Conflict: A Recovery Conversation

Transcript

keisha: 0:00

Welcome to If I'm Honest. On today's episode, we are talking about recovery again I am I'm a little sick of this conversation. I ain't gonna hold you. I thought we had a good conversation so far. We talked about recovery, defining what it is and the steps that happen in the process of repair and reconciliation, or rebuilding the trust that was lost in the harm. And then we talked about sometimes recovery that needs to happen because we have a belief about ourself, which could be the issue. Or, we have a hope of who we want to be, or an idea of who we are, and that is being challenged, right? And, and how that process of recovery can happen, and it's a more long term and linear process. But we haven't talked about what happens when the issue that arises, the harm that was caused, how it's handled, becomes conflict. And I don't want to have this conversation about conflict. keisha is conflict averse. I try to avoid conflict at all costs. And so having a week that has been filled with conflict is very difficult for me. I want to talk about what to do when recovery is a singular process. So in other words, the person that you are seeking to recover with because of the harm that was caused, maybe because it's harm that I caused, right? Sometimes I'm the harmer and I will talk about that, but sometimes you are bringing the harm that was caused to you to the other person and they don't respond well to that. And what do you do when you're in this process and you're the only one who needs to recover for the benefit of how you work and live and move moving forward. So come on in the room. Let's talk about it. All right. So first I want to say that I am not living a life to create content for this podcast. The reason I started this podcast is because I was having all of these kind of rough experiences and some of them are racist and some of them were just interpersonal conflict. Some of them were, you know, fill in the blank. We are human in this space. And I think there's a lot about, This anti racist, anti oppression journey that is in our living, it is in our everyday existence, uh, and we have to kind of improve those things in order to be effective at this. And so I don't want you guys to be scared of having interactions with me and hoping that I'm looking for content. I hope that my experience in every situation that I go to is podcast content free, right? I would really like to not have to talk about this, especially not when it's conflict. I hate conflict. I really do. And I think I've said that already, but I'm gonna keep saying it. I hate conflict. In some of these situations, I'm responsible for the conflict and I am responsible for the breakdown in communication. I like to take ownership for what is mine. And I also am a believer in conversation. I'm a believer in recovery and repair. I'm a believer in trying to reconcile and rebuild relationships from where the breakdown happened. I believe in that. I live that, right? And so I'm not on this podcast spewing to you a bunch of garbage that I don't believe in. I do. I absolutely do believe in that. And so I had a conflict this week that did not, it just crashed and burnt, right? Like it didn't go well. And it would be disingenuous for me to, to have a conversation about recovery and not talk about, um, recovery when it can't happen because we can't agree or we have conflicting conversation styles. And so I really do hope that we can exist in a content free zone and that's just not real and it's not real for me it's not real for me and so I want to make sure that If I'm honest, has integrity. And if I'm honest, the podcaster keisha lives in a space where she's wanting to have the entire conversation and not just the ones that make her look good. All right, so let's have a conversation about what happened this week. So this week I worked at a virtual on call. I do it weekly, um, but as it stands right now, because it's the summer, I have essentially interpreted one meeting per week. That's maybe 45 minutes every other week, right? And so there are lots of details and context and content about this space that I don't have. My team has it because she's there more frequently and more often. It's been there a lot longer. And so because I don't have this context and this content, I need to be fed, right? There are lots of details I'm just going to miss in the voicing. It's just a fact, right? And that's partially because I'm not receptive skills I need to improve that skill, but it's also partially just because I'm not there. I'm also physically not in the space. So there's a lot of distance between me and the context in which I'm working and I need support. And so in this space on this day, my team saw that I was struggling and I was missing some of those details. She came up on the screen, she came down, she came up again, and then she just took it. And normally, like I'm open process. I don't mind if you just take it. But I did prefer to be fed. And so I'm actively in the process of interpreting, right, and she takes it. And, when I take it back, right, I'm thinking about how This particular let me take it felt to me. It did not feel good to me, right? I didn't like how that process happened for me, right? And so in the middle of interpreting, I probably should have waited I probably should have waited, but in the middle of interpreting, I send her a message and I say, feed me, don't take it. And her response to me was normally, yes, that's exactly what I would do. But in this case I took it for the sake of the message. And my response to her, right, still