"A newt??"

"I got better...."

I feel really really good right now. I had a nice little epiphany at work. I've become Wally from the Dilbert cartoons. Wally is often characterized as walking around the office, pretending to be busy, carrying a coffee mug. I walk around the office, pretending to be busy, carrying a Nalgene water bottle. It's not so much that I'm trying to pretend to be busy, but that I do 8 hours' worth of work in 8 hours, as oppsed to 8 hours' worth of work in 6. So in essence, I have an extra 2 hours in a day to walk around the office, pretending to be busy, carrying a water bottle.

As it turns out, I'm working at the same pace as everyone else now. I normally work pretty quickly, and for the past 2 years I'd been working at my normal pace, and that invariably resulted in a paucity of tasks. My supervisors would see the slack, so they'd give me more work to do, which I'd do at my normal, hurried pace--lather, rinse, repeat. For 2 years I did a lot of work, spending a lot of time doing it, and reaped nearly no reward.

So this week, I had an epiphany. The epiphany stemmed from an encounter I had with some co-workers (see On Cluefulness, or Lack Thereof) in which I realized that I made enough people mad at me that an entire site won't talk to me. And I'm OK with this. See, the information I need to do my job exists in the brains of people at that site. If they won't talk to me, then I can't do my job, so I have no work to do. It's pretty simple really.

I've realized that over the last 2 years, I've subconciously put pressure on myself to succeed. In fact, I am a self-professed perfectionist, and quite often I don't even reach my own high standards of perfection, let alone anyone else. For the last 2 years, my work ethic reflected closely my perfectionism, and for 2 years no one has been able to meet my standard, and for 2 years it has worn me down into a depressed blob of a person.

So now, I'm free from my own expectations, and thus from my expectations of what people should expect from me. I don't care what people think of me as a person, or as an engineer. I do my work, and I live my life as I want to, and that's good enough. I don't have to be SuperGenius Engineer.

The other part of this epiphany is that I now have an end goal to strive for. I don't care if I get laid of tomorrow or next week. In fact, where do I sign up for voluntary lay offs? In 9 months, I won't be an engineer anymore, and in 9 months, I'll be pursuing a dream and living a great adventure into the uncharted waters of My Destiny. In 2 years, I'll be qualified to crank out wedding cakes and cookbooks, and in one year at my high school reunion (I'm still undecided if I want to go), I'll be able to say "I'm a pastry chef, not because I couldn't do anything else, but because I want to."

I remember now what life was like, when I wasn't depressed. I thought those memories were long-ago faded, but I guess I still had hope that I could go back to that life of happiness and joy. As I look forward, I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm running at it full-bore, and I'm not looking back. I don't regret anything from the last 6 years of being an engineer. I don't regret spending 5 years at University working toward a computer degree. But I also don't regret giving it all up to pursue a dream, a dream that could make me happy again.

¶ 11:12 AM