Success Redefined

Today, I reached out.

A resource left the company. A project is teetering on the brink with their departure. For the project to succeed, this void must be filled. This was known two weeks ago. I arrived back from vacation and have discovered this void remains. To express my fundamental concern with the well being of the project and the company, I wandered into the GM's office, asked if they had a moment, and expressed my concern and indicated I would be taking action - but that before doing so, I wanted to discuss the situation with them. We spoke at length. I was unable to pay attention because my ears were buzzing, but I picked up enough to allow me parrot a few words. After this impromptu meeting, I wandered off and bumped into the VP under whom, several layers down, this cluster resides.

Me: "So, I talked to the GM about X, and we think we should Y".

VP: "Yup, me too. What do you think?"

Me: "I think we should do it. Excellent opportunities for mentoring and esablishing a beachhead for [a project].

VP: "Yup."

Now, I feel I have completed the most important part of my day. I have appeared engaged, authentic, and optimistic, all the while using a confident tone. I would be happy to do more, but the next several months are already booked, and I can't afford the time to fight the fight needed to do Y above. No one can. As I write, I can see the project tilt so very slightly a touch more towards the abyss.

Grinding Down

Where do I start? The grinding sameness of every day, week, and month? The insipid infection of nowhere and nothing? Pursuing every day the monotonous needs…get up, go to work, maybe have another argument on the phone on the way in, arrive angry, go through the day with a mind twisted by anger, push through the same challenges, come home, eat dinner, have necessarily superficial conversation (so many little demands, things that have to be done, drop offs, clean, and god knows what other drudgery sucking away the ability to care or engage), distract self with a bit of surfing (can’t read as it’s too solitary a pursuit and would result in endless drama – but surfing is a horrid mean that leaves everyone unsatisfied, but just not quite enough to crack open and expose raw frustration and sorrow), then slide into unconsciousness. Repeat. Up, work, argue, balance, exhaust, pass-out.

What is this doing to me? I weigh more than I ever have.I'm exhausted. So tired. I often consider mashing the gas pedal down and slamming into a tree, pole, or off of a cliff. It would kill me yes indeed. I have to stop my body from following the ideation…have to force myself not to. Of course, you might say why not change your life rather than end it. Excellent question I’ve spent some time with. It’s much more difficult to sort out changes while maintaining continuity. How do I know which pieces should give, which cannot, which pain to choose, to avoid? How do I know what choices to make? I don’t know how to choose from the many. Colliding with a fixed object at speed is manageable. Sick, isn’t it.

Grinding, grinding, grinding down. I have access to no variety of experience without first diluting them through discussion and compromise. I have no experience of my own. I must always find the compromise in everything I do. I have deflated myself so as to not offend or distress. And now I am tepid, taupe, and sometimes struggling to remember where what I am and why I live.

A Reason to Smile

Today, while hunched at my desk, my dull gaze was caught by a flash from my phone. I considered ignoring it and continuing practicing my dull, but was eventually overcome by a wayward remnant of innate human curiosity. What I found helped me smile, so I will share.

Text1: There I was. Sitting in Chicago. Enjoying a salad. Then I realized I had missed my plane.

Time passed while I considered this and decided a mild giggle was in order. Then, while working myself up to giggle, another message arrived.

Text2: My goodness, I`m developing a serious alcohol dependency.

I did in fact break into a quiet giggle after reading this. Wages of sin..? No, just the effects of our protracted struggle against the crushing momentum of our profession. Onwards and upwards.

Rock On

Another day has passed. There were multiple points of failure. In my efforts, others efforts, lives. A series of implosions and dazed looks. Occasionally, we break out in booming laughter, hoping our wheezing desperation will drive off bad spirits and ill luck. I’m uncertain if it’s effective, but I hope it is, and, well, over the years I’ve learned hope is a strategy. Truly, there may be no other we’ve ever used. We struggle forth with nary an ill word. Optimism is indeed the by and only word. We must proceed. We must adhere to policy. Success is inevitable. And, on the off chance that we in fact fail, we must exert our every creative fibre to present failure as success. Though I’m with excellent people and we do, despite our best efforts, succeed some of the time - it is a charnel house driving all of us downward into a twisted spiral of half-truths and fictions. There’s no point in what I’ve said – no desire to communicate anything beyond the invariable, inestimable, breakdown of potential and ability within which I drift.

