Throwing in the cape...

Today marks the first day I took off my Super Woman cape and chucked it.  I've always hated that vision of the American woman doing it all, being everyone's rock, and tackling a man's world.  It's enough to make me gag.  But I realized today that I have been living it.  Not in that I'm this wonderful, tough, hard-working, ladder-climbing person.  I'm not.  I resembled the super hero in a more minute, detailed kind of way.   In other words, I am always trying to make everyone else happy.  And, today, working alone at a front desk with chaos zooming around me at 100 miles a minute, I lost it.  I lost my focus, my cool, and I lost my cape.  I suddenly understood how everyone else deals with this garbage.

Out of everyone who works the desk, I am the wussiest.  When things get hectic or guests gets rude, I am the one who freaks out.  Not in front of the guest, but inside.  I get angry.  I get flustered.  I want to be able to help everyone, while, at the same time, I hate everyone for intruding on my time and stress level.  I want to yell at them, "don't you see I am busy here?"  I guess sometimes things have to be at their worst before the lesson finally sinks in.  It was the moment when I had about 8 people at the desk waiting for 10 minutes to be helped, a guy I was currently helping who had a billing error which takes forever to figure out, one guy on the phone holding for an early check-in when we had no rooms available and he'd already called 5 times, and another lady on the phone playing 20 questions.  It was similar to one of those moments in the movies when the character is so overwhelmed that time stops, she looks around, realizes she is completely out of control, and says to herself, "fuck it".  I can only do what I can do, and if someone has a problem with waiting for 30 minutes at the desk, well that's just too bad.  Perhaps this is a new pattern for me, as this last line reminds me of my Billy Ray comment from the other night. 

Anyway, I think I made someone mad at me today.  Normally that would eat me up inside, but today, I just thought, "Oh well".  I was stressing out running late for my niece's dance recital after work, but I just thought, "I'll make it when I make it".  I was worried about spending money on a fancy dinner afterward, but I just thought, "Money comes, money goes".  And the world did not end.  I can only be what I can be, above that, I have no consolation.

The ballerina.  I can't believe it's been a year almost since I began this blog.  I remember blogging about her recital last year.  That was my first week of blogging.  It's cool to look back and see how the act of this near-daily writing has affected me.  It's really been a friend and an enemy, a way to break myself down and pick apart the pieces.  The greatest part, though, is that it has truly thrown my own talent in my face.