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Jan. 31st, 2012 12:49 pmI grew up by the Hudson River.
The Hudson is the river that GE polluted for decades; they dumped tons of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, into it, and then spent a while denying, in chronological order, that they'd done it, that PCBs were harmful and carcinogenic, and that the river needed to be cleaned.
But they lost the court cases throughout the eighties and nineties, and they looked like morons when they ran ads about how the river had "cleaned itself," late in the nineties and into the twenty-first century, and eventually, in 2002 or so, they agreed to have the river dredged.
I can't remember a time when I didn't know the word "dredge." When I didn't know what it meant.
Poor old Hudson. After Monday's therapy session, I have a little more sympathy for her.
The thing about dredging is, it's a violent process. You tear at the bed of the river, scrape away at everything that's fallen to the bottom and come to rest, and you rip out the pollutants. It had to be done to the Hudson, PCBs don't just go away on their own; and I know I have to do it to the various harmful pollutants that have settled their way into my brain. But it's an awful process.
Monday was a dredging session.
Last week at work was rough, and that's putting it mildly; I came down with a bad case of impostor syndrome, and poured a lot of energy into stomping on it; I worked really really hard on mastering a project which is huge and complex and has a tight deadline, and felt inadequate; I slept poorly and lost my appetite and was generally in a bad state.
This is the project which, when it came onto my radar about a month ago, I told my boss I didn't feel comfortable handling on my own. He said, "Yeah, and I'm not too pleased about making you be the tech lead on something on this scale so fast, but we don't have anyone else." So now I'm in charge of this thing which is frankly beyond my pay grade, and it's beyond my pay grade because I do not have the skills for it yet; and for the past three weeks, I have been relatively unsupported as I tried to level up as fast as I could.
I've needed help on this fucking project for at least a week now. I've known I need help for at least that long. But I haven't been able to bring myself to ask for it.
So this morning I sat on the floor of my sunny apartment, and talked to my therapist about this, and cried a little.
(It's funny; ever since I moved and had to switch to phone sessions, I have cried more — twice — than I ever did in the five previous years of face-to-face sessions. And I think I know why.)
Apparently my belief that if I ask for help, it will be denied me, and all I will have accomplished is making myself vulnerable, is bedrock-deep. I don't know when it started, but I can tell you this: it took me four years at Emma, the single most nurturing environment it has been my privilege to be in, to veneer over it with some amount of trust in the people around me, the authority figures in my life, and then that veneer got pretty thoroughly shattered during my gap year and my first year-and-change at college. I've never really gotten even the veneer back, much less the ability, the strength, to be that kind of vulnerable again.
This is my emotional truth: asking for help is dangerous and useless, and it is better to grit my teeth and survive as best I can.
I know that this is, in the simplest possible terms, wrong. Most people are not cruel. They will not deny help to someone who asks for it merely for their own amusement or because — you know, I can't even think of how to end that sentence. Because.
But I believe it.
This session was spent dredging at that concept, that bedrock belief, and I spent all day shaking a little from the intensity of it; spent all day with tears pressing at the backs of my eyeballs.
And then, because of Murphy's Law, I had a meeting with a co-worker, who had offered to support me on the Dreaded Project; that meeting did not turn into divvying up the remaining work for this week's deadline, but instead was about an hour of him going through everything I had managed to put together over the past three weeks, and explaining the ways in which I had diverged from agency style. Which I would normally be okay with — I am fucking delighted to have an agency style to adhere to, and am mildly in love with the process of code review — but now I have to go back and fix everything I've already done, plus everything else I already had on my plate. Which frankly was quite enough to be going on with.
I foresee a week of nine-hour days at the office. I foresee a week of pouring intellectual energy into the Dreaded Project and emotional energy into being brave and I am going to be very surprised if I have physical energy to so much as take the stairs instead of the elevator after work.
This is going to be fun.
The Hudson is the river that GE polluted for decades; they dumped tons of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, into it, and then spent a while denying, in chronological order, that they'd done it, that PCBs were harmful and carcinogenic, and that the river needed to be cleaned.
But they lost the court cases throughout the eighties and nineties, and they looked like morons when they ran ads about how the river had "cleaned itself," late in the nineties and into the twenty-first century, and eventually, in 2002 or so, they agreed to have the river dredged.
I can't remember a time when I didn't know the word "dredge." When I didn't know what it meant.
Poor old Hudson. After Monday's therapy session, I have a little more sympathy for her.
The thing about dredging is, it's a violent process. You tear at the bed of the river, scrape away at everything that's fallen to the bottom and come to rest, and you rip out the pollutants. It had to be done to the Hudson, PCBs don't just go away on their own; and I know I have to do it to the various harmful pollutants that have settled their way into my brain. But it's an awful process.
Monday was a dredging session.
Last week at work was rough, and that's putting it mildly; I came down with a bad case of impostor syndrome, and poured a lot of energy into stomping on it; I worked really really hard on mastering a project which is huge and complex and has a tight deadline, and felt inadequate; I slept poorly and lost my appetite and was generally in a bad state.
This is the project which, when it came onto my radar about a month ago, I told my boss I didn't feel comfortable handling on my own. He said, "Yeah, and I'm not too pleased about making you be the tech lead on something on this scale so fast, but we don't have anyone else." So now I'm in charge of this thing which is frankly beyond my pay grade, and it's beyond my pay grade because I do not have the skills for it yet; and for the past three weeks, I have been relatively unsupported as I tried to level up as fast as I could.
I've needed help on this fucking project for at least a week now. I've known I need help for at least that long. But I haven't been able to bring myself to ask for it.
So this morning I sat on the floor of my sunny apartment, and talked to my therapist about this, and cried a little.
(It's funny; ever since I moved and had to switch to phone sessions, I have cried more — twice — than I ever did in the five previous years of face-to-face sessions. And I think I know why.)
Apparently my belief that if I ask for help, it will be denied me, and all I will have accomplished is making myself vulnerable, is bedrock-deep. I don't know when it started, but I can tell you this: it took me four years at Emma, the single most nurturing environment it has been my privilege to be in, to veneer over it with some amount of trust in the people around me, the authority figures in my life, and then that veneer got pretty thoroughly shattered during my gap year and my first year-and-change at college. I've never really gotten even the veneer back, much less the ability, the strength, to be that kind of vulnerable again.
This is my emotional truth: asking for help is dangerous and useless, and it is better to grit my teeth and survive as best I can.
I know that this is, in the simplest possible terms, wrong. Most people are not cruel. They will not deny help to someone who asks for it merely for their own amusement or because — you know, I can't even think of how to end that sentence. Because.
But I believe it.
This session was spent dredging at that concept, that bedrock belief, and I spent all day shaking a little from the intensity of it; spent all day with tears pressing at the backs of my eyeballs.
And then, because of Murphy's Law, I had a meeting with a co-worker, who had offered to support me on the Dreaded Project; that meeting did not turn into divvying up the remaining work for this week's deadline, but instead was about an hour of him going through everything I had managed to put together over the past three weeks, and explaining the ways in which I had diverged from agency style. Which I would normally be okay with — I am fucking delighted to have an agency style to adhere to, and am mildly in love with the process of code review — but now I have to go back and fix everything I've already done, plus everything else I already had on my plate. Which frankly was quite enough to be going on with.
I foresee a week of nine-hour days at the office. I foresee a week of pouring intellectual energy into the Dreaded Project and emotional energy into being brave and I am going to be very surprised if I have physical energy to so much as take the stairs instead of the elevator after work.
This is going to be fun.
