Thursday ramble

It's been a rough few weeks (/months/years/centuries) in the world, so I know that my own rough few weeks at work amount to a picnic in relative terms. But they've been rough nonetheless. A roller-coaster, actually--not without its peaks. They culminated in a meltdown earlier this week, but even before that, they lead to an epiphany over the weekend, at Current Boutique: I was looking at blazers and thought, "you can never have too many blazers, but I'm past the point where a blazer can help or harm my career."


The day of the meltdown, which I think was Tuesday, I left work early (read: on time) and answered the question I'd been asking myself for weeks: "if this isn't rush hour on the metro, what is?" I rarely make metro rush hour these days, but it still feels like rush hour. Well, actual rush hour has apparently reached Tokyo levels of crowded. But I digress.

I try not to let work get to me. I make a point not to remind myself that I neither save lives, nor clean toilets for a living. Nobody dies if I miss a deadline, and my worst work days are cushier than a lot of people's better ones. Even within my own career, I've had some really shitty days (/weeks/months), and I'm in a far better place now. But none of this matters much in the moment; you can know it in your head, but it's hard to make yourself feel it. Hell, the evening of the meltdown, I talked to my friend with the brain injury (talk about some rough weeks; she just wants to be able to work). Thinking about her difficult time reinforced the idea that I should get over mine, but it couldn't make me feel it.

What did make me feel better was coming to work the next morning to a snarky (small-)group e-mail from a coworker, and the ensuing reply-alls that followed. It was funny, and it reinforced to me on, a gut level, the fact that I was among friends. And then, this morning, there was a bag of veggies from a coworker's garden (a couple of coworkers have been sharing the produce from their much more successful gardens). That's the stuff that let's you know that everything's going to be okay, even when you know in your head that it is but can't seem to convince your soul by logic alone.