30 March, 1999

Implosion

I suppose my life has just been building up to this gradually over the past few months.

Between all of the pressures that I have to deal with on an almost daily basis, it's a wonder this didn't happen sooner.

I managed to miss three meetings at work last week. I neglected to turn up for class and did not call the professor to notify her. I rarely went to bed before 3am.

The co-worker who brought me on board at this job was on vacation last week and for some reason his absence left me in a haze of uncertainty about what to do and with whom to speak about various elements of the project. The end result was, that I accomplished very little.

Yesterday, he returned from Colorado. I turned up at work around noon after another difficult night and was immediately plunged into an update session. He wanted to know where we stood in relation to the timeline on our current project of course. Then we dove into troubleshooting a possible solution to one of our Oracle problems.

Afterwards, I sat here staring at the screen, swamped with guilt, doubt and a sense of complete and utter incompetence.

When he came into my office a few minutes later to ask me a question, the dam broke.

I burst into tears, I started babbling, I lost it quite spectacularly.

Co-worker, bless his heart, simply gaped with consternation for a moment then shut the door and asked me what was wrong.

Out poured the list of frustrations, the worry about fitting in, the fear that I am not knowledgeable enough to complete this project within the desired timeframe. He sat down and talked with me gently, trying to pinpoint exactly where the problems were. Then he suggested that some training in ColdFusion might help to boost my confidence and give me the basic framework I need to implement the code more quickly.

Breathing a sight of relief, I printed out Allaire's training schedule and within an hour, I was registered for a class and planning out airfare and accomodation for a three-day trip to Chicago.

Slowly now, the worry about work was wisping away leaving me with the continuing set of concerns about multiple personal web projects, my fledgeling costuming business and school.

School.

That's a big one.

Yesterday, I sent a fax to the history department requesting a leave of absence for the remainder of the spring semester and for this coming fall. I wrote to both of my professors, to request an incomplete in one class and to beg for the privilege of continuing to sit in, without credit on the other one.

I await the verdict with bated breath while eyeing the syllabus of the class I skipped out on last week with consternation.

I had a paper due today.