Salvage

Yesterday I had a panic attack and mini-breakdown at work. Actually it was a series of panic attacks.....which lasted about an hour and a half.

What caused this you might say?
In a word......

TAXES

We recently switched from using an accountant to handle our accounts to doing it all in-house. Now if I mess up on some of the bookkeeping, it can be fixed. If I mess up on our taxes there are much heavier penalties. I was under the impression that our accountant would still be doing them....she was under the impression that I am perfectly capable of handling it. I am glad that someone had more confidence in me than I had.....but, I wasn't able to overcome my fears of messing up.

And so I cracked at work.

I have a wonderfully understanding boss, but this could have been avoided. I should have been able to say sooner that I was overloaded and not capable of doing it. I'm so stubborn though that I kept trying to do it myself until I imploded in my boss's office.

I'm a little embarrassed. Breaking down into tears makes me feel awful, horrifically weak, and incredibly unprofessional. I think that it is the professionalism aspect that is getting to me most. Ugh....I cried...in the office....I frickin' cried. How more negatively female could I have been in an office setting? Even though I am now in an environment where it is a bit more acceptable to be emotional, and even encouraged in a therapeutic sense, the old carry-overs of being dominated in my old office and being accused of not being mature enough to be competent because I let my emotions take over still linger. There is bitterness there (and for once it is not about the last MEC director there but other professors in my past who used it to their advantage).

What to do? How do I salvage what happened yesterday?
I can only hope that my co-workers don't feel like they need to tip-toe around me today. That will make the embarrassment much worse. For me, I think that the only other thing I can do is to work that much harder, get done what I need to do, and get my productivity levels back up. Let the automatron take over.