retirement

I slept through the night last night, the whole night, right until 4:58am.  (I get up at 5:15 anyway, so I don't count this as waking up early.)  Prior to last night, I have woken up in the middle of the middle of the night every night for about a month.  When I wake up, I wake up abruptly, plunged immediately into some stupid dilemma from work, and trying to figure out what to do about C, or remembering kids I have forgotten to see.  So to sleep through the night was good, very good.  I think it happened because I did a little bit of yoga last night before bed.  (Not a class, just fifteen minutes by myself on the living room floor, but it was still better than having a glass of wine, which has been my other very clever stress management technique - and has not helped me to sleep at all.)

I recognize there is something about my coworker, C, that is becoming unmanageable for me.  And I recognize my pattern of impatience with my colleagues and their imperfections.  M drives me crazy too - but she is predictable.  I can always count on her to be late, to miss her deadlines, to contribute nothing to a team effort.  But also, she is emotionally flat and requires no maintenance.  C, on the other hand, is totally unpredictable.  Sometimes she surprises me by being helpful when I expected her to be useless.  But then she also frequently startles me by insulting our colleagues to their faces, and then bursting into tears when they call her out on it.  The moral of the story is that I am becoming too wrapped up in this woman's behaviour and I need to go back to yoga class so I can sleep.

I am starting tonight at 5:30.  Although I've gone back in starts and stops many times since the vertigo, I have never fully returned to daily practice.  I keep psyching myself out, which is unnecessary.  The vertigo has ended, and besides, even it it comes back, it isn't life threatening.  This time I am not promising myself that this is a return to daily practice, because it likely isn't.  But I hope it can be a return to some kind of self-management that will help me take my focus away from work and to get some rest.

That said, today I plan to have an uncomfortable conversation with C about the fact that a lot of her work is slipping onto my desk because there are several people in the building who don't want to talk to her and therefore bring their requests to me instead, even when she is the one who should be handling them.  This will likely cause her to have another cry and I will keep taking long slow breaths in through the mouth, out through the nose.

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