I have my GI tests Tuesday, and Friday I have my annual review at work. I am sure I will have much to update soon, but this week I am lying low. I have not had an easy past few weeks.
I’m using the recommended day off before the procedure (during the prep phase) to have a longer session than normal with my therapist. She advised that we preemptively role-play the types of negative feedback I expect to receive at my annual review and make a plan for ways to keep the physical symptoms of RSD under wraps.
The timing – and extra planning – actually makes a lot of sense. I’ve recently had to deal with some family issues (on top of work and spoonie-ness) that are highly triggering for me. The last thing I want is for RSD and PTSD to tag team during my review. RSD alone makes it hard enough to respond coherently. I don’t want to conflate an unpleasant, but short term, experience at work with broader trauma issues.
Until my next update, have installment two of Where’s Whoopsie!
In service of preparing responses to the feedback I expect to receive at my annual review, this picture update is also a good segue into an experiment I’ll be undertaking in my next few blog posts.
I have the hyperactive flavor of ADHD. I can’t seem to shut up, even when I desperately wish I could. I fully anticipate my wordy, rambling, interrupting nature to be discussed at my review. It has been discussed at every review throughout my career, even by the kindest and most supportive of bosses.
I carry that verbal hyperactivity into this blog. My posts are long! My therapist and I are thinking that having a pre-prepared plan for exactly how I will respond to each potential critical comment, with a planned maximum word count, at my review could help break the RSD cycle. I won’t be stumbling out an impromptu response while my fidgetiness and verbal hyperactivity are amped up to 11. I’ll know what words I want to say, concisely, and I’ll just have to robotically spit them out.
One of my planned responses will be that I’ve been working actively on being more succinct in my emails and spoken presentations. To ensure that response is accurate, I’m undertaking a “Thousand Words” exercise on my blog. I’m aiming to keep my next couple of posts under 1,000 words. I have been reading that’s a good rule of thumb on blogging advice posts. I highly doubt I can stick to that in perpetuity, but it’s a good exercise. (In my last post, I kept to 100 words for a prompt. 100!)
My next posts will likely be discussions of personally triggering topics. Brevity in the face of such topics on Lavender and Levity might, in theory, lead to brevity outside of it?
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m unofficially starting the project with this post. (It’s 498 words.)
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Need a recap of anything I’m talking about in any post? Check out the Glossary of Terms.
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