A Cautionary Tale About Not Taking Holidays When One Should

The last week was a little horrifying but not without compensations.

I had a 4.5 hour meeting at the office about the results of a survey alongside a group of 10 others in a similar position, preceded and followed by 45 minutes of cycling to the office, plus a self-administered corona test, plus a bit of work in the morning, and a lunch and a dinner. It was not as stressful as I had feared on the day itself. And it touched me greatly that my mother and brothers had made sure I had marshmallows and chocolate to cheer me up when I was finally home again.

The day after that was likewise sort of horrible, however. I had 8 meetings and a long list of things to get through, and it felt like I barely had time to breathe. And in the end I just kind of sent a message of despair to the head of HR, saying that I really wanted to have regular meetings with a fellow team lead as well because I just no longer wanted to rely on the current manager I have. One thing I absolutely detest is 'telling' on someone, but it sounded rather like she took his point of view. And I am slated to have a new manager in January anyway, due to top management decisions in which I wasn't involved. So probably no harm done and I can do my best to make sure that is still true. The head of HR and I will have a meeting this week. On Friday I had a regular meeting with my manager and just mentioned that I was talking with HR because I did not want to be sneaky about it, and we finally had a reasonably blunt and forthright meeting about fairly small things.

One of the worst things about being a middle manager is being in this work-team-and-top-management sandwich. I can try to take good care of my team, and I can try to take good care of my work. But one thing I have never mastered and likely will never master, is taking care of the people whom I report to, at the same time. One thing I fear is 'sucking up.' There is also the very real risk of the top manager making impulsive changes, based on our conversations, which would adversely affect a lot of people. The best form of this relationship so far has been conversations where we trade observation, news, and advice, in a way that I try to make sure represents the company quite broadly; and the advice feels like a neutral, take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing.

On Thursday my appetite finally came back after a two-week absence, because of all the food for St. Martin's (which we celebrated with a much smaller circle of family only, and not even all family, this year). And I no longer look as gaunt as I did. Over the weekend I also caught up on my sleep, twelve hours or so per day.

On Saturday I went for a long bicycle ride on a sunny and slightly chilly day, first to visit the bookshop where my aunt works, then to visit a market hall in Kreuzberg. Unfortunately the bank machines hadn't been in order earlier that day, so I couldn't make a transfer or (apparently) pick up cash, and ended up scrambling for the coins to pay for the persimmons that are now in stock. An orange pumpkin had to go back in the crate with the others due to lack of cash. Then I bought two Christmas presents and a bag of ironwort herbs with my debit card. It's the second weekend of my 'appreciating modern times' project, which will continue until I am out of the 1930s and early 1940s in my historical project.

Although I played the piano over the weekend, I still haven't warmed to the last movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata and apparently have projected some of the frustration and anger from work onto it. But gradually I am beginning to be able to read and listen to online books for leisure again: in a weird form of aversion therapy, I actually began to be stressed just looking at them because of all the times in the past weeks I've tried to turn to books to relax me and they didn't help.

On December 24th and 27th the whole company will have two days off. Aside from all the people in my life who have not inadvertently caused me a lot of frustration lately, and the specks of friendly feeling I feel from and toward even the people who have, this is a big consolation.

To help when books are not enough to relax, I've launched on a new project, which is to try to write something set in the Middle Ages about dragons. So I've created two massive Pinterest boards full of pictures of landscapes, art, historical figures, manuscripts, architecture, animals and food from medieval Iceland and Norway, and will move on from there. That said, I want my dragons to be fire-breathing, which means that some historical inaccuracy is inbuilt into the project.