November 5, 2021
My job is stressing me out quite a lot. Usually, I bulldoze through the week enthusiastically, by Friday, I am feeling the fatigue, but a few hours on the first day of my weekend and I am good to go. Lately, that it is now getting slowly more difficult.
I find myself getting up between 4-5 AM of my first weekend day (normal time I get up on a work day), and have work on the brain. It no longer takes me a few hours to recoup, but it takes a full day to START to wind down and by the time I go to bed on the 2nd day I am barely starting to destress… just in time to get up 8 hours later to start the cycle all over again… and it is like walking through a mud pit, where the mud is getting deeper and thicker each week.
I… am… tired.
On top of that I no longer work MON-FRI, but SUN-THU… which doesn’t sound so bad, but it is just a bit more straw that works to break the camel’s back because I have no agents that work on Sunday, forcing me to accomplish a ton of goals in 4 days instead of 5.
The stress at work has been incredible. More cuts, more downsizing, a lot of fear about whether or not next week my agents or my own post will be shut down and having us released or moved to another campaign… and though so far, it’s not hit me directly, what happens is that when someone in management leaves, their people are moved to someone else, and that is what is happening a lot to me. Being the sole CA senior supervisor of a US campaign, I was told that I never have to deal with or manage US agents, and yet my team is currently close to being half USA and half CA. Multi-linguistic challenges, multi-country procedures and multi-country laws are all things that are are tiny drops in the ocean of responsibility. I also now don’t manage 1 department… but must have the knowledge to manage THREE.
When I started, we were 14 managers… today we are 4. We were supposed to be 5 but disease and covid took the life of a good man a mere 1.5 weeks ago, and that, along with other managers leaving, all just squeeze that pressure up a touch higher. That event was also something that sucked the life out of me and everyone else who knew him. He was a good man.
Now, honestly, that is as deep as I am going to go, but suffice to say that yet again I’ve not touched an accordion in weeks. There is just no desire, no joy, even though I finally managed to get the last book needed to start on that first exam and was very happy to have been able to find it. Now, the stresses of the Christmas season are here too… and no one dare tell me that there are no stresses related to that!
I get up every morning and try to motivate myself to play my accordion, but instead of bringing me joy, it adds to my stress levels. I leave work chanting “after supper, just 15 minutes, you can do it… only 15 minutes, you can do it!”, and simply… can’t.
Believe it or not I am so stressed, I feel mild chest pains and my heart starts to race just thinking about starting my mornings and guilt of not playing accordion in the mornings or evenings.
So, rather than hold a guilt trip, I’ve decided to not hold myself to the timeline and just decided that 2022 will be a much better time for me to set exam goals for my RCM exams and begin that process in the new year.
That thought alone reduces a ton of stress off of me, as I set some very high expectations for myself… expectations that I was not able to meet, and it was killing me. So, the solution was to smile, take yet another break and not worry about my music until after the holidays, but if I get the desire to put on the accordion, I’ll enjoy that aspect of it, without any expectations, other than that moment of enjoyment.