Unexpected Gift

2013 has been a rewarding year, but it didn't lack for frustration and stress.  I can't say anything about my life is difficult, but I stress myself out and let things get to me.

Of course, the ultimate outcome of that, this year, has been a fairly storytelling-tidy ending, with the year's worth of concern and fear at my job bringing me to a new one.  Even as much of a drama queen as I am, I hesitate to take writing credit - still, the way my brother described it, I'll take.  I was proactive this year.  Even with my skepticism about the means by which I actually managed it, I did in the end manage to change my situation.  The echoes of poison I've heard since leaving do little to contribute to regretting this, so 2014 will have to start with a healthy consideration of gratitude.

The months spent worrying were also months spent lying to my mom - not because I'm a juvenile incapable of being honest with my mommy, but because she had plentiful concrete worries without my whinging to her about unformed and mercurial ones.  She's since thanked me multiple times, told my brother, my aunts and uncle, and apparently her Sunday school class, how glad she was I never said anything about the situation before I resolved it - and I had a new job to tell her about.

The unlooked-for side effect of a long time lying, and of stress deflected and deferred in a lot of contexts, is that now that it's "over" (hee ... yeah, I know life's not actually as episodic as this tidy little storytellers-delight of an arc has run) the anticlimax has me both numb and massively emotional.  For a week or so now, I've noticed myself overcome at things which, while meaningful, probably aren't of such a proportion they should get me weepy.

It's not a bad thing.  It's letting go after holding on for a long time.  It's a liberty to feel after constraint.  It's the luxury of my gender and my hormones.  It's relief, and it's fear too.  The "what have I done?" factor is fairly small, highly manageable, but it's only reasonable to check yourself even in what looks a bit like success.

One of the completely new things for me in the new job is its culture.  I've been in the financial and IT/tech worlds for so long, to work in operations for a company that sells an actual, concrete product is completely different.  The wardrobe will be both accommodating to my professional style and more liberal in some ways, too, which is an interesting opportunity.  The personalities aren't tech nor Project Management nor securities nor even anything I would label as (typically) "corporate".  It's a corporation, to be sure, but it's not an insurance nor financial concern, and its' unlike any corporate culture I've known, so that's exciting.

Another new thing is being in not just mainstream corporate America, but the commercial sector.  This means that the infrastructure of my job, if you will, is entirely unfamiliar to me in some ways - I have an iPhone, for goodness' sake.  Haven't figured the thing out, nor even finished activating it yet (the infrastructure of firewalls from sites like iTunes hasn't changed ... heh), but it will perforce become necessary to be a smartphone carrier.

In keeping with my luddite-ery and contrarianism, I'll content myself with the fact that this is my "work phone" and not a toy I succumbed to personally.  And, of course, the damnably smug nonconformist's knowledge that (a) millions of people would consider such a stance both inexplicable and idiotic, and (b) it'd piss off just the right people, at that.  Heh.

Having been so sick I missed the marking of the new year coming into 2013, I look forward to finding my way into 2014 on steadier legs.  I look forward to not having the cognitive dissonance both of missing that subjective transition and the sort of inchoate fear of this year.

I hope all of you will find your way - steady legs, fine good fortune, and all.  Let me know how it goes ...