a sleepless night

Brain monkeys. Too many things going on in my head to get to sleep, even though I'm exhausted. The desire to try to let someone at work know about my concerns for the future of the IT department, even though I'm leaving and I don't feel it would really do any good. The frustration at not being able to succeed there, and at not being truly heard. The confusion and frustration with James, the inability to get him to look past his own certainties and insecurities for a bit and to truly *hear* what I am saying about how I feel and how his actions affect me. The big grey area that is my future...what will I do, where will I do it, with whom? And of course the usual human worries about money, health, life...you know, the little things.

Funny...I just noticed another similarity between my work life and love life: I have been telling the very bald truth to the people involved, and it doesn't seem to help; they continue doing what they want, and don't seem to hear what I am saying. I am increasingly frustrated and drained trying to make things work, trying to be heard, and more importantly, to be understood.

That is the one trait of mine that has followed me through my entire life: the deep need to be *heard*, to be *understood*. I will explain in twenty different ways to someone, because I desperately want them to *understand*, to fathom why something affects me the way it does. Greg, James, Ope, ActivCard...all of them were situations that left me feeling at loose ends because I just couldn't break through to the people involved. They were too caught up in their own situations to be able to hear or understand mine, unable to step outside themselves for long enough to consider my perspective. And the irony is that each person tsk-tsked when they heard about the other situations, never comprehending the similarity of the situations, never grasping the painful irony of their telling me to just walk away, that it wasn't worth it, that I had given the person [or company] more chances than I should have.

I don't think I'm too unusual from most people in wanting to be understood. I think my problem is that I don't give up when I should...I keep trying past the point when it should have been given up as a lost cause. And it leads to sleepless nights like tonight, when my helplessness and inability to be heard just spin 'round and 'round, and I keep trying out different scenarios in my head, keep trying to find just the right way to explain, to be heard. Frickin' monkeys...

[insert poignant closing remark here]