What I Do After a Bad One

Some shifts you carry out of the building with you and some you don’t, and I’ve never figured out a reliable way to predict which is which going in. I’m not going to tell you what made the last bad one bad. That’s not the kind of thing that belongs on a blog about board games and paperbacks, and honestly it wouldn’t tell you anything true about the night anyway, the worst parts never translate into a story that’s fair to the people who lived it.

What I can tell you is what I do afterward, because that part’s mine to talk about.

I don’t talk in the parking lot. A few of us used to do the thing where you stand by your cars for ten minutes hashing it out before anyone drives home, and I understand the impulse, but it never worked for me, it just extended the shift by ten more minutes I didn’t have the reserves for. I say goodnight, I get in the car, I do the drive the same as any other drive.

At home the order matters more than I’d like to admit. Shower first, always, before I let myself sit down anywhere, because sitting down first means I don’t get back up for an hour. Then I make tea I won’t finish, in a mug my sister gave me a few birthdays back that says something dumb about coffee that doesn’t even apply since it’s tea, and I don’t read anything, not that night. Reading after a bad one doesn’t work, my triage instinct is too keyed up to actually take anything in, I’ll read the same paragraph four times and retain none of it. So instead I do something with my hands that doesn’t require thinking, dishes, folding laundry that’s been in the basket for three days, anything with a clear start and a clear finish, because clear starts and finishes are in short supply some nights and I want at least one.

If it’s a morning my partner’s around, I don’t talk about it right away either. They’ve learned not to ask right when I walk in, which took some negotiating a few years back and I’m grateful for it now. Sometimes I’ll say something small hours later, over dinner that’s really breakfast, just enough to put a shape on it without handing over the details. Some mornings I call my sister instead, not to talk about work specifically, just to talk about anything else, her kid’s soccer schedule, a recipe she’s trying, whatever normal thing she’s got going on that has nothing to do with my job.

Eventually I sleep, which some days takes longer than others, and I wake up mid afternoon and the version of me that comes back up is usually alright. Not always right away. But usually. That’s the whole system. It’s not sophisticated. It works because I do it the same way every time, and doing it the same way every time is most of what gets me through this job at all.