the (first) worst of times
chapter 1: what i did (2018-2019)
have your words ever made a child cry? it doesn’t feel good.
sure if safety is at risk it might feel appropriate; but even when safety is not a concern, we can still use language that hurts.
i want to explore what it feels like to harm for the sake of nothing, even with the grandest intentions.
there is a power dynamic when you are using language to share an understanding between yourself and a child. one brain is more developed - - yours has experienced time to deepen and interweave its edges and creases and neurons with all that sparkles. the child’s brain is in the process of development, the sparkles are all that the little one knows they see and the rest of it is firing randomly. the concentrated connections come later, over time. but for a while, the child lives in blissful confusing awe as things connect and disconnect and flow in between. the more developed brain in the relationship will define the subtle and explicit elements of a container where the child’s ignorance can flourish into creative brilliance.
(at least, i think…i can’t pretend i’m an expert i’m just a person who was once a child)
if it’s important to your heart to teach others but you have not sufficiently fed the nurturing part of your being, you might create a shadow…an expectation to lead but from a place of wavering support.
so it’s 2018 and i don’t know about my own compulsion to find a complex understanding of every thought and feeling that i experience. instead i live in reaction mode.
i also don’t work with children so this version of me is clueless to whatever blurbs are written above.
late summer, the outside world is hot as hell and i count the seconds between each air conditioned space (car, my office bldg, my boss’s and his boss’s office bldg, cafeteria, my office bldg, car to elevator to apartment). my feet and hair get sticky with each trip into one space or another.
i’ve survived half of my first plan cycle and my peers and i are doing an effective job at keeping the ship afloat without a manager. i feel an edgy, competitive pride that my mind has kept up with the myriad of details and language and resources across all 7 of our jobs. i also feel deep comradery with my teammates, like we’re all crawling through a fire together.
the early stages of planning are technical; the later stages of planning are more behavioral. it’s a lot of reviews, questions, slicing and dicing information to comprehend the picture through many different lenses. this is often when we would catch unexpected items and misstakes, so i found a lot of support in keeping “known” items on (or ahead of) schedule.
one of the “known”s was an ~8 week workflow to plan overhead costs; “known” because it did not often vary, but it was a complex and layered thing to complete. we welcomed a new team member - let’s call her B - who would own this piece after a month of dedicated one-to-one training.
do you see where this is going? adult cait meet child B; child B meet adult cait.
my teammates and i spent the next two weeks training and planning and reviewing and training and asking questions and spreadsheet monkeying and PowerPointing and training and we each juggled about 1.5 full time jobs at a time. B was sharply present in the middle of it all, listening with wide eyes and finding ground in the weeds, unwinding detailed, nitty-gritty technicalities.
and then some arbitrary date surprised us, and some part of the plan wasn’t loaded into the right system in the right way and i sensed public failure. everyone might know that we - the ragtag team who could - couldn’t get it done. missing expectations felt dangereous to me, and my ego sensed safety at risk.
urgh this is hard to write!
i actually don’t remember all of the details because they weren’t important to me. i was present in my mind but not present in my senses so my memory is not reliable. the fear of unknown was screaming at me to listen and instead of tuning in to release and regulate my container (i didn’t know i could do that?!) i chose to barrel forward (buckle down & get-er-done!).
my teammate and i notice that our plan number loaded in the globally shared system is exceedingly low. other teams are relying on whatever number is in that system, and awareness of a mistake sets in and i am panicking.
what did we miss?! eek…the missing amount is suspiciously similar to the overhead number that we were working with B on….*click* *click* *click* *click*….sh*t…..
i turn back to teammate’s desk, “could you confirm we missed loading the overhead number that B was working on?”
i hear a few clicks, the cluck of tongue in cheek and a sigh, “that sure looks like what happened,” he said.
crap. what am i gonna do. how did i forget to check this particular thing last night, i knew today was the global deadline. i’ll save this file that rooted out the issue, and next time a deadline comes up i will have a way to verify what has been loaded. problem solved for future me.
but right now….we have to tell someone. who do we tell, how do we tell, when?
i glance over the partition to B, who is at her desk tuned into a meeting with one of the regional business leads. she is blissfully unaware to the doom that i sense like a cloud of thunder rolling in.
i know B’s calendar, and i know that she’s observing and supporting in this meeting, but she is not leading it. armed with that knowledge, i (overstepping my lane) signal to B to pull off one of her headphones.
