Ok fine I’ll say it. I’m from New York. Not downstate, somewhere upstate, but it’s all the same. And there’s a reason I’m saying this. Since my breakdown I’ve been more mindful about the breaks I take. I made sure at my old job that I would take my lunch after I broke down. An hour for me. The messages could wait. Prior to COVID I remember going to work and then leaving feeling like I entered two different worlds. Like I was sucked in, spit up, chewed out, and then on the way home I’d have to come to terms with the day. Process all the conversations. Moving a million miles a minute. Constantly. We don’t know any different. And I thought that I got a lot better, moved slower. But it’s engrained in me. Probably since I was a little kid. Trained to be harsh when I speak. Move quickly. Have no patience. We don’t mean to be that way, we’re just in a fuckin’ hurry. To get where? Even we don’t know. We’re all just running in circles, but when it’s all you know it shocks you to slow down. Then it shocks you again to realize that not everyone works like that.
Now I’m not saying it’s the best way to work by any means, there is a lot of room for error when your whole goal is speed. But you also learn how to process information faster out of necessity. People talk fast, move fast. You have to think fast, act fast. It’s just the nature of things. So, again for the millionth time, I just left a company that I worked at for 15 years. Before that I was still a teenager, but I had many jobs. They were all owned and operated in NY. They were mainly employed by people who lived in my area, in NY. It is all I know, it is all I’ve ever known. Of course, I’ve held jobs where you call different parts of the country. I’ve traveled. But my day to day and the way I’ve worked has always been a certain pace.
I say this for a reason. Because WFH changed a lot of things, and now my company is based in the mid-west. My team is all over, but mostly in the south. My boss resides in Florida. And I guess you could say I’m going through a little culture shock. I’m used to running, full speed ahead, no training, figure it out as I get it done. But here? Here they ask me if I have questions. If I need help. I’ve already run through my list, proactively built partner relationships, made client calls, all in a week. And I’m bored. Today I talked to one of my partners in NYC and I felt like I was speaking my language again, I started to move like I normally would. I needed my boss to know something so I shot a message off to him, haphazardly, while I was doing something else. Something I used to do and has been done to me constantly, for years, in my former role. But this time, my boss called me and said, “Whoa, slow down, you can’t just bring me in halfway like that. What now”?
So I guess you could say that today I learned the problem is me. Well, that maybe I am a little different. Or maybe I have to be mindful of how I work, or the speed I move. Something I never had to be self-conscious of before. I thought that I was mindful now, but I guess I’m not so sure. Everyone else seems so slow. Why do I move so fast? Where do I even go?
The Girl Without A Face 