After a fantastic summer interning in Washington D.C., I'm back! Interested in reading about my D.C. experiences? Well, in the interest of time, just read my other blog that was created for the purposes of documenting my time there: 2 Massachusetts Ave., N.E.
For the last two weeks I've been in CA training, getting ready for my final year in res life. However, this year I am in a new role as a Hall Director, which is super exciting and super exhausting at the same time. Now, let me just say, I have a love-hate relationship with CA training. I love it because I get to see most of my college friends in one place and am able to catch up with them after a summer apart. I've missed my Morris friends loads and it's great to be back with them again. Also, I love meeting and bonding with everyone on staff. Particularly, this year, it's super fun to see how everyone interacts and gets to know each other because I was involved in the hiring process. However, despite all the awesome aspects of it, I really hate CA training, primarily because it is not introvert friendly. Not at all. Over the past year, I've become a pro at taking care of myself and recognizing when I need time alone to recharge. However, it becomes exceedingly difficult to do that during training because, the majority of the time, I'm running on a schedule that someone else created. We are constantly going, going, going, and even though we do have down time, I've wanted to utilize a lot of that to spend time with the friends I haven't seen all summer and to get to know new staff members better. Also, sleep. Haven't gotten much of that with all the Hall Director stuff I need to prepare. I'm not working out as much either because I don't have the time or I'm too exhausted when I do have time. So, needless to say, I have been failing at properly taking care of myself.
Today I had a bit of a breaking point. I didn't see it coming and it just sprang up upon me. It's not surprising as I have been over exerting myself way too much and last night I stayed up late waiting for some international students to arrive to campus from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. Morris is about three hours away from The Cities and international students obviously don't plan their flights around the sleep schedules of those people who will be checking them into their res halls. So, in the week or so before school starts, we have some late nights waiting for them to get here. I was on call last night so it was my responsibility to greet them when they arrived. However, they didn't arrive. I was kind of peeved that Res Life wasn't notified that these people wouldn't be coming since I did end up getting way less sleep than I would have liked, though I didn't let that get to me too much. After all, there was nothing I could do about it.
So, anywho, during the morning today, I was fine other than being a little tired. However, when we came back from lunch and started into our next activity, I started to feel really on edge. It probably didn't help that it's really humid today and we did this activity outside. Not super comfortable. I got really crabby all of the sudden and knew that if I said anything to anyone, it would just be mean and rude. I wanted nothing more than to go back to my room and have some serious alone time. However, as a hall director, I felt obligated to stay there. After spending a good while feeling crabby, I all the sudden began to feel unbelievably overwhelmed and then felt like I was going to cry, which I did (for those of you who don't know, I'm a very emotional person and those emotions tend to manifest themselves in situations where I'm feeling super overwhelmed). My boss took note of this and allowed me to go back to my room for a little bit, thankfully.
I went back to my room, took a shower, and started to blog and little bit because I knew I needed to write to feel better. When I went back to meet with my staff, it became apparent that I wasn't the only one who was feeling burned out. Everyone was exhausted, even the more extroverted individuals. It's been a long couple weeks. I love my job and I want to enjoy my last year in res life as much as possible, but it can be taxing, especially for more introverted individuals. Once I'm able to schedule more of my own time, I'll be better off. There are only four more days and freshman move in day is on Sunday! Eek! So much to do before then!
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