Small Calamities

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Your Calamities

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December 2, 2007 | permalink

Hello, Gentle Readers... It's been a while, hasn't it? More than two months, which I believe is the longest break in my writing to date. Which really was not a good idea. I let myself forget how much of a stabilizing and sanity inducing influence this writing is, and only now looking back at the last couple of months do I see how much I probably would have benefited from being diligent about writing.

Not that you should get the impression that these last many weeks have been full of unbridled misery; far from it, there have been some really fantastic high points, and I have no complaints about my personal life and relationships. It was the job. I did a gig in October that broke me, and I have been feeling a little less confident, a little less extroverted (or more introverted, I suppose, would be more accurate, since extroversion is not really a strong trait of mine), and a little more passive since then.

The job in question started out fine, but slowly turned into a grueling clusterfuck. Some of it was foreseeable, and just not noticed in time by me (though I am assured that this is far less true than I think it is), some of it unforeseeable, and some of it was just bad luck. Towards the end I reached a real low point, and my morale broke.

I do not mean that I was feeling discouraged, or frustrated, or even depressed; I mean my morale really broke. I gave up. I ceased to be leading the crew, I ceased to be the boss. I ceased to be the motivator and the encourager and the example that a leader is supposed to be. All I wanted to do was slink away and hide in a corner, alone with my misery.

After a few hours (which seemed eternal, I assure you) of despair, I pulled myself together and took charge again, rallying the crew as I rallied myself. Which is good; judging by how crappy I still feel over my temporary lapse, I have trouble imagining how terrible I would be feeling if I had not managed to get my shit together and salvaged that job.

I have never, in my entire life (which, if you have been reading, you know has encompassed some difficult challenges) felt so completely defeated and broken. And frankly, I would not have believed that I could feel such despair. I always thought that I was too tough, too tempered by previous challenges. But it seems that I was wrong.

Even now, writing this, I feel a deep shame for having so unequivocally surrendered. Which I suppose is the real reason I haven't written in so long; I didn't want to really admit out loud my surrender and the resulting shame I felt. But I wasn't able to write about anything else, either. It seemed too disingenuous to just let it slide away and not acknowledge it here, to you.

So that's my story, Gentle Readers. And now that I have aired out the room, so to speak, the writing at regular intervals will resume...

Posted in Blogging & Musings & Working
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