May 17th

I have to be very careful about my mood swings. I had a great weekend — the perfect combination of hard work and pleasure, rest and idleness, travel and discovery, exercise and spirituality. One of the best weekends in a long time. And what is more — I planned those activities, made sure everything is in place to achieve them, and just went for it and done them. And I still had plenty of time to nap or watch stupid videos on YouTube. I was content and happy on Sunday night…and then Monday morning reality hit in the face like a ton of bricks:

• Problems at work. After a few quiet weeks, now shit had to hit the fan — email after email about delays, cancellations, trucks breaking down, clients wanting more and more, complete chaos everywhere.
• No clear chain of command — who is responsible for what, who will take charge of what and when. Different departments pulling in different directions.
• Clients taking a piss, placing new orders while knowing all the problems our company and industry have — they don’t care, just want more products and want them now.
• Microsoft taking a piss as well — a new Office update that made Excel unusable with OneDrive. My colleagues had this problem last week, it took several hours for each case to be resolved by IT. Well, in my case the IT manager spent 3 hours working on my issue without success.
• That meant I had to work opening my Excel files in a browser — and that is a really shitty way of working — excel in a browser doesn’t have all the functionalities of a regular program and all the formatting and usability is very scaled-down.

When I finished for the day I was steaming. No traces of good mood from the weekend. I watched my anger very closely (something that learned at my therapy), and can honestly say — I have no influence over all that happened today at work, I did all I could with a bad situation and all the problems. I cannot blame myself in any way. So, the question is — why get angry at all at the things that I have no influence over? But I got angry, it took me a while to calm down. I could feel this anger slowly building in me, every couple of minutes with another problem after another problem — this anger dispersing all the good I experienced over the weekend, this anger becoming all-consuming and slowly turning into a boiling rage…

I was able to stop this anger from being completely dominant in my mind and taking over my emotions, for now. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I know I will be better prepared for problems at work, and hopefully, I will solve them one by one without too much of an issue. I will be better prepared to keep my emotions in check (without bottling them inside — I don’t want to overreact now in the opposite direction).

I have to remember — one day at a time, one hour at a time, one problem at a time. It gets easier, and it will get easier soon, I just have to weather those current storms and watch my moods, while being very aware of what is causing them in the first place.