Well I did cry. Which wasn't the most professional thing to do but at least I got through it.

As a fellow cryer, including in stressful work situations, I totally empathize. Good for you for TCBing on this!!!

You let your boss know what was going on and asked for help. You did the right thing.

And, I've cried at work. We're human. It happens.

I made a student really mad at me today, but I honestly think she needed the wake up call. She made a glib remark about liking Nazis. I asked her if she knew who the Nazis were. She said yes. I asked her to explain who they were and she wouldn't. I'm not clear if that's because she didn't know (unlikely since our 8th graders took a field trip to the Holocaust Museum in Skokie) or if she was too embarrassed to say. I explained who they were. And she said, I know. Someone else said that she must be joking about liking them. I said I certainly hoped so and that if she really did like them, we needed to have a serious conversation. She then clammed up and pouted all class period.

I know she's 14, but really? Joking about liking Nazis?

askye, you did the brave thing and the hard thing and my stomach is still all knotted up for you, for what you had to face down to do it.

I'm so glad your boss is so great and is willing to work with you on all of it (and was upset to find out how little training anyone had given you--everything you described sounded like one giant, fraught responsibility piled on top of six others, and throwing you into all that with essentially no training at all was just a world of wrong).

Well I did cry. Which wasn't the most professional thing to do but at least I got through it.

Every time I am in a confrontational situation or one where I am getting a dressing down, I cry. I HATE IT. There is not a damn thing I can do about it, trying not to makes it worse. It's just how my body/brain process confrontations for reasons that I get, but still can't overwrite the hardwiring.

Hoo boy, that was a long post when really all I wanted to say was, "don't beat yourself for crying- it happens to the best of us and you've been going through so much stress lately."

askye, you did GREAT. And thankfully it sounds like your boss is reasonable. Don't you feel better now for bringing it out in the open? It's amazing how much we can scare ourselves at the possibility of things which so often turn out to be manageable.

I feel better and my boss did tell me to go home and relax and enjoy the weekend.

...and I'm all jealous that there's going to be some sort effort from management to explain what they want you to do, so you can do your job effectively. Yay! Something linear to work on, something concrete to refer to. Would that I had had that myself way back when I worked.

Nope, I'm not bitter about being fired. edit: It was my own dern fault because of my horrible personality more than my ppw wrangling.

My poor old cat Squeak is at the vet having his teeth cleaned, and it turned into surgery to remove a broken tooth. I just won't feel settled until I have him back. Plus Sophie, his beautiful young calico lady friend, has not shown herself since I took him away.

I'll be 37 years old and I'm still emotionally scared for what a person in power told me nearly over 25 years ago.

That's okay, and you know why? Because when you talked to your boss -- i.e., asked for help -- your ACTION was in direct contradiction to your emotions. Basically, your action told your old emotions that if they want to hang out, they can, but they're going to get really bored, because you're going to go do something else, something that you DESERVE.

Will you feel shitty again, like you have no right to ask for help? Sure. But you can do the same thing you did this time -- go ahead and feel that way if those are the feelings that come up, but then ACT on what you know is true, which is that you deserve to ask for help.

In other words, what you did today goes a long way towards helping you deal with those old emotional responses.

Steph is wise.

La Tep is smrt.