A season ends:
I know I've declared the imminent end of school multiple times in the last couple of weeks, but it has now officially and finally arrived. Yesterday was the final day of end-of-year staff meetings, and last night was the totally rocking end-of-year party. When the students are gone, the adults really let their hair down! Best part -- lots and lots of dancing. I don't honestly know when was the last time I danced, and I had no intention of doing so last night -- I guess if one goes long enough without it, it stops seeming like a real option -- but a friend pulled me onto the dance floor, and once I was there, I had a blast. Honestly I haven't had that much fun in ages. Of course, I'm incredibly out of shape, so I mostly had to sit out every other dance and catch my breath and hang out talking with the non-dancing folks (i.e., men, whereas the dancers were almost entirely women -- of course, that's true of most things at FGS!). And then I'd go back out and dance again. Damn, it was fun.
You know, I used to be a person who would put on music and dance around my apartment by myself just for fun. When did I stop doing that?
Okay, it's true that I had to take Advil last night and that my knees were aching pretty badly when I went to bed, and then this morning I was so stiff from my five hours of eating and drinking and dancing. But by now I feel fine, and a few aches and pains are a small price to pay. Plus my colleagues are so much fun ... or at least the ones who stayed for the party -- kind of a self-selecting crowd, so no surprise that it was the really cool folks who hung out.
And a new season begins:
And then, as of today, summer officially began. So are you surprised at all to hear that my mood went steadily south over the course of the day until I had a short crying session in the bathroom a few minutes ago? Some of this is hormonal, and some of it is my typical response to the sudden loss of structure and externally imposed and validated purpose.
But some of it is also because an email I received today made it clear that I have, once again, offended one of my colleagues in the English department. And this is on top of apparently having (probably only momentarily) ruffled the feathers of another departmental colleague earlier this week. I think I'm no doubt being overly sensitive and getting upset about things that don't warrant it, and I'm sure this week's complications are due mostly to its being the end of the year when we're all tired and fed up with most everything. So I'm trying not to read too much into this latest kerfuffle.
But there are also broader relationships trends at work here. Today I realized that partly this all feels weird because I'm having such a different personnel experience from my last job. At St. Martyr's, my department all came to love me (although in some cases it took over two years, so I should be more patient), and the faculty at large mostly loved me, and only the administration wanted me gone. At FGS, the administration absolutely loves me -- as they've made quite clear, which is a very nice thing indeed in an administration -- and I seem to be pretty popular with the faculty at large (one of the reasons that last night's party was so much fun), and it's only in my own department that I'm considered difficult. Honestly, it's just so strange to be seen as a challenging or even problematic colleague, when I've always been thought of as the go-to gal, the hard-working and gifted person who throws her all into her work, who will help others out and be cheerful and a good friend as well as a good colleague. So it's strange to have some of my department not see me that way at all.
Since I was in a bit of a tailspin about all of this today, I sat myself down and listed out all of my departmental colleagues and my relationships with them and then categorized said relationships (which, yes, is a little anal, but useful). And really, when all is said and done, things aren't so bad. Here's the breakdown:
Good to great relationships: 4 colleagues, i.e., half the department
Complicated relationship that is actually mostly enjoyable and is getting better: my Dead Poets Society colleague, with whom I had the beginnings
of a really productive argument on Wednesday in which we spoke our
minds frankly about our differing writing pedagogies but did so within
parameters of clear respect for each other -- very cool.
Complicated relationship that is sometimes bad and sometimes achieves an uneasy stasis: my department chair
Relationships that are sometimes fine but sometimes distinctly un-fine: 2 colleagues, i.e., a fourth of the department, who happen to be the two that I seem to have offended this week; the one who sent the email is a sweet guy who is SO sensitive that it's very easy to offend him (
I've seen it happen with others as well, so it's not just me), and the other is a woman who does not suffer fools gladly and seems to think that most people are fools, so at least I'm in good company in being occasionally spoken to sharply by her.
So really, that's not actually that bad, is it? If we were a college department and didn't actually meet very often, this would all be fairly rosy; I think part of the issue is that I'm still getting closely to working more closely with colleagues and thus experiencing more and more opportunities to rub people the wrong way or be irritated myself. But it's also true that I've worried for awhile that I'm much like a colleague whom I find very irritating, and in scrolling back through my blog posts about school for the year, there seem to be several in which I comment on having spoken up too vociferously in a meeting or having argued with a colleague about something. So maybe I've become a crank who really is unpleasant to work with? Certainly good questions to ask myself, but not tonight, not when I'm already distressed.
One of the reasons I'm upset, I realize, is that I tend to internalize other people's irritation at me and think that maybe I really am a bad, bad person whom no one actually likes and that everything good that's ever happened is undeserved and probably about to be stripped away. In other words, your classic fraud anxiety. So mostly I'm describing it here so that I can see it in black and white, realize it for what it is, and get on with my summer.
Maybe I'm just being very, very efficient and getting all of the emotional turmoil packed into one day so that I'll really enjoy the rest of the summer? And hey, when am I going to get one of those really easy transitions, the kind that cause no emotional repurcussions at all?