Backfire

The past two weeks has been full of lessons, hard to keep up. Some felt like beatings. A lot were consequences of my actions. I'm tired.

I'll share one of my mistakes.... The soup story, ugh.

I made an effort to show my appreciation towards a colleague who gave me homemade soup. We've had some tensions due to various disagreements. I corrected my faults (practices learnt from previous work areas), but some discussions caused tensions when I hinted she was being heavy-handed (thankfully I had enough tact to not say fault-finding, e.g. if 50% was good, she would only mention the 50% that was bad). Let me stress, this colleague is a very nice, kind lady. But we treat our friends better than we treat our colleagues. We are only colleagues at work, not "clicky". And some colleagues make assumptions and judgments towards each other. But kindness still occasionally spill out to each other.

Back to the soup. She gave it to me on a Friday, but I couldn't eat it then, as I had a baguette sandwich that would not keep until Monday. I planned to eat the soup on Tuesday (as on Mondays I use my lunch break to do circuits in the gym, so I usually eat a sandwich quickly at my desk while I work). But she asked about her soup on Monday. Since things were already sensitive between us, I did not want to offend her some more, I decided to eat the soup then. Call it relationship-rebuilding.

Did I fuss over her too much? I tried too hard? I over-thought it? Yes, I did. All with (too much?) good intentions. I pictured a happy ending. It was also a reeaaallly yummy soup! I complimented her. She told me how she made it. We had a nice conversation. Success. But a couple of days later, it backfired! She told me off for taking 20mins extra of "soup time". I was flabbergasted!!?! I decided to not disagree because she was technically correct, and I did not want to make things worse. But again, the heavy-handedness (when others did worse, regularly, including by her). She chose as an example the one day I did differently. It was really hard to not react, to keep my mouth shut, but I did. I also did not bother telling her I did it for her. By then I knew I could do nothing right.

Times like then, it was hard for me to not be emotional. I felt misunderstood. I beat myself up for bothering, or for not standing up. My pride SHOUTED LOUDLY telling me to react, but I pushed it away. I looked at the bigger picture. I knew I wouldn't win the situation without bringing my neighbours down with me. It would have been a disastrous move. There will be a better way I could handle the problem later. I prayed for her and myself instead. :-)

To end, the lessons I learned are that:

- I could still be in the wrong even when I think I am doing things correctly. It is important to be open to corrections, to not be immediately offended or self-preserving.

- Good intentions does not equal happy endings.

- Nice people are not always nice to each other.

- Momentary "wins" will only serve you/me.

- It is not about winning. It is about doing what is good or best at the time.
- Pride is really hard to battle with. I thought I was attacking it, then it crept in in another form.
- It was nice to still find calm in this storm.

- *Scratching my head* Human conditions really boggles me! :-)