it’s been a shitshow of a year, really, both for everyone in general and for me; surviving it is easily enough to be proud of. there is one thing, though, that I didn’t really expect this year, and that I’m very proud of: how far I’ve managed to push my confidence.
I started a new role at work at the beginning of this year, and while I knew how the specific tasks would differ from my old role, I hadn’t realised quite how much it would affect how I interact with large chunks of my workplace. suddenly, my sphere of responsibility expanded to include other people’s work and support and wellbeing; not only do I have so many more meetings, but my role in many of them is larger; I have so many more emails and phone calls that I can no longer rely on carefully scripting every conversation, I’ve just got to react as best I can.
it took a lot of work and a lot of adjustment! but it has worked changes in my nonwork life, and vice versa, in a way that I didn’t expect, and that I’m delighted by.
for example, I started doing occasional tabletop games on voice chat this year, after avoiding that for years. It was terrifying, and I’m still not great at it, but it made me better at speaking up in meetings when I was now expected to do so, and speaking up in meetings more made me more practised at bringing up ideas in future games, and discussing those meant it was easier to bring up ideas in meetings... (and when I had to actually chair a meeting, all these skills grew exponentially!)
having to rely on instinctive affect to send emails and make phone calls was terrifying, again, because I know I sound weird; but I keep doing it and I keep doing it; and it’s easier to deal with important out-of-work stuff like emailing my letting agency or sorting out council tax or dealing with doctors. I practise giving off the impression that I’m a professional and you can trust me, even if I don’t sound neurotypical/straight/whatever - because a lot of my job is getting people to trust me, which makes it sound way sketchier than it is - and I end up automatically acting that way out of work.
I started playing ffxiv this summer, and ended up really submersing myself in it over a pretty awful autumn/early winter - and at first I was terrified to do group content because I would be bad and people would judge me! and I was even more terrified to ask friends for help because they’d know I was bad, and I care about their good opinion! but I kept at it and I kept at it and now I can usually laugh at myself if I’m messing up, and I have friends I really enjoy playing with - and all this practice acknowledging when I fucked up a mechanic or caused a wipe means that I’m better at acknowledging mistakes in both my work and nonwork lives without being so anxious about it that I can’t do anything to fix it. which of course then makes people react better, so that next time I will be even better placed to deal with a mistake, and when I do hit someone who is reacting badly for whatever reason, I am better able to weather it as an outlier rather than a reflection of my worth of a human being.
and, of course, all of this adds to my ability to hold conversations and be a decent friend. I won’t say I’m perfect. I will say I’m getting better.
this is long and rambling, but - it’s been a bad year globally, for most of my friends, for me, but I do think in this one respect I am significantly different from the Rowan of a year ago, and I’m proud of it.
I suspect I’ve linked this for past year-end posts, but it’s still apt: here’s the vibe for the new year.
