Well, I’ve got to say that I feel a little silly about freaking out about losing my desk yesterday. I was reminded by my mom that this has happened to me before: when I was in a civilian job (before the AF), at one point I was moved out of an office and into a hallway cubicle because the boss’s son was interning for a summer. That felt similarly dismissive and I actually went into a six-month long snit about it. Thankfully that won’t be necessary this time (my snit only has to be a couple months long)! Anyway, point is, I guess I invest a lot of feelings of self and security in my place, be it desk or bedroom or apartment, and when that is taken away from me, it throws me off.
I realized, too, that the blowup (I had a full-fledged emotional meltdown about this in private) was not even really about the desk; it’s about all this stuff that’s been wearing on me day after day. Working 14+ hours a day with people you really don’t want to be around, 6 days a week… No real privacy anywhere… I recognized last night that, every once in a while, when it’s night and I’m walking through the various trailers, there’s a moment when there’s stillness and quiet, real quiet, and I feel at peace for a breath or two. I never feel at peace like that for more than a moment, and it’s always when all the people and input and crashes and bangs are done, and it’s just quiet. I miss that.
I am so going to be a hermit out in the middle of the woods somewhere when I’m done with this!
Anyway, it reminded me of a conversation I had a while back with someone else here. We were talking about the fact that even just what we’re doing here should be enough to make people busy and add drama to their lives. But are they satisfied with that? No! Instead, we get soap-opera style personal battles and political battles that wouldn’t look amiss on a show like 24 (and I always thought they exaggerated the interpersonal dynamics for the sake of keeping the show going).
And I think that maybe what happens is that all the stress of the situation gets turned into personal and political drama. Since most of us can’t effectively unload a big gun on the insurgents who shoot at us, we take all that energy and direct it in a safer direction. Someone lower-ranking who works with you. Maybe a peer who upsets you. Maybe the rest of your division because they’re all picking on you. I think maybe we’re all taking our (understandable) stress of being here and translating it into something more familiar to us, something we can point at as the source of our woes.
I mean, look at me. Not only do I flip out over the whole desk debacle, but I’m also losing my ability to listen to people and treat them the way I’d like to be treated. I was in a position a few nights ago where I should have introduced two people who I both knew but hadn’t met one another, and did I think of it? No, I was too involved in my own personal soap-opera to think about them. I’ve been dwelling on the little things and blowing them out of proportion because, perhaps, so much of the rest of my life seems like it’s uncontrollable.
So the personal and political battles here are maybe just an outlet for our real stress? It makes sense, in a weird kind of way. I know that the reason you don’t usually see this kind of stress in a Stateside office situation is because no one cares enough about anything there to get this wrapped up in it. You do your 8 hours for the day, and you get out of there. If your coworkers irritate you, it’s a short term thing and you’ve got the rest of your life to think about. Out here, work is our lives, except for the time we spend in our trailers trying NOT to think about work.
Posted by Kjirstin 