actively interpreting, it's a pause, right? There's a pause that happens in the conversation. I say very curtly, I stand by my request. Right, and she didn't respond well to that, and I think she, she takes over, and you can kind of see on the screen that she is not responding well, to this feedback, and so, once the meeting is over, I ask her if she wants to talk about it, right, because like, I see that you didn't respond well to my feedback, and I don't necessarily think that this is a space where I need to repair. Right. But I do want to try and soothe, and make it a more comfortable situation because we're colleagues, right? We're working together. Um, and the message also matters, but our relationship is equally important, like you can't, shit on your team for the sake of the message, right? Because now the dynamic between us is off and the message is going to suffer as a result of that. And, um, I say shit on, right? Like, I say that and it's a little, hyperbolic, right? Like, let's be honest about that. But what is true is how this exchange happened did not feel good to me, right? And I gave some feedback hoping to correct that. So when I opened the door for conversation, I expected that she was going to be responsive to the conversation. Right? That's what I hoped. It's what I really need in a conversation where I am bringing, to you something that's probably a difficult conversation and it's uncomfortable for both of us. I'm expecting her to say, I understand your perspective. I see how that could have come across to you and how that might've felt to you. I get it. Um, I'm sorry. How can we do this better for next time? That's what I was expecting, right? Like I went into that situation thinking that she thinks like me. Okay. Right? She thinks like me. And really what happened was She was offended, and how I presented the content of my message and what I was seeing and what my experience was, she interpreted as a character assassination. And I'm looking like, how the hell did you get that from what I said? Right? Like how? So now we're in a full blown conflict and she's triggered and one of my huge huge triggers in my life is feeling misunderstood. I have a long history of trauma around being misunderstood and not being seen and not being heard and so now I'm triggered. Right? And now, we aren't communicating in a way that it was effective. And here's the first thing I'll say that I did incorrectly in this space. Right? Is I brought a kind of grievance to her. So if we go back to the process of, of recovery and repair, we start with the conflict. And I don't necessarily think it's always a conflict. Sometimes I think what it is, is a conversation. That, that can lead to a deeper connection, because there's a misunderstanding that happened. It was not intentional and now we can go about building a deeper connection because we agree that we should repair it, right? But sometimes when the issue isn't received well, it becomes conflict. And If the person who is on the receiving end of the grievance disagrees with you or doesn't appreciate your delivery or gets defensive for whatever reason, now it's a conflict, and it has to be addressed differently or there's a complete breakdown and now you don't work together anymore. There are lots and lots of scenarios and that's why I want to talk about this because we didn't talk about that. Like we talked about recovery on the side of like me getting defensive, right? Like me getting defensive when somebody says, Hey keisha, you did this thing and you shouldn't have done that thing. Like you shouldn't have done that thing. Uh, that thing is perceived as unprofessional. Don't do that shit again. Right? So now we have a delivery issue and we have a content issue and I'm being defensive and I'm not thinking about what's important because now my lid is flipped and I've lost my shit and I am not actively still engaged in the process of making sure that I recover, that I take ownership for what is mine, that I seek the counsel of repair, right? Like I'm outside of that process, and so that's what we talked about. So I know what to do when I'm defensive, but I don't know what to do when the person I have brought the issue to is offended and they're defensive, right? And so I tried to skip the step of just the initial like, Hey, I see that my feedback to you was not received well. And this is what I'm seeing, and this is my experience, and I'd like to fix this. We haven't talked about what happens when that's the thing that now she's offended now She's defensive, right and you can't skip that step and just hope to Move through the other steps of recovery and repair and reconciliation. That's not a thing, and sometimes I think what's real is that People don't want to repair with you People can't repair with you, right? And in this situation, it didn't go well. It did not go well. It did not go well. Like it just exceedingly went poorly. And I ended the conversation with her and I felt bad, right? Like I felt bad how it resolved. I felt bad that we didn't come to some resolution. I felt bad that we never could come to a place where we agreed and understood one another. I felt terrible. And. I still have to answer the question of how to move forward because I didn't come off the job. I think initially I wanted to, I was just like, hell no, I'm not going to stay in this space because we can't see eye to eye. But the job was fine, right? It's now the communication process by which recovery needs to happen. All right, so we've talked about what happened and initially I wanted to wait until she and I had the conversation again. What