I have granted myself a small lie-in this morning and feel pleasantly relaxed as a result. Also, I failed to note that it was a bank holiday and my weekday alarm woke me at seven, along with Geiger demanding to go outside. Back to bed was essential of course. Going to sleep feels OK, like it’s a thing that’s within my compass, which is a really lovely and novel feeling. I’ve little to report today, other than I’m looking out on a busy week which includes only one and a half proper days of work, plus boardgaming, doing our Aconyte Books stuff at UK Games Expo in Birmingham, followed by the Improvised Star Wars Show at Bath Fringe. All those things and the bank holiday do rather knacker my nice cycling and swimming routines, but as long as I get my swim in tomorrow, everything will be fine. Getting back from Birmingham in the middle of a train strike may offer some challenges however…
But apart from the prospect of another bus journey these are all things to look forward to. I’m especially looking forward to the rare treat of seeing my colleagues in person, playing some games and hanging out for a bit. I adore working from home, and being free of the purposeless distraction of being in an office is brilliant, but I do very much like these people. I’ve realised I’m a small team person, and every time I’ve been in an environment where the concept of “team” expands to be fifteen, twenty, hundreds of people I just don’t enjoy it. It’s just too big and it doesn’t feel like anything to do with me. This only confirms for me that I’m a detail, do stuff guy, not the big vision strategic stuff which involves lots of meetings and remembering dozens of peoples’ names. I’m quite content to be a cog in a machine, as long as I don’t have to look at the whole machine. I mean, it can be interesting, but none of it is the stuff I need to get done. I suspect that’s where a lot of the stress back working in Probation came from – the consolidation of small teams into a larger, noisier one, followed by the catastrophic restructuring at national, regional and local levels (for sure, a massively stressful, badly managed and fucking stupid process) continually changed what the team was and what we did, never mind who was in it. Horrible, horrible stuff. It’s a bit like being in an improv team I suppose: you want just enough people to introduce chaos and fill in the gaps, but not so many people that no one gets enough stage time or space to explore their own ideas in the show, or that the sheer number of characters and detail becomes overwhelming. More than two, less than ten works for me, and ideally an odd number.
No idea where all that came from, but that’s sort of the pleasure of giving myself this time to muse and introspect without any particular purpose other than figuring out how I feel on any given day. I do feel more present, and I wonder how much maintaining this mental health track has been responsible for generally being up and in a good place. I have to think about it, at least for a bit, every day. Having the record and knowing that I felt just dandy two days ago was very helpful in digging myself back out the week before last, so even though this feels very self-indulgent some days, I suspect it’s proving its worth.