Blurgle!

Good lord, I blinked and it's been months. I dove down deep into the mayhem, battled the maddening moments and came through only to discover it's time to begin the same bloody exercise, but this time, in multiples. Good fun.

Alright, today I've nothing more than a brief litany of suffering. First: to the dentist yesterday to have two fillings...refilled. Sadly, one of them wouldn't freeze properly and so the drilling was, at times, excruciating. I hate the kind of pain that makes your body leap quite beyond your control. Second: did I mention before I went to the dentist I had very bad abdominal pains, had to make a dash to the toilet and let loose the dogs of war upon the porcelain battlefield! Well, this pattern has continued throughout today and I'm feeling more than a wee bit uncomfortable with this most recent development.

Alright then. Well. Gainful employment continues to be an exercise in ADD and presenting a (nearly) unfailingly positive exterior. Not true to self, but what the hell, I'm certainly learning something.

HMS Failure

Today, there was failure. I expanded the scope of my efforts, pulling more and better bodies into the shower of fail. First, someone made the mistake of gathering my attention by asking a question. I went to their desk and proceeded to waste 20 minutes of my and their time in an unfocused attempt to ignore what they were saying and reach no tangible or useful end point. Having done them this favour, when I was later faced with a conundrum of my own, I decided I now had the capital to spend, and so, reached out through the ether, and asked them if they could "just pop over for a quick second".

Bwahahahahaha!

They arrived. And, unlike myself, were focused on my communication, and shortly had an answer. I asked them to try it. It failed. They then came up with another answer. I asked, knowing full well the outcome, if they could, ahem, try it. Failure. At this point, their eagerness had dissapated, but they were comitted. They couldn't walk away without defaulting on the contract they'd signed when asking for my assistance, and because of their initial joi de vivre, couldn't, in good faith, leave and promise to come back later with an answer. Oh no, they were trapped.

At this stage, I wandered off with a "I'll be back in a bit". Went, had a coffee, found a fellow failure, discussed the slowly dying man back at my desk, then wandered back to see how much of his soul had eroded during my short absence. The answer was sadly evident.

"So, how's it going"?

"I wish this thing would just f-off. Just fuck right off".

"You know...maybe I should ask someone else and let you get back to your thing".

"No, I need to do this. I'll need to know anyway".

"Weeeeellll.......if you're sure".

Vein popping followed. There were curses. There were further failures. There was a strong sense in my chest that, yes indeed, all was as it should be; my fellow failure swung by to observe the suffering, looked knowingly at me, sadly smiled, and shuffled off to another lonely night.

After about an hour, the poor mangled mess of a man I'd pulled into the pit of my issues sorted it out. There was no celebration. Just a kind of weary acknowledgement that this particular piece of horror had been addressed...but that there would be more. I know why he felt this way. There will be so much more failure. Endless seas of failure remain to be sailed by this good ship.

At Work...Failure...

I'm at my desk. My legs are shaking. I occasionally glance at the taupe fabric of my cubicle walls. My head is often supported by my hands. I often forget what I'm doing: moving my mouse across the screen to discover I don't know which of the 40 windows I was seeking, or why I was seeking it...(quick aside: I had to step away, came back, and discovered my head in my hands again). At other times, I sit staring at the screen, just quietly sighing to myself and just...staring. Sometimes, I sigh loudly enough to be heard by other cubicles, and they'll sigh a sympathetic sigh, which has been known to set of another sigh. A sigh chain: the sound of small implosions of the soul. We often walk bent over and discuss the failures of our efforts and how much we wish we could do more than just enough, and how it wouldn't matter if we worked 40 hours a day, the work to be done would just bubble up and so we would continue to fail. Unstoppable, immense failure. The daily tasks are just the tip of the monstrous iceberg of...failure waiting for us weeks, months, and years from now.

A last note: one of the senior folks stopped by my desk to chat at the end of the day. To quote:

"Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck".

He was suffering the effects of, yes, you guessed it, failure.