Res. Life in the City #5- Feels Like Home to Me

After all, seasons change. So do cities. People come into your life and people go. But it's comforting to know the ones you love are always in your heart. And if you're very lucky, a plane ride away. ~Carrie Bradshaw


So I have been really stressed recently. Not the normal "wow I have a lot to do" kind of stress or really even the "I feel somewhat over my head" stress. This was more along the lines of "I don't know if I can truly do my job" sort of stress. This is not a good feeling. The past two weeks there has been the overwhelming, soul-crushing force that has been hanging over my head. The feeling that has forced me to work 12, 14, or 16 hour days on a regular basis. The feeling that made me feel totally and completely incompetent at my job. Something was simply not right. What was the solution to this problem? Take five days away from work, escape to my prior institution's Homecoming Weekend, totally forget about responsibilities, hang out with friends, mentors, professors, and former staff members, and basically get the hell out of this funk.

I'm still trying to figure out if it was worth it. Clearly, I had a fantastic time. I did almost everything I wanted to while I was home including:

-Seeing everyone I wanted to and no one I didn't
-Catching up with my three best friends from grad school who all made the trek back to Homecoming (which is pretty fantastic when you think about it since we live about 3,000 miles away from each other)
-Hanging out with old RAs in the context of being a friend and not a supervisor which was pretty much amazing
-Eating at all of the places that I have have been craving since uprooting my life
-Laughing to the point of tears numerous times
-Having conversations with old RAs that helped me remember why I wanted to go into student affairs in the first place
-Living in a residence hall room for five days and experiencing public bathrooms for the first time in four years

While this weekend was truly amazing and good for my soul, it was also difficult in many ways. I have always had issues with change. Not so much personal change, but I don't like it when people or places or things that I love change. Therefore, it should come to no surprise that I burst into tears when I walked into the RA Workroom at my old building. It was simply too much for me to take when I saw a new furniture arrangement, different decorations, new systems and processes, and worst of all, a new grad's stuff in my office. It was really, really, really overwhelming. I think I was finally forced into the realization that I really was gone and didn't work there anymore. Consciously, I knew that I had started a new life, but it wasn't until I saw that everything had changed with my own eyes did it hit me that I wasn't just "playing hall director" at my new school, but I really had left the building, staff, students, and institution that I loved and hated with equal passion for over two years.

While I was away however, life kept on churning at my current school. My RAs dealt with a two and a half hour roommate mediation that ended with a stalemate, there was a student who reported suicidal thoughts and six students all decided they wanted to move. The phrase "life goes on" was never more clearly illustrated to me than when I opened up my e-mail for the first time in five days (aren't you proud? I didn't even look at it while I was away!). I was yet again thrown into the soul-crushing stress that made it hard for me to breathe. I'm not afraid to admit that at one point on Wednesday, I shut my office door, blasted some Journey, and just cried my eyes out. The stress had been building for so long, I was ready for my 1-on-1 with my supervisor to be a conversation about how I was slacking with my job responsibilities, wasn't doing well from an administrative standpoint, and was spending too much time on "fluff" (ie developmental activities with my staff) and literally not getting the job done.

I could not have been more wrong. I tried to keep it together for the first part of my 1-on-1, but then I confessed that I was really stressed and didn't know how I was going to get everything done. My supervisor deftly transitioned into a conversation about mid-semester evaluations. She said that she would like to give me a little feedback before our evaluation together next week. I braced myself for the worst, took a deep breath, and was ready for a reaming. However, she said that I was succeeding well past her expectations. She told me that the amount of developmental activities that I was attempting with my staff was something that campus had never seen before. She told me that she was shocked at the way I could be given a task and simply blow it out of the water. She continued to basically go against every notion that I had in my head about how I was majorly sucking at this job. I'm not writing about this to brag, but instead to process where these misconceptions about job performance are coming from. How is it that I think I am barely keeping my head above water, but my supervisor thinks I am gliding along? I'm going to think about that one and get back to you in a couple of days.