Self Care

Before I first started working at Harry's Mother, my first social-work job, one of the questions in the interview was, "How do you take care of yourself?" I'd never been asked that before, and I was young and hadn't really thought about how the environment and the people around me could affect my emotional state. So I pulled my answer out of the air: "Spend time with friends and talk; eat; read books; and get enough sleep." My prospective boss didn't correct my answer - in fact, she probably wanted me to think about it ahead of time, rather than there being a right answer, and this is what I've been using as my standard prescription for self-care, when asked.


Over the last couple of days I have been having experiences that have made me aware that I don't do good self care when I'm in the moment. I am getting better about just removing myself from the situation where people around me are irritating me at work, whether it's their fault or mine. I find work to do in the back room if it's a client, or I walk out the door and either walk up the street or hang out in the back lot if it's a volunteer.


What I don't do well is think about how I can make a bad situation better for myself if I can't remove myself, or, which happens more often, I forget that I can. This usually happens when I feel like I am in charge. I usually forget that I can often turn things over to someone else. Last night I didn't think I would be able to effectively facilitate the group, and it never occurred to me to call another facilitator and ask if she was available to come and do it instead. Though this is probably because my experience is that I'm the only one who says "yes" to last minute substitutions, which in itself is something for me to think about.


Maybe now that I recognize this I will be able to catch myself in it, though honestly I doubt it, mostly because I think I've realized this before - it feels very familiar.


I have definitely been having "Always Learning" experiences this week. Sigh.

"Regrets on the Stairs"

Have you ever poked yourself with a pencil, and then did it again? And again? It's annoying, but for some reason you keep doing it? Last night I laid in bed and realized that once again I was thinking about "what I would say if I ran into [any person from Cal]." I don't like thinking about that. First of all, I get all annoyed at those people, and second of all I know that it is totally unproductive to dwell on what I would say, because it's just not going to happen. And then I get annoyed at myself for being annoyed at them.

I seem to go into this dream world in which I can have a real conversation with my former boss, and I imagine all of the things I would say to her about what happened. I don't really try to imagine what she would say... And the problem is, even if I was somehow in a place with her and could say whatever I would say, I know that she wouldn't be able to respond to me as anything other than a representative of my former employer, which would effectively shut down that conversation. That's frustrating because I still don't really understand what happened there. I will never understand as long as I can't ask. And I'm not going to be able to ask. Another thing that's frustrating is that I want to be beyond all the crap, and I have a friend or two who tell me I'm evolving, or evolved, which makes me think I should be beyond all the crap. But I'm just not.

I imagine what I would say to this or that person, something different for each one. Without going into details - because it will just annoy me - I embroider a whole statement for each of, say, five or six people. There was one person who was honest with me when she was angry at me and I wish I could tell her that I appreciated it at the time and I still do. But not enough to overcome the rest of how I feel about that place and some of the people who work there.

The more I think about the situation I was in, the more I'm reminded of grammar school. In grammar school, I laid in my bed at night and thought of all the great or nasty comebacks to the mean girls in my class. The office I was in had some similar dynamics to the classroom, from my perspective, and here I am (and was last year) doing the same thing I did then.

I heard one time that there's a French word for the comebacks you think of after someone has insulted you. I have no idea what the French idiom is, but the literal translation is "regrets on the stairs." I'm spending less time there, but I still find myself on the stairs from time to time.