Friday, November 7, 2008

Meltdown!

There are many wonderful, and not-so-wonderful, aspects to being a control freak. I usually do things quite well, and I use that term generally because I do attempt nearly everything. If it's something that's physically possible for me to do, then I hate to achieve less than 95% (well, nobody's perfect!). People know they can rely on me to get a job done, and they know it will be done to a high standard. They also know that despite my best efforts to be a team player, I'm itching to take charge and implement my ideas and generally just tidy things up a bit, so it doesn't necessary help me to make friends!


I am very much aware that my need to maintain control over everything, and sometimes everyone, is extremely neurotic, and by meeting my need to be involved in everything I am simply attempting to silence my inner voices with their fearful chant - "They're doing it wrong! Fix it! Help them!!" It's not like I'm trying to take over just to rub my proficiency in other people's faces. That's just a bonus. :o)


The major downside to being a control freak, with its inherent perfectionist streak, is what happens when a mistake is made? When something goes wrong?! Even when it's through no fault of my own, the fact that it reflects on me is traumatic. I experienced that last night, and I think the best term for it is simply a Meltdown. I think that's the best way to describe my wailing down the phone to my TKD Instructor at 1am because somehow the updates that I made to the website not only refused to save, but the home page is now blank!! I nearly crapped myself when I saw it. This is the most public job I could be doing and I've just wiped the website home page. F*ck.


Now, regardless of the fact that this is clearly a computer error, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it happening, other than simply refusing to turn the thing on! Despite the fact that no-one should blame me for this, in fact they should apologise for giving me a crappy laptop to work with, with out of date web-editing software that crashes every 5 minutes! None of this matters, because my ego was the one crashing last night. I couldn't handle the fact that everyone who clicked on the site would know it was my job to maintain it, and would think I had messed it up.


All of this emotional turmoil has a terrible knock-on effect: An hour of crying results in extremely puffy eyes which no amount of eye make-up can mask and I couldn't get to bed till well after 1am, hence was unable to wake early enough for am gym session; and the associated guilt should ensue. But I'm not going to let it.


I'm not taking responsibility for this mess. I'm not going to let it bother me. I'm going to have an extremely productive day at work and then go to TKD tonight. And maybe hit some people. :o)

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