When a drunk has a terrific hangover because he drank heavily yesterday, he cannot live well today. But there is another kind of hangover which we all experience whether we are drinking or not. That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of yesterday’s and sometimes today’s excesses of negative emotion — anger, fear, jealousy, and the like.
Epiphany!
a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
I am, in a way, going through it all again. The very difficult time I had two years ago at work. And again, of course, the only thing I can control is myself (though not always even that). And I wonder what part I should play and how I should act and react. I desperately want to take the lessons of my experience forward into helping the people I work with and for. Mostly the people who have developmental disabilities that I can impact in a positive way almost every day for years at a time. Also the very good people I work with who are dedicated to the clients the way I should be.
But excesses of negative emotion. I have them often and they overwhelm and drown me. Then I lose the time I spend with them, and the next day too to the emotional hangover. I’m still hopelessly at sea about what I should do in these work situations. I feel like I would pay to just know and see which path I should travel, but I know it’s much more simple and much more complicated than that. There is no one who will show me the way. No one can. I’ve got to somehow wrest the answer from this book and these people and my experiences so far.