Ascension

Feeling emotionally exhausted and a little freaked out.

Today had meetings all day. A bunch of them I had organized myself because I want to enact my own plans, conduct business for my brands the way I think it should be done. Others were normal weekly meetings, or special planning meetings, or phone calls I had to have with people. Which didn't leave enough time to actually do anything, follow up the action items I had from all the meetings or review emails or do backlog stuff. Or end of year stuff which I'm a bit behind on. And at 5:30 after getting a Diet Coke and surfing for a bit to rest my mind, I decided I need to take care of myself first (fit your own mask before helping others kind of thing), and so just shut the computer down, left it there, and came home. I don't have anything to eat for breakfast tomorrow and nothing obvious to have for dinner tonight, but I didn't care, I just came straight home and watched an episode of Mad Men and am trying to rest.

The meetings in which I'm trying to enact my plans require incredible levels of personal influence, all the more so because I need to go so very, very slowly, to get buy-in from the people I need buy-in from. In some cases I am planning to move on from certain folks but need to respect their knowledge and contribution and want them to help with transition so I can't tell them they're about to be no longer useful to the organization. And maybe it's not my decision anyway, but that's my plan. So those need to be incredibly delicate, because I have forged positive and loyal relationships in the past so as to get what I needed from them back then, and now there really is a bond there but I might have to break it. And then there are other new people who, given the shifting of the organizational continents at work, are suddenly in a position, a much better position, to partner with to enact the things I want to do, and so I'm trying to make initial forays but I really feel like an ambassador from a very foreign culture, and I have already put a few tenderfoot feet wrong and must go very, very cautiously so as not to spook them and to make myself understood.

All day, this. After a day like that, all you want is to meet someone at a bar who doesn't work at work, and over some tall gold schooners tell them all the stories (and not worry about if you sound like a conniving hound or a lying manipulative sales-devil). Someone who is sophisticated enough to understand the work stuff and has been following the story so you don't have to go back to real basics, like what does "DAT" stand for, but who doesn't actually work at work. So they aren't players in the political dramas unfolding, and you can tell them really sensitive confidential things and they won't run into anyone they shouldn't tell about it until it's irrelevant and old news.

Mostly somebody I can just be my whole self with, without spin, without judging all my words, without checking the impression I'm making on them. Someone with whom I can say, "Yeah, when I was in Paris, we..." and you don't have to worry that you're sounding snobby. Someone with whom you can say, "And my sister's at Pole so I can't call her now to talk about it, " and not have to explain what "at Pole" means and answer the 20 standard Antarctica questions that everyone has. You can just skip ahead to the important bit. Or maybe even just drink your schooner and listen to them talk about their day, and you are up to speed on it too because it's a mutual relationship, not like a paid therapist, you care just as much about their job and trials and people in their life and how their day was.

Is a wife what I need? Someone to come home to who is there to support me while I'm trying to to these ambitious business things? Or a husband, someone who with their strong arms and strong back can give me a hug and shore up the edges of my personality? Or just a BFF?

Maybe what I really need is a mentor. Another seniorish woman who is already spending her days doing the high-level things that I'm trying to do (trying to be worthy of doing so they give me the chance to do them). So I can talk through the emotional side of rising up, being senior. Check my mistakes, learn from them, get some encouragement, make sure someone else believes I can actually do this, and that I should be doing it.

I love my job. I love the opportunities it presents. I want to work at that top level where big things happen and big relationships are forged. I want to have interesting projects like my current, rather big one. But you know, tonight driving around the roundabout in the rain home to my grocery-less house, I could see the appeal of having an easy job. Something you just go, and do, and get done, and then you come home and you still have everything left inside you that you left with that morning.

Freaking out a little bit. Needing a beer and a hug.