elainegrey

This past week

Saturday: a chat with Dad as he's driving off to play poker at the American Legion. Background: He's been seeing the same person for almost a year, she's introduced him to all her friends and family members. He doesn't know "where things are with her". I think, she's in the bleeping twenty-first century Dad and you are in the 1940s. "She's in a relationship with you, you 'have' her," i tell him. Does he really need her to wear a ring to signify that she's (cough, cough) "his"? During this call he says he's thought about it and yeah, it's probably true. (I've not met the woman, my sister has only glanced at her. My brother did get to have lunch with her.)

Sunday: lovely, mad at Dad because he was rude when he called for tech support and i started explaining the fix and he cut me off. Also stressing about Monday.

Monday: long hard workday using up all my focus on tiny details and stay on task energy for the week (exec function)

Tuesday: Because i understand what i used up on Monday, i can watch myself and how it impacted on Tuesday. I also know Tuesday's work schedule will not need much of that capacity, so it all works out.

Tuesday: another colleague announces departure. For keeping score

* 2022 Spring New Exec Dir T hired
* beginning 2023 Exec Dir T moves to another division
* March 2023 New Exec Dir J hired
* June 2023 my manager goes to T's division
* Early Oct Director for the teams i work with goes to very different company - he's been passed over for the exec dir twice.
* Mid Oct Principal Engineer for the team i work most closely with (eg the leader for the team in engineering) goes to T's division
* Oct 31 Manager for the team i work most closely with goes to the same very different company

The team i work most closely with is probably shell shocked. I've reached out to them and said, i would help, how do they want me to support them on their support job? And feel free to ask me about anything they would have their manager, i have managed before.

Exec Dir J wants to talk to me about the team. I'm am trying to figure out how to be very clear. No, i do not want to be a manager, and i cannot provide the benefit to the organization that i do now if i try to also do that job.

Tuesday: provided Dad tech support. Still mad. He knows how to ask people about themselves, he does it with strangers etc. He doesn't know how to do it with his daughters.

Wednesday: I dress in a good mood. Look at me, putting on colorful hair extensions just because they will look good with the sweater, and earrings, and necklace! By end of day, feeling dreadful. Headaches. Asthma flare really bad. My sister is back home from a road trip with her family, i call and we rant about Dad. She shares his boorish behavior over the past week. I share a little about work situation. We plan to get together the next morning. Feeling even worse after grocery trip. Possible it's hair extensions pulling + asthma + a lunch of full grain barley and cabbage?

Thursday: Meet up with sis at co-op for breakfast and herbal tea. Talk about her trip, a little more about my work. Bought buckwheat and water for health equipment and other impulse buys. Home, spent a few hours reflecting on the future and came up with guiding statements that sort of say where i want to be in the next decade, and some more questions to think about. Back to work after lunch.

I'm actually peopling this week, having some social (and quasi social) zooms. Which is novel-ish. A sign my depression is fading! On the other hand, i'm leaning into "asthma flare so i can't" a lot. I tried reading about asthma advice and i can't tell if i am recalcitrant or if i should really get checked for COPD. I really don't feel like exercising or doing things that require exertion. You should exercise, says the asthma advice, but all the advice seems to be for people with regular asthma. Not "i've been coughing for a month."

I'll try to get in a walk down the hill today.

Yesterday's reorg had me staring at the note in which i keep track of corporate changes. I apparently started the note in July of 2014 when the effects of new executive leadership at where i work, "The Whale," had reached a crescendo. I realize i needed a time line. This has been incredibly helpful to me since then, and i've added as much detail as i could tracking back to when the merger of "The Minnow" and "The Whale" occurred in 2006. I find myself wanting to add some other dates.

And then i thought that, while a number of you have shared the journey with me, many of you missed some of these adventures. So i thought i'd share here.

( Cut for length )
So, here we are.

Not all of that reflection was about "the elephant in the room," but part of what inspired this was for me to get a sense of how long this elephant has been hanging around as well as how long i was in the crisis that put me on antidepressants to begin with.

I think Christine has made a great deal of progress out of her crisis. Admittedly, after this much time, "crisis" is no longer really a good term. Some time back i did accept to myself that this is a long term condition. I do see improvement though, and i see her making great efforts to cope. The most hard thing, i think, is that she wakes with panic attacks more often than not. She has changed from a CPAP to the more fancy thing (heated! humidified! variable pressure!) which has a little bit of improvement, but the change didn't solve the issue.

There are things left out -- my time line of involvement in Quaker meetings stands out as something significant. My Dad's surgery is important because it came just before i my body seemed to hit middle age. There are a number of things about my health -- when did i do the diet exclusion test? When were various therapists? -- but i actually think those are in another file. My siblings' marriages, their children's birth, deaths of Christine's father and my grandfather -- those are important markers, too.

What this does, though, it take some events that have duration -- the process of coming out and how long before Christine had confirmation surgery, my work misery, her crisis -- and helps me see how my sense of duration is so skewed.