“B did you load the overhead?”
ever ready to be helpful, B’s eyes go wide and she nods, “yes! yes! i made sure to check the load last night…let me see…”
a few clicks and i see her monitor glow white with a new file open. she is nodding, looking to me, indicating that everything looks as expected. i refresh my check file which still shows we are missing a chunk of the budget.
i think at this point B logs off of the meeting, or she leaves it running but stops paying it attention.
who was i to interrupt her working agency like this? i didn’t even know to consider that boundary at the time. get-er-done!
i walk over to B’s desk and we begin reviewing her file against my file. i nod and nod and then i look at her and tell her she loaded them in one system but not the other.
words spill out of my mouth like, “this is where you should have had them loaded. do you see how our numbers don’t match? we showed you how to load this particular item, we reminded you many times to check both systems, i sent you an email to refresh this to confirm, how in the world did this get missed? do you see that the number everyone else will use is now incorrect?” i had walked right into the blame game 101, ensuring opposing team B would feel my wrath.
at this point i can feel my heart beating in my throat and i interpret it as righteous frustration but really it is bile forming in response to the language i am choosing, the energy i am creating.
B blinks at her monitor then looks up at me with tears in her eyes.
my stomach felt like it dropped through my heels into the core of the earth. B’s tears start to spill over and she starts to apologize repeatedly and i take a slowing breath.
like walking into a brick wall i realize i am processing the experience of chaos, the need for order, a burgeoning plan toward solution, and the various players all at once while ultimately directing shame to a new teammate. i can feel i have crossed a boundary but i do not understand what i did wrong - - i was working in service of protection, or at least i thought i was? how did i harm her so deeply?
“let’s go into a meeting room, we’ll figure this out together,” i say in a gentler (foreign?) tone, and i lead B to a closed door space.
we spend the next hour speaking openly about the confusion that led to the missed number - “why are there so many different places to load the same thing?” - B was already showing me where we could improve but my focus was get-er-done, not get-er-different.
striving to mend what was broken, B and i give each other the gift of whole attention; we use different iterations of language and we emote freely and honestly we sort of face our biggest fears in that meeting room together…B’s being imperfect and juvenile in the context of a role, and my own inability to accept imperfection with love.
i knew i had hurt someone that meant something to me without intending to. and what was that knowledge worth, what did i receive? immediately i had made another soul feel dissonant and that felt antithetical in my heart but i had chosen to do it and i did not know how to face my shadow so instead i just felt scared and mean.
in that way B taught me to be vulnerable, raw, exposed. i didn’t like what was there but here it was indeed.
recall i noted this was an 8-week work cycle, and B had only been with us for one month…those of you in STEM can calculate there were 4 weeks left of the work cycle at this point. it really was not that big of a deal. 4 weeks is plenty of time to correct any budget miss, let alone something as straightforward as this.
after a few hours of brainstorming and a phone call or two to the boss’s boss, the resolution was clear and simple: memo it to the global teams and then update the system next week.
so why did it become such an ordeal?
i predicted an outcome that never needed to happen. i anticipated (and, truly feared) collective frustration and punishment from parties outside of our team.
instead of tapping into compassion (i did not know that was a choice) - i felt all the fear.
i trusted my panic like a fool and it had nowhere to lead me.
so i threw a tantrum and scared my friend and learned a lesson about myself that i will never forget.
protect the rhythm of your heart and feel how it cannot lie to you. there is no message more present or urgent than to show grace.
i’ve called my friend B, for bija -- sanskrit for “seed”.
B was the seed that sowed a new flower right in front of my eyes. we would spend another year working together through Excel sheets and budget reviews, systems upgrades and personnel changes.
in between work calls we shared an unravelling of the shadow realms of our identities. we would speak what we thought was unspeakable - - what it was like to make a stupid mistake in front of an executive, why it was frustrating for a coworker to ghost your email request, how maddening it was to put everything from a meeting into an email, where social politics crept into the hierarchies of leadership, what pressure came with being treated as both a technical grunt worker and a managing leader all at once. we held no part of ourselves back from each other, and still through our friendship we practice radical honesty.
on some arbitrary date in 2018, B was a clear-as-day mirror who i finally felt comfortable looking into. and then she showed me grace to act with the reigns of my heart no matter how imperfectly it came out. what a gift B showed me by simply feeling how she felt.
then i got promoted out of the team and B became “superstar” and our friendship grew even more woo-woo until i finally trusted her reflection enough to see something bigger, greater, more alive in my soul….(to be continued)
