Reining in the Discomfort that Rains on Me

I liked to think of myself as a relatively unflappable person, mature enough to handle disruptions and bumps in the road, large and small. I was so wrong!

Turns out that I'm like the Princess and the Pea as far as any kind of deviation from the routines of my life go. How disappointing.

Everything in my life has changed in the last couple of months and I'm both enjoying it all immensely and totally upset about all of the discomfort of change. I moved to Maryland last weekend (on the two days of the nasty Nor'easter, as I wrote about in my previous post) and nearly everything is foreign or missing.

New town and state -- and I don't know the streets or highways or nicknames for places or where the closest post office is or where to get good Mexican food or which stores carry Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke or whether talking on my cell phone while driving is legal or not.

New place to live -- and I love it, especially the forest views from every window, but I can't find anything. I scrupulously taped remotes and cords and connectors to each electronic device but can't find my sandals or my receipts for expenses from March or two cushions for my sofa bed or my favorite sheets that match my comforter. I learned just today that the remote for the underground parking garage isn't necessary to get out -- I had wondered why the left door kept opening when I pushed the button instead of the right one. (Duh -- the electric eye lets me out, so the remote is only necessary to get in.)

Even some of the things that should work don't. After they hooked up my phone, I called a new friend here and she told me that another number and name showed up on her caller ID. Sure enough, that's the number that rings in my house. Yet my voice mail works with the number they assigned to me. Verizon will take care of it in two days. How's that for service? And my cell phone somehow made its way into a sink of sudsy water just before I moved so it's new and I don't know how to get the video part to work or download ring tones and I found out the hard way that the same button on the side of the phone that quieted the ringer on my previous phone just cuts off the call on this one.

Don't even get me started on work. Everything there is new, different and not the way I'm used to doing things. Building, phone system, style of desk and office, colleagues, computer, route to work. I don't know where to get envelopes or use the voice mail or transfer a call or find file folders or what the codes are to make photocopies. The name plate outside my office has someone else's name on it.

I'm used to being the answer lady -- after 16 years at my previous employer there wasn't much I didn't know about there -- but here I'm still the one asking questions and trying to get oriented. I can't afford that luxury -- clients and colleagues expect me, as a senior level person, to produce lots and fast and competently.

A good friend of mine, a high-ranking exec, told me recently, "The higher up you are in the organization, the less they tell you when you start working there. They expect you to perform right away and you don't even know where to get a tablet and a pen or where the bathrooms are."

So I'm not handling this all very well. I'm flat exhausted at the end of the day (and I mean day, not even night) from struggling to do everything new. I'm upset at myself for not picking everything up faster. This morning I thought I could at least get to work 25 miles away without my GPS. A normally 30-minute trip took me nearly an hour and a half, so tomorrow I'll hook up my little Garmin friend again. (Best investment I ever made!) I'm frustrated at not being able to just flow through the day, at starting something and then realizing I don't have the next thing I need and don't know where to go to get it or I have to wait days for it. I'm grumpy and ditzy (misplacing things every two minutes because I don't have a routine place to put them) and disorganized and slow and sleepless worrying about all of this.

Yes, yes, yes, I know -- this too shall pass. In six months I won't even remember feeling this way. It is a great adventure. I know this is a very good move for me and I'm excited about it. I see it as a long-term decision. But meanwhile, I'm so uncomfortable with discomfort, having emotionally budgeted for a much smaller amount of it than I am experiencing, and tonight it's 1:00 a.m. and here I am, up stewing.