I spent this week with a slight sense of wonder, navigating through work and home life with a general feeling like something was missing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What could that be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh right, crippling stress. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve* spent the last 2+ years in the “you are way behind, never going to catch up, buried but still with pressing deadlines, and making enough progress to continue” mode on a very large project. And as it turns out, when you’ve had the stress piled on for almost 3 years, it takes a while to feel normal once it’s (mostly) removed. Maybe a long while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*Not just me, but I can’t speak for anyone else.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The good news is, said Along the way on this project, we played vicious games of whack-a-mole with several different types of problems, one of which fell mostly on me and ultimately lasted more than a year (!!). So here I am, occasionally looking at something and going “Wait, that was 2017?!? How can that be from 2 years ago?!” because in some respects it’s been a complete blur. Or maybe a fog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Actually, what comes to mind is the trench battle in Star Wars; dive in, get shot at interminably and in waves, finally win, and take a big breath when you pull up out of the trench. But yeah, 3 years in the trench. <\/p>\n\n\n\n [I should note at this point: in the grand scheme of things, I realize I’m talking about work stress. It’s not as big of a deal as it could be, say, if it was stress from dealing with a sick family member, failing financials, or any number of other issues. Things are good. I give thanks daily that things are as good as they are, and that work stress is (mostly) the toughest kind I face. Most people in the world would envy me my piddly little work problems, and even some people I know would as well, given what they’ve gone through.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, also along the way, we’ve had several big milestones, and more than one person has asked me “aren’t you excited to be done with that?” My answers varied, but because I didn’t want to hurt any feelings or bring anyone down, or make them feel like it was wrong to feel good about an accomplishment… mostly they weren’t the purely honest one, which would have been “I’ll be excited when I’m working on something new.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, though, here I am working on something new (a few of them), and it’s not exactly the catharsis I expected.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don’t get me wrong: it’s great, and even a bit blissful because there is nothing at this stage on those projects that will ruin my day\/week\/month\/year. If it doesn’t work, there’s another thing to try, another way to do it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that, later on in projects, if you’re wired like me and unlikely to go around smashing pottery and yelling that everything has to stop and be changed… you’re kind of locked in in a way that can be incredibly stressful. Particularly if you’re not the master of your destiny and have signed up to do something a specific way, and it later turns out that isn’t the best way, but no one has (or thinks they have) the time or money to redo it. I’m thinking some about how to identify those sooner and handle them better in my own work, but progress there seems slow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But hey, no more laying awake at night with stomach issues that I had no idea were stress-related. That’s pretty darn nice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Today I asked a co-worker from the project “Are you wandering around feeling like there should be some sort of crisis you need to attend to?” and got an immediate yes. So it’s not just me, and not by a long shot. But since I’m the only one left who has been on it the whole time (also: !!), I’m vain enough to think that I’ve got the strongest case of this. It would be nice to shake it off, and I think I am starting to, but researching this topic largely seems to point to: “get out from under the stress, and wait.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n So that’s what I’m doing, and I think it’s going to work, but I can’t say I’m fully out of the fog just yet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent this week with a slight sense of wonder, navigating through work and home…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegigl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}