I Stress Therefore I Am

I appear to be turning into someone that I'm not altogether fond of, or comfortable with.

Certainly during the hours of 7 and 5 when I'm sat at my computer (interspersed with treacle-dripped, apple-of-my-eye loving looks at Newfy asleep by my side or gnawing softly on something that she shouldn’t, and some gallivanting around the garden in wellies holding a slobber-soaked toy while Newfy out runs and out plays me).

I know this person though. I know this familiar sensation. I should have expected it, or put up the emotional sandbags to quell the onslaught.

I should have spotted the signs, like the onset of a cold, you know its there however many vitamin tablets and Echinacea capsules you drown your body in, in a vain attempt to fend off threatening sniffles and snuffles and a whole world of miserableness.

I was about to say I couldn’t remember when exactly said person arrived, suitcases shipped in from wherever remote location I had managed to detain them for a good few months. But I do remember.

Things had been going okay, work wise. I’d sunk my over-sized canines into a meaty project (a virtual one naturally, for a WebStress sometimes-vegan) that, although the deadlines where completely unachievable and the workload was equally so, I was enjoying. It was…well, fun. I was, naturally, stressed. But it was a stress that I could feed off, thrive off, run my energy from. I’m sure if they found a way to harness the great power that stress conducts through me then we’d be in the money and the world would be a less polluted place (although severely short on teabags).

Then I had an offer.

Most people when their bosses offer them a substantial pay rise, a personal development grant and a promotion (to be in a position that they had promoted me to last year which has, as of yet, failed to be addressed) would be having kittens.

Not the WebStress.

But the catch?

Move to London. Or, as my boss eagerly put it in a desperate attempt to whet my appetite, to entice me back to those South Easterly climes, the commutable London area.

My boss left me to think about it, to resume our conversation the following Monday.

That Monday came and went, as did every day following that. Now it is 10 days since that conversation and my boss has not yet broached the topic again with me.

My silence, I imagine, speaks volumes. At the time I was polite, courteous, saying I would discuss the matter with my boyfriend. My discussion with my boyfriend went along the lines of ‘well, I’m not bloody going’ (it was slightly lengthier than that, but mostly just alternative arrangements of that sentence repeated, with a number of expletives scattered throughout for good measure).

There was an unspoken subtext though, in my declining of this proposal.

This is perhaps the third or fourth time I have turned down such a lucrative position (or at least ‘such a position’, the word lucrative could have been added if the pay rise was not significantly less than I am aware the company would be offering a new recruit for the same role). That is not counting the times where it has been casually slipped into conversation, embedded in rose petal praise.

I am deeply flattered. But I am also deeply frustrated. They were waiting, I know, until a suitable time had passed that my boyfriend had been back in the UK. His departure, after all, was the reason that they let me leave London but continue my role.

I am exceptionally lucky, I am aware, that my company were flexible enough to let me stay whilst working remotely. I have a lifestyle that suits me well: my pathetically weak immune system is not assaulted by the continual wave of public transport germs, I am in the countryside, my commuting time is roughly 30 seconds.

However, that luck was a result of a verbal resignation on my part, forcing a retraction of their previous comments of not letting me if they wanted to keep me.

And the subtext? That if I don’t accept this, they’ll employ someone to take the job that they gave me previously in a now seemingly redundant promotion. I will, although they won’t get rid of me, be essentially demoted. I’m not jumping to conclusions – this is what they said last time (which was postponed due to the onset of Christmas).

This is my choice, I understand. I am not going anywhere, so the choice has been revoked and I have unwittingly signed my own contractual agreements.

I am acutely aware that I won’t cope well with someone being employed for a substantial more than me, gazumping my role, to do the job that I have been doing for the past year and being my superior. I don’t have a problem with authority, only when that authority was previously mine.

While this may appear irrelevant to my stress levels, my brain, in its eccentric wiring, has fused the various thought fragments together in a spectacular explosion of stress to have caused the resurfacing of the fact that I really don’t like what I’m doing and am not wonderfully happy about the whole thing. Coupled with Christmas already upon our clients, a time where all the hard work of instilling good practice, form and function into their processes is swiftly abandoned and replaced with erratic, incomprehensible and unachievable decisions.

With every link in a chain of events that has formed over these past weeks, I have noticed a frown permanently embed itself within my forehead, a tension wind itself around my back and fingers, a frustration that cannot be subdued and an anger I don’t know how to abate. I am snappy, difficult and not very nice. Out of hours, at least, I manage to redeem myself from within this stress riddled cocoon, but during hours I imagine my PMs are all too glad that I’m several hundred miles away so when they finish briefing me in they don’t have to hear the expletive littered grumblings, rumblings and ramblings of a WebStress who is, to put it mildly, not very happy.
I must remember at times like this that I am being paid for my job. And paid well, for being in the South West. My mum does her best to subdue my temper with this reminder, although it isn’t always greeted with a sedated, understanding response. It is not my God-given right to enjoy my job. I have a job to pay the bills, to enjoy the rest of my life. In time things will change, things may change, eventually.

But that doesn’t quite work with me. I wish it did, I wish I could convince myself otherwise. I wish I could entice my thoughts around to this way of thinking, to make myself understand, to subdue the frustration.

I work hard, I work long hours, I work consistently and methodically (most of the time). I put energy into what I do, whole-hearted attempts, ideas dragged from my hibernating creativity, disturbing the sleeping mammal that buries itself deep within the depths of my subconscious to just try something different, something new. I have been told, in this job as in others, that I am not ‘pixel perfect’, that I am not the greatest designer, that I don’t live and breathe imagination, that I don’t excite the creative juices needed to allow new designs to thrive on. But I do try. I really do.

I have ideas in my head. They are there, waiting. For my tax bill to be paid? For myself to become so despondent that I leave? For a mortgage to be achieved? For children to be born? I don’t know.

But they are there, all of them, huddled together, screwed up tight, bunched together, occasionally allowed their playtime, their exercise, allowed to infect every thought, every action, until I am forced to rubber-band them back together, causing a knot within me.