I wanted to bring to you was a pretty present with a bow on it, right? Like I wanted to be able to say, you know, I had this really yucky conversation that happened this week where it led to conflict. I had some harm that was caused to me. I brought that harm to a colleague, right? And then. And then we had a complete breakdown in communication and conversation. Like our communicative styles were disagreeable to one another. And now we are fighting it out and it just went really bad. But I had a different recovery conversation where After I recognized and took ownership for the harm that I caused, she was able to do the same thing and then we were able to reconcile or at least begin that process. I wanted to present a pretty picture. That's what I wanted and that's not real. That's not real. It doesn't always happen that way. And so I want to talk about now what I wish I would have done better. And while simultaneously acknowledging the skills I don't have yet. The first thing I wish I would have done better is I wish I could have stopped us. I wish I could have said, Hey, this conversation isn't going well. We aren't, Understanding one another. You aren't understanding what I'm saying to you, uh, and that's leading me to have to defend myself. But maybe we just need to take a beat because it's so hot to the touch I was emotionally dysregulated. I was fighting for my life. I was literally being chased by a lion. I was not able to do that. And so another thing I wish I would have done is had some regulating practices that I was good at in the moment, right? So I, Know that when you are triggered in this way and you do feel like you're being chased by a lion and your brain can't separate that this isn't a lion, this is a colleague and you're having a disagreement, right? My brain isn't able to make that differentiation. It is like fight or flight or freeze or fawn, and my natural tendency in cases like this is to fight. So I'm fighting for my life and what I wish I could have done is been able to identify that I'm not being chased by a lion. And I'm emotionally dysregulated, and I could have used some emotionally regulating practices that would have either stopped us, and given me a moment to do that, in the moment. Or I could have stopped this long enough to do that personally and privately. I wish I had those skills. I don't have them. Right. And we talked about doing that last week when, when somebody, when you get defensive, I'm typically not the one who's defensive. And so it was easier for me to talk about that when it was somebody else. But now I'm in the, in a situation where I am actually defensive as a result to how I'm being responded to. And I think it's easier said than done to say, Find some, regulating practices, figure it out, do some somatic, some breathing, some do something. Right? It's easy for me, but I don't have that practice down and I can imagine that you don't either, uh, or many of you don't. And I want to talk about finding ways that we can figure out how to get back online. The next thing I want to say I wish I had done is just been able to use nonviolent communication practices. Now, I read a book, last year, and I will read it again, called Nonviolent Communication. And in those practices, one of the things that you do is you listen without judgment. Right? You're able to not take what is being said to you personally, and you're able to hear and ask questions about what she's saying and thinking, um, and you're not, and you're listening not to defend, not to, to, to advise, not to do anything else. But to hear what she's saying, yeah, I don't, I don't have it yet. And so I will revisit some practices on how I can do that better for next time. Right. And I think that's what recovery looks like in a singular process. I'm not sure if the follow up conversation with her is going to go well. I don't know. I have no way of knowing that until I have it. And. If I just set it up and expect that it's not going to go well, which I don't think is helpful. So I'm not going to do that, but just give, just go with me for a minute. Let's just say, I say it's not going to go well. I still need to recover. So the next time I experience a conflict like this, I can respond better. Right? I can do that for me. I personally don't want to have conflicts with my colleagues. I don't want to get into, an argument or just a debate that, that happened in such a really unfortunate and uncomfortable way. I don't want to do that in the way that that happened before. I'd like to never do that shit again. Right? And so it means that my recovery in this situation is to learn how to resolve conflict. Resolve conflict well. Not just for her or the next her, which could be anybody. not for me. That conversation didn't feel good to me about me, right? And so these are things that I wish I had done better and will work towards doing for the next time. Now, before I move on to the next scenario that happened in my actual lived life, I want to talk about What does a recovery conversation look like? The follow up conversation I'd like to have with my colleague, what does it look like? And the first thing I will say is I am grateful for her contribution, uh, to my healing and to this podcast, right? I appreciate, a mirror being put in my face about one, the ways that I need to improve. My communication style. And some of my practices and habits. It's kind of like the universe said. keisha, you're talking about recovery. Let me show you how bad you are at it, right? And so I'm grateful that I can have an honest conversation with you about it, but also an honest conversation