--== ∞ ==--

So if i keep journaling here for another eighteen years, i will have documented half my life on LiveJournal and its descendant DreamWidth. LJ was launched nineteen years ago. (I was actually blogging on geocities in 1999. No one read it, but i was writing there.)

[6/1/17, 4:23:09 PM] [Colleague GK]: I just stumbled on a message from [New Director]
                                     to the [larger] team - and you in particular.
[6/1/17, 4:23:27 PM] [Colleague GK]: He was decidedly obnoxious.   The bold face, red
                                     lettering is rather insulting.

I took a moment to see if i could find a post where i transcribed one of those missives. It was enough to just glance through some of the entries where i recorded my dealings with him.

My world is such a better place.

(Although i'm having a rather low couple of days, right now.)

I received a notice that a Quaker i haven't seen in ... eight? nine? years had endorsed me on Linked In. I find the endorsements all odd: it's some weird game that different people play in different ways. Could this person really endorse some technical skill of mine?

It drew my attention to my Linked In profile, and i realized how much i hate it, as it represents the management skills i felt i ought to highlight. My first thought was to make a new profile, but as Linked In uses all sorts of network analysis, unless i start with EVERYTHING fresh, i fear that my Whale colleagues will be presented with, "Do you know these people?" and see my alter ego sitting there. (Mainly because my alter ego was presented with my boss in the moments after setting up.)

I nuked the alter ego.

I did a little fiddling with the tagging feature offered for connections, and have identified that 1/8th of my connections (even after deleting some) are currently employed by the Whale. The network of people who might comment to my current colleagues is even larger.

Suddenly i saw a way to do what i want: having deleted my "headline" that highlighted my interest in management ("team builder") i replaced it with "Weekend botanist and photographer." I added the photo of myself hiking that i am using across other social media. I reorganized the page so my work experience is at the bottom of the page. The "Organizations" section allows you to call out roles, so i'm noting my stream keeping and work at Meeting. I've linked photos from Flickr. I've listed last weekend's workshop.

So now i see a way to use LinkedIn in a way non-threatening to my current employment: use it to network for "volunteer" positions. When i finish my borage book, i can add that. And as Christine and i develop the apps, i can add those. It will put my interests first as i network around the native plant communities and photography communities.

Fingers crossed.

--==∞==--

Meanwhile, Tuesday the team solved yet another issue in production and spent all their energy tracking down an issue in our testing environment. The issue ran away and it was not witnessed yesterday. I couldn't find the log message that i had thought was a sign of the issue when i looked back at the early reports, and we couldn't find it associated with our last documented observation. In fact, the logs were clean. So yesterday everything was put in debug mode and we pounded the system, trying to get it to scream.

It hasn't.

This is distressingly similar to the issue we had with production that went away with a "fix" that has no reason to fix anything.

On Tuesday, the director of our product division screamed and cursed at my director (engineering division) in the midst of the open plan offices. The new president has been in place just two months now, and i'm sure everyone is wondering what he is thinking about this debacle. Having the festering infection of dysfunction open and obvious will hopefully allow it to be treated. The other president just seemed to plaster it over.

The stress is pretty clear though.

Other than working hard, i've been trying to thank people. Not gratuitously, but honestly. Email to people's managers, thanks to folks on my team directly.

I think i have an idea about how to work with our product analyst to capture more clear details that may help reduce some of the fragility.

Tomorrow is the post mortem, and as our errors were highly visible, i expect that i will need to be grounded for the discussion.

--==∞==--

As part of my consciously acknowledging the good performance going on around me, i noticed some ... respect? that New Director sent my way in some meetings yesterday. The sudden sense that he is working WITH me intentionally is quite welcome. We will see if he can follow up, but i am acknowledging that he is acknowledging that i have a clue to which he should listen.

Oh, look at the New Director repeat! Or don't: it's yesterday redux but not at 7 am at least.
( same old same old )

Yet another cranky morning.

( Grumble )

So, those meetings are wrapped up, skype is off, and i've skimmed a bit of internet to distract me. It's 9 am and overcast. I haven't had my even minimal reflective start of my day free of work irritation. It's time to do that.

So much is so much improved with my job: it's hard to communicate that. I'm getting the support i need through my Pretend Boss. New Director is doing better at showing up on time and making sure that he stays in touch: this morning stands in contrast to the rest of August's performance. The engineering and systems divisions are getting processes and procedures in place in response to the debacles of a year ago. I am seeing improvement in the larger work systems.

But i am still a crispy fried critter from the previous years.

One of the barriers to my recovery is the way days start with urgent triage. I read and hear advice to set aside the first 90 minutes of the day to focus on the Important and it's hard. I don't want to start work any earlier: i don't have enough time for the other Important in my life. What i think i can do is block Monday mornings for getting big tasks done: i will blow off email on Monday mornings. I'm going to also be more proactive in blocking other time periods to keep meetings from happening.

