Everything is (not) fine

Welp, I launched the newsletter and then...things happened.

Yes, I'm talking about the U.S. Presidential Election, where (and I'm sorry if you're a Republican and voted for him) the least qualified or moral person to ever hold the office of President was elected for a second term, while being a convicted felon and also still a subject of ongoing cases.

With his election came debilitating anxiety, oppressive fear, and honestly, I don't know how I managed to work the rest of the week. I don't know how you managed to work the rest of the week! Did you?

I know for a fact that many of my followers and connections and friends were dealing with similar giant emotions and that being "productive" at a job that either seems under threat, insignificant, or suddenly far more indispensable and load-bearing than ever before no longer looked the same.

Many of us are now wondering who at our work doesn't think we deserve health care, or equal rights, or to live in this country, or so many other things. Others think that our friends and family are trying to replace them, or don't know how the economy works, or fear for their businesses. And yet, somehow, we keep working. For lots of unfair reasons, yes(capitalism, I'm looking at you??), but also because for many of us (myself included), work is an escape. Complex, difficult, problems that we can solve allow us to step away from the complex, difficult problems we can't solve, at least not with the limited resources we have as individuals, or even small teams.

And so I've buried myself in work for the past several weeks, because (luckily!) I got a part-time gig that (not surprisingly!) needed more than just part-time work for a few weeks. And I didn't have to think about everything during the day, and I could focus on fixing pixels and creating Confluence pages and being frustrated at clients. You know, the normal things.

The satisfaction many of us find in fixing something small helps us cope with the big things. It reminds us that big problems are often just a lot of mid-size problems, which are often just a bunch of little problems, and if we start at the bottom and fix the things we can, we just might end up fixing the whole thing without even noticing it (or toppling it, but that's for a different newsletter, lol).

So for today, maybe we did come here to work, right? Maybe not because the work was the most important thing, but because it was the thing we could control. it was something we could get our hands around and manage and be certain about when so much right now is uncertain. It's where we could hug a work friend and cry a little or where we could disappear into a spreadsheet for an hour or two and leave the muddle and the mess and the confusion behind.

Sometimes, friends, work can be the best place you've ever been because it's something to hold onto when everything else is spinning out of control.

(And I hope nothing else too unprecedented comes along and you'll get another issue next week!)

<3

Bryan