I remember the day it first hit me that I had a stupid, silly, embarrassing schoolgirl crush on you. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I do remember thinking to myself, “What the fuck is wrong with me?”
After my last day working for you I came home and cried. Once again, here I am thinking to myself, “What the fuck is wrong with me?” And now we’ve come full circle.
“Well if you don’t want to leave, then don’t,” I hear you thinking. Yes, yes, I know – no one is forcing me to leave. When I really thought about what I know about you, I didn’t expect you to understand. I wanted you to understand, because I care what you think of me. I hoped you would understand, because we understand a lot of really random things about each other. We think a lot alike, which is one thing that made our professional relationship really fun. But you also have a ruthlessly self-interested streak, so you shut down long before you even started to see it from my perspective.
When I first told you I was leaving, you sat on it for a day and then came back to me – “Should we talk about this?” I was not expecting that at all. I don’t know if you realize how perilously close you came to changing my mind over the next two weeks. Or maybe you do but you don’t care because I didn’t actually change my mind.
When I thought about how much I wanted to leave, I didn’t fully trust myself because I was afraid my irritation was blinding me to all the reasons I should stay.
But when I thought about how much I wanted to stay, I really didn’t trust myself because I was afraid my feelings were being influenced by how I felt about you. Remember that stupid, schoolgirl crush I mentioned earlier? Yeah, that was a real pain in the ass.
It was a lot to work through, which was hard enough, but the hardest part was working through it alone. Sure, I had my husband and a few friends to talk to, but their perspective on accounting career issues is so limited. The one person whose advice I really wanted was the person sitting across the table from me. For obvious reasons, that was the one person whose advice I couldn’t have.
So, I figured if I can’t trust some of my feelings, then I really can’t trust any of them. It had to come down to intellectual reasons only. And that conclusion was unmistakable: I had to go. Oh, I fought it for a while. A long while. Not that you looked terribly closely(*) but I’m told the weight loss was fairly obvious. That’s how hard I had to hit the gym just to stay sane while I was both getting my work done and accepting the inevitable. I also lost a lot of hair because agonizing indecision is ever so much fun.
But the biggest thing I was afraid of? Telling you. I knew that it would be the end of our friendly professional relationship, and I really, really, really didn’t want that. So the real reason I lost the weight and the hair? You.
A year from now I’ll look back and laugh at myself, but the fact remains that today I feel like crap. Thankfully I only have to keep myself distracted this weekend before I can throw myself into my new job on Monday – I expect to be overwhelmed, which will help more than anything.
I wish you nothing but the best.
I will never forget you.
(*) Which is more than fine, really. Honestly, if you had said something, I would have wondered if I was in the office or out at a certain client-which-shall-not-be-named. You know the one.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Thanks for reading; I feel better now.
We will never speak of this again.
