It’s been quite awhile since the last time I wrote in this blog. The previous entry helped me find closure on the issue of our miscarriage, and after that I poured myself pretty heavily into things like programming and getting ready for our move back to Lewisville. I think the constant preoccupation has allowed my mind and my heart to settle as I was able to avoid thinking about anything other than surface-level daily life.
There are a few reasons that I think I needed a mental break. First of all, I was just coming out of a job that demanded social interaction all day every day through the phone and through facilitating presentations and training classes. I was forced to put on a mask of happiness and cheerfully accept verbal abuse from upset clients and frustrated coworkers. Over the 4 years that I worked on a customer service phone team, I began to develop some antisocial tendencies and a strong aversion towards using the telephone. I began to subconsciously work to avoid social encounters when in public, and it was a rather difficult struggle whenever I needed to actually use the phone at home.
Secondly, after I moved into the IT world as a software engineer, I began to be frustrated by the way that a large corporation does business as compared to the small startup companies that I interact with and follow on the Internet. The piles of paperwork and bureaucracy stifle creativity and choke efficiency in a corporate environment. A minor update to 1 row of a database takes weeks to plan, requires change management tickets, portfolio management requests, coordination through the database administration team, and countless hours spent waiting for a DBA to be ready to make the 5-second change. I’m a strong believer in agile methodologies and lean thinking, so being mired down in such a mess is disheartening.
On top of all of that, I’ve been working my way through the emotional turmoil of losing our baby and the excitement of learning that we have another chance. We found out several weeks ago that we are expecting again. This time the due date is in February. Things have gone well so far, though we had a scare this morning when Barbara began bleeding. After a hurried trip to the doctor, we were assured that everything was fine and we were treated to one of the sweetest sounds we could imagine right now – our baby’s heartbeat.
So, I think all of this has worked together to create something of a mental blackout for me. This weekend, however, I realized that it’s time to step out of that and return to normal. I’d like to resume my strongly social personality that I had before working in the call center, and I really want to start being excited about the future rather than disappointed with the present. I’m going to try to post a blog update here once a week (I’m setting calendar reminders), and I’m going to try to be more active on Facebook and Twitter. I hope to hear from you there!