So, I will see continuous improvement in me taking care of my needs, too.

I had another night of I-don'-wanna and spent it reading light science fiction/fantasy. (Young person on a quest learning to control special secret psi powers seems like a fantasy story even if spaceships are involved.) I trust that the lethargy that hit at around 2 pm yesterday was related to hormonal shifts. I reflect, too, that there was communication annoyance at work: a decision had been made in my division on Friday that i found out about when sitting in another division's management meeting. A colleague forwarded me the email, and i forwarded it to my team. I actually met with New Director later in the day and made clear that not receiving the communication was an issue.

Apparently New Director had food poisoning last week and spent time in the hospital. I don't feel guilty for speculating that he was "sick" and looking for a new job. However, listening to him whine about having to be present at the director level management meeting where he was to explain why he was asking for a schedule change, i realize he's clueless about why he should be looking for a new job.

All the politics of the day -- including the now-weekly meeting on one of the projects where we can't support them at the level they want to be supported -- were probably far more draining than they "felt." I wasn't upset or surprised, but instead recognized usual behavior. In some ways, i was delighted the un-communicated "decision" had finally been made, as it was an expectation the rest of the enterprise had had that New Director's division will FINALLY honor.

So work probably drained me more than i accept. I have Meeting responsibilities i'm neglecting. Correspondence seems a challenge. I'm glad i did use my energy on Sunday to brighten and tidy the household as i don't look around and see nags of tasks from every corner like i did last week.

It seems so strange to have shifted energy so quickly, just as the weekend's and Monday's energy to get things done seemed such an overflowing bounty.

One final joy: i feel like i am so much more clear these days. In the past year? I am able to see my ebb and flow of energy and accept it now. Perhaps it's the antidepressant, but i think it's more the trust i am developing that i don't need to will myself to have "more spoons." I am learning to trust during an ebb that my energy will return instead of having to Do Something to Make Myself Function. I find myself looking back on my old behaviors and feel like i was engaging in superstitious behavior. It's as if i was some coastal dweller who believed that she had to plea with the sea to return the water at every low tide and lived in fear that some day the sea would just decide to keep the tide out. I'm now able to trust that after an ebb, there will be a flow. Now it's a matter of being prepared for the different conditions.

I am thankful for the compassion for myself that i am learning. I think of how i was raised: in some sense we were constantly in preparation for catastrophe. "Don't rest", was the lesson, "because some day something horrible might be happening and you won't have time to rest. If you rest now, you won't be able to push through then." I suppose the military backgrounds both my parents brought and the trauma my dad experienced growing up fed their need to teach these lessons.

I now feel less like i have to exercise my will constantly, as i begin to realize that fighting the ebbs in my energy was not like building up muscle stamina but was the superstitious plea with the sea. I know even if my energy ebbs i can push through and get things done if it's important, but i don't need to create fake "importance" to practice the pushing through.

So now i begin my tidal observations: will i find a moon and sun that pull and push the tides?

Argh. So, i'm up and giving myself a little personal time to wake up before i cram through my monthly report. I had to change a password to access work email yesterday , so i log the change in evernote & see a reminder to update my password on my phone. I do so, but get error after error. Long troubleshooting story short, on trying the third toatally different access application, i get the error, "The website encountered an error while retrieving https://[whale.tld]/exchange. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly."

OK, so it's not due to my password change. Exhale.

And there goes a half hour of "me" time.

Sunday's flight was uneventful, although my 40 minute layover in Dallas was as short as it could be for me to catch the next flight. I was willing to take the gamble on my way to the Whale's offices.

Yesterday morning i worked on my talk for Wednesday and pretty much pulled it together before starting my work day. I saw New Director twice. ( And my brain itches. )

Today the meetings are MUCH longer and, while one is a meeting with New Director and the VP, in all the others i should be able to just be present.

I find myself reflecting on the queries i read as the plane was landing. They were about living so one could be listening for a call. For years when i was working at the Minnow i was very clear that i was still learning and that i was at the right place. I'm less clear now, but i believe i can do my current job better with respect to caring for my staff (must be able to keep my oxygen mask on as i do so).

I guess i really need to do the re-membering project as a next step.

Gah.

Today was more crisis circus. ( whine whine whine )

Christine's practicing her tremolo scales in the corner of the living room, in her little music nook, while i sit here on the lounge and tippity-tap. She's got a plush Kokopelli from the Phoenix airport playing with her.

I've hung amber diode lit clear plastic pinecones around our entry door. In December i'll switch them for blue and white diode lit plastic snowflakes. I think these cones will look more attractive on the Yule tree than they do around the door.

I think one of our cats is in the open hall closet... yes, Greycie Loo was nested among the camping gear. The closet is open because i had to dig out the jumper cables. Sooner or later we need to give Josie the Jeep a charge.