Listen. Listen. This is my blog. If I want to start a post with song lyrics that are meaningful to me, like I’m fifteen years old again on MSN Messenger, I fucking will. Revel in the return to your horrible, anguished, brilliant youth. And read on.

I snapped at someone this week. By virtue of my leadership position, people come to me with all kinds of frustrations. Some of those frustrations I don’t agree with. Some of the reasoning often seems off to me. One of my biggest challenges this week has been getting past that, because neither of those two reasons are pertinent to that person’s frustrations. If I were a doctor and someone turned up with, I don’t know. A knife through their hand, and they were furiously declaring that the president of Venezuela had done this to them, swearing up and down that this was the work of Nicolás Maduro: not his agents, not his spies, the actual man.

I don’t think I could say, “Huh. That seems unlikely. And if that’s unlikely, then it seems equally unlikely that there’s a knife here: for if the narrative that results in the knife is unlikely, then the knife itself must be equally unlikely.”

There is obviously a knife there. The reasons aren’t that important – or at least, they’re not important to treating the immediate problem and assessing whether further investigation is necessary (are there clones of Nicolás Maduro running amock? Is the patient being slowly poisoned by their Venezuelan boyfriend? Is the president of Venezuela actually in town and known to be a bit handy with a knife?). This is a stupid example, necessarily so. I’m not going to actually talk about the specifics of the person I snapped at, or even why, except to say that I’ve written this out to remind myself that I chose to take up this role, and being snippy to people is not okay.

There do have to be boundaries, and I think I need to work on what those are. I shouldn’t allow myself to be a community punching-bag, for example. I don’t yet know where the line is, between “accepting an amount of vitriol from someone who hoped you could help them (but whom you cannot)” and “welcoming unkind words as a kind of penance for not being able to help someone”. The latter seems…not so healthy. I’m never going to be able to help everyone.

Anyway, on the topic of leadership: I went to an away day at the end of last week with my new team and I was absolutely bushwhacked when I got back, which is why you got no weeknotes last week. We talked a lot about leadership there, and about culture. I got a much better sense of the vision and aims of the programme I’ll be working in, and my little part in it. I’m so excited to get started.

And finally: the next read through of the musical is on the 10th March in Sydney, Australia. You won’t see my name at the link for the same reason that you don’t know the name of the janitor at NASA but you do know the name ‘Buzz Aldrin’, but trust me when I say some of my words are in there. If you’re an Australian reader, please do go and see it. It’s genuinely brilliant.