasting my time and energy, and the ongoing stupid just infuriates me because now they’re forcing me to miss lunch to make their bad planning not fail.

Is that really a reason to be angry? No. It absolutely is not. But when you’re having a bad day, you’re having a bad day, and honestly by the time I got home I was just… done.

I think Nocturne is skewing the results, Gentle Reader. I think she’s moderating what would be a meltdown and instead I come home and let it all go. Which is fantastic, but… as grateful as I am for that assistance, it’s dealing with symptoms and not root cause.

Root cause is… well, okay, honestly, I’ve actually broken that logjam already. But it’s going to take a little longer for the effects to really be felt. And that means I need tactical answers and not strategic ones.

So I’m taking a long lunch on Friday. Since they booked that stupid meeting last year, I haven’t had a lazy happy friday lunch, and I’m going to do that.

And just that little thing changes my whole emotional stance, and I wonder why I never thought of this till now. Or else how did I forget this trick?