I have a bad habit of bringing my work home with me even when I’m not getting paid to do it.
Internally, I let things get to me. Sometimes I feel like a wreck, like the rest of my department looks at me like I’m crazy and over dramatic and creating mountains out of molehills. I used to chalk it up to being the only girl in a room full of boys, boys who don’t get worked up over stuff. But now there’s a few other girls and they don’t seem to worry as much. One isn’t invested enough to care, the other has been in the business long enough and is extremely laid back so she doesn’t let stuff get to her.
But I do and I don’t know how to change it. I like to think I pick my battles wisely and I feel that on most occasions I do. It’s the occasions when I think, “Alright, I’m fed up, it’s time to go to the mattresses” that I start second guessing myself and wondering if I’m just being too much of a girl, if I’m letting my emotions get the better of me, if I’m blowing the situation up into something it shouldn’t be.
Am I paranoid? Do I have the feminine stereotype so ingrained in me that if I show a bit of passion or emotion for a subject, I immediately feel the need to pull it back lest others around attribute it merely to me being female? Or am I just a crazy, overdramatic, overemotional person?
The worst part is that I’m not really a confrontational person. Anyone who has known me for longer than six months or so know I talk a lot of game but when it come down to it, I hate conflict. I’ve never been good at it – always afraid I’m not going to say the right thing, I’m going to look stupid, I’m not going to be able to stand my ground and worst of all, I’m going to cry. Because I do cry when I’m angry. I can’t help it. It probably makes me look awful, but I don’t know how to cure it.
So I can rant and rave with the best of them to others around me but when it comes right down to actually looking the person in the face and telling them I have an issue, I clam up. I’ve gotten better but more often than not, the point I’m trying to make comes across as a plea, a request, a question and not a direct demand or explanation and in the long run, I feel like I look weaker, AM weaker, because of it.
My job does not demand that I confront people on a regular basis. There’s a lot of suggestions, a lot of discussion about how things would be better this way. I’ve learned the art of subtlety – of the zinger. Of letting someone know that something doesn’t work because they are doing it incorrect without directly pointing out “Hey, dummy, it doesn’t work because you did it wrong!”. But sometimes subtlety doesn’t work. Sometimes you gotta say things straight up – “Hey, the way you went about things was wrong and could have been done in a more efficient way”.
The problem is being able to say it. Tomorrow. Not tonight. Not right now when I’m thinking about it and stewing over it and making a game plan. This bringing my work home is going to bite me in the ass eventually because all the courage I’ve worked up tonight – all the the hype and the psyching up ….
It’s just gonna keep me up tonight.
And then tomorrow, I’ll be lucky if I can muster enough to even bring it up at the time when it needs to be discussed.
Like I said, I talk a big game. Now how do I play one?
