Many, many years ago one of my best friends in dentistry was having a chat with me about ‘Sunday night feeling’.
He was talking about that feeling in the pit of your stomach where you dread going to work on a Monday, where you realise your weekend is over (that you looked forward to for the whole week) and that you’d have to face your demons again on Monday morning, in a place or a job or with people you just didn’t want to be with.
He told me that his Sunday night feeling was now so bad that he got it on a Saturday lunchtime.
I remember the conversation vividly in my disbelief that things were that bad and while sometimes I understood that I’d had a lovely weekend and might like it to continue, I was so engaged with my work that it never seemed a chore to go, even when things were difficult or stressful with difficulties or problems. It was still somewhere that I’d love to spend my life.
And then it wasn’t, not so much anymore.
Perhaps in this post I might start to say a little bit of the truth about how difficult it was over the last 2 years, to navigate some of the craziest, most insane times of my life.
Perhaps you’ll have to hunt for them in here, for the clues or the signs before I have the courage to tell the full tale (which I really hope to do and might come soon but then again might not).
Throughout all of the difficulties over the past couples of years, of trying to build a new practice of the size and scale that we have and then trying to open it and then to close it and then to open it again and then to wonder whether it would have any viability at all, the hardest bit was probably the PTSD.
That’s a story for another day but you will never understand it until you’ve felt it and looked it in the eye and watched yourself unravel in front of your very eyes, knowing all the time that it’s happening that it’s unreasonable.
One of the worst bits though was the return of ‘Sunday night feeling’ which I haven’t had for so many years and which came back to me in the later stages of 2019 and never really left even though my practice was closed for 13 weeks.
The truth is it started to creep like my friends did, further back into the weekend and was almost certainly linked to the PTSD that I’ve talked about above.
I was terrified that I would go into work and someone would have cancelled or someone would say no or someone else would ask us to buy something or tell me that some money had to be spent on something that was unexpected.
For so many years that was all gone and then the realisation was that it was back with vengeance.
The funny thing is that this week it’s gone and I think probably gone for good, not because my circumstances have drastically changed overnight and not because I’ve won the lottery but because I’ve altered my narrative again.
Every day that I go to work, I have the opportunity to help someone.
That might be someone who works with me or it might be someone that comes through the door or it might be someone who contacts me by email or another manner of electronic communication or telephone.
That is a privilege that not everybody gets who goes to work, although in truth that applies to almost everybody and only some people choose to except or see it.
I get paid for that and paid really, really well to be kind and honest and ethical and give my honest opinion and to learn and then to apply what I’ve learnt and to try to help.
So, in truth now, there’s nothing for me to be worried about when I go to work and there’s no reason for the Sunday night feeling to creep into Saturday because I don’t have a work/life balance. Because as Chris (Barrow) told me all of those years ago “the opposite of life is not work, the opposite of life is death”.
My work is part of my life, and a wonderful part of my life but one that I can still make better and make more exciting and more interesting and provide more help and more support and more change and why would I be worried or scared or anxious about going somewhere where I did that.
We have the most wonderful community of people at our work, who take care of each other and work as hard as they can to make it a bit better for other people and in the midst of that community is an electronic communication programme called Slack that we use both in teaching and for our own internal comms.
Recently, my long-term friend and now colleague Carl Dunstan posted a message on Slack to the guys in the senior leadership team about a quote from a football coach that he’d just seen on the television (we share tons and tons of this stuff with each other). The coach had said “everything you want is on the other side of hard work and fear”, we had a discussion whether that was true or not, because everything I want is just the chance to continue to work hard, to make it a little bit better than it was before.
Time for me to tell the truth to the youth maybe, you really don’t want to build one of these things that we built up the road in Edwalton unless you know exactly what it’s like.
But then again, maybe if you knew what it was like, you would never build it in the first place.
Blog Post Number - 2736