March 27 - The day I cried at work

Not to suggest that I have never cried at work before. Because in the three years I spent working before grad school, I can recall plenty of times when I cried. Usually due to feeling underpaid and under-appreciated. The CEO was, by necessity, very sympathetic to these kinds of breakdowns, as his company was run almost solely by female twenty-somethings. We were pretty much awesome, and he knew that. Which is why these breakdowns would occasionally land you in his office, and more often than not, you'd come out with a raise. Such are the benefits of working for a small company. Looking back, I probably should have cried MORE.

Since my current job leaves me feeling neither underpaid nor under-appreciated, not even a little bit, I was surprised by today's emotional outburst. Granted, I kind of suspected it was going to be a bad day when I headed to the ice machine at 8:30 AM for my first cup of ice water and it was empty. Occasionally by the end of the day we are out of ice. But at 8:30 in the morning? What, did someone bring in their cooler and fill it at 8:15? Anyway, anyone who knows me knows I cannot function without ice in my glass. So I should have known then what the day would hold. Instead I found out the hard way. In my 9:00 AM meeting with the boss man and a co-worker.

I had done a fair amount of prep for the meeting, as I'm in charge of planning a rather significant cost savings event this spring. As I laid out my initial ideas in the meeting, I was stopped by both men, who informed me that there's actually a formal process these types of events need to go through when planning and scoping them out. It's not so much that I felt like an idiot, because I can get over that, but it bothered me to no end that no one had told me this. I had just been told, by my boss, to start planning. What if I had spent days and days on this? Planned the whole thing myself? Why didn't someone point me in the right direction if there was an established process already in existence? I just sat there, listening to them tell me what I should have done, and suddenly I recognized a sensation I have come to despise...the one that tells me I am so full of feeling that if I wanted to, I could cry. Of course I suppressed it. Like I would really cry in the middle of the meeting. I even suppressed it when I vented to the co-worker afterward about how frustrating the meeting was for me. I can't tell you how upset I was...even though I knew at least some amount of it was an overreaction.

When I sat down at my desk, my eyes began to water and I knew I wouldn't be able to even get to the restroom before the tears came. I sat in a conference room for 10 minutes and cried. Not really about the meeting. More because the week itself was a little overwhelming. Either that or today was just about being a girl on a certain day. Either way, I hate that I cried. I should have been able to hold it together. The thing is, sometimes we just can't help it.