The first month of 2021 is over - How was everyones start into the new year? Did anyone else felt like January was like three days but also 47 years long at the same time? It definitely felt like this for me. Now that I'm already a few days into February I'm at the point where I want to look at my theme for this month: 'Communication'. I'm not going to do a whole analysis of what is communication and such. It's a theme, it's a bit vague on purpose and I wan't to look at my achievement and not at possible failures. Not that my communication in January felt like a failure or anything.
The whole lockdown situation more or less 'forced' me to work on my communication if a few different ways. For work I wrote a bunch of letters each week to the kids I usually care for since most of them have to stay at home at the moment. At first I struggled with the idea of having to write letters. My handwriting is not great, I tend to ramble and I had no ideas what to write to a bunch of under 3 years olds. But I managed very quickly to get over that. My colleagues and I exchanged ideas for cute letters, we helped each other out some weeks and in the end I found my way of writing letters each and every week. I'm proud of that.
I also had do a lot more video calls, mostly work related. At first I was nervous. We don't use a nice platform where I can hide my crazy goblin room in the background so I was scared my colleagues would judge me for seeing how much weird stuff I own. But nobody cares. Some just asked excitedly to get a closer look of the terrarium and that was it. My colleagues are great I don't know what I was scared of. I even manage to be calm and relaxed when my boss is in a call and everything.
I wrote a ton of emails. There was a time when this was hard to do for me, but apperantly I just got uses to it. That's a nice development.
I even had to do a bunch of phone calls. People that know me, know how much I dislike phone calls. But it was necessary. I had some important parent meetings and the phone was our only option. So I got over my nervousness and in my opinion I did really well. I think it's way easier for me to make work related calls than personal ones.
The thing I didn't do as well or as frequent as I would have liked was texting my friends. I'm not even sure if my friends really mind, because most of them I frequently 'see' on Discord. But not seeing them in person and having more one-on-one talks is something that I miss.
My friends and I use Discord for our (almost) weekly meet ups. It's nice to have a least that. I miss seeing them in person. I miss playing D&D in person, but I'll take what I can get. But I struggle with big and loud groups on voice chats. People almost screaming over each other, interrupting each other all the time and making it impossible to have an actual conversation without turning everything into a dirty joke. It's so overwhelming and I feel bad shutting down and becoming quiet. I want to 'meet' my friends, but sometimes it's just too much. That happened a lot more recently. I don't really know how to solve that.
But I managed to work on my one resolution ("working on standing up more for myself in conversations [...] and being able to say: Stop, saying sh*t like this is not okay!") - I managed to call out a few inappropriate 'jokes' right away. That felt like a huge thing for me.
So what is my conclusion of this 'communication'- themed month? I now know that I am capable of professional phone calls, video meetings, emails and letters. That great.
But I struggle with keeping up with my personal communication and I need a solution for dealing with overwhelming group voice- our video chats. That's something to work on and just because the month is over, doesn't mean that being mindful about the whole topic of communicating is over.
The theme for February is 'boundaries' and I maybe thinking a bit more about this could help with what was going on in January. Lets see how it works out ...