with me. I am not a interested in not addressing this. And so I'm really grateful to, unfortunately, the breakdown in conversation and communication so that now I can be intentional about repair and nonviolent communication practices as well as how to regulate in a moment where I feel like I'm being chased by a lion and just figuring out what that looks like for me, right? What somatic practices I might be able to use, you know, what breathing exercises I could use. So first I'd start out by saying that, like, thank you so much for unfortunately coming along for the ride for my own healing and recovery. I'd really like to do this better. But the next thing I think I would say is I was really dysregulated and as a result of that, I was defensive and not able to hear you either, right? And I want to apologize for that. I want to apologize for how I contributed to the breakdown in communication. Um, and I would like for us to start over. Let's try and have this conversation again so that we can continue to work effectively, and figure out what that looks like together. And also be honest about the reality that, you know, It might not work. It might, she might not be agreeable to that. And also being okay with that too, right? Feeling like I really am trying to do my part to be cooperative in this process, but I also can do it without you. We don't always get the participation of the person who's harmed us and that we have harmed for the healing. That's just a fact of the matter, right? If you do some racist shit, and a black person or a brown person or whoever it is that the racist shit was done towards, if they say, I don't want to deal with you forever, that's their humanity and that's a prerogative. And they get to be in that space and we don't get to be offended because they don't want to be participants in your healing process. We got to learn to heal regardless. We got to learn to figure out how we can be better, right? In their absence, right? And we're doing that because we want to be great people. But we also want to be better relational people, people who have relationships of different kinds in different ways, but also this is a business model, like I don't want to be, uh, in a situation where my business model looks like I can't recover, And I can't figure out how to move forward regardless of the situation that happened. And so that's what I would do. Um, that's my plan. That's my hope and that's why I want to do it. Actually, right quick before we move on, I want to say this, uh, I was thinking about this conversation that I had with my colleague and I was kind of processing it through with one of my best friends and she was talking about moments where she is disallowed to recover. And quite frankly, this is a situation where I may go to revisit the conversation and my colleague completely be resistant and shut down to all of my attempts to try and recover cooperatively. But there are lots of reasons that people disallow you from recovering cooperatively. Like they don't trust you. You've caused this harm. Now they don't trust you and they don't want to talk to you anymore. Or you have history and you have harmed them in such a way and they're heartbroken or whatever the case may be and they don't want to talk to you, right? And in those moments of being disallowed to recover cooperatively, it feels terrible. It feels so bad and you don't want that, right? Like you really do want to recover. But what she said as she was, processing through her own experiences made me ask myself the question, is my desire to recover cooperatively Is it self serving? Is it performative? Am I just trying to control the narrative that my colleague thinks about me? And I do think it's time for another conversation around performativity. What I do want to say about that in this space is that, it's the same thing that we've talked about before, is that sometimes when you're completely offline and who you are and who you want to be and who you think you are, all of that gets misaligned because this conflict has happened, because some harm has been caused, because there's a disagreement and you're not operating in the conversation at your best, right? And That person that's sitting across from you, proverbially, digitally, physically, comes to a conclusion about you that sometimes our aim at recovery is just to fix the narrative. I want you to see me as a good person. I want you to see me as a communicator. I want you to see me in the way that I see myself and I don't like the narrative that you have developed as a result of that. That is self serving. And as a result of trying to force, cooperative recovery, we just cause more harm, right? If the people that we're talking to isn't able to really receive the conversation in the way that you intended, or because you don't actually care about them, you just care about how you look, then it just causes more harm. And I don't live in that space. That is not true for me, but I think people do, right? And I think sometimes we don't know that we do. Sometimes we don't realize, Our intentions aren't genuine, like we think they are, and on the surface it feels like it, but we have to stop and interrogate our motives. And if our motive is just to correct the narrative, then we are not just trying to control the narrative, we're also trying to control the person that we are in conversation with. And like, that's not healing. Right? It's not productive, but it also robs you of your own introspections and way of recovering and repairing in their absence, right? And so I want you to think about that. I want to think, I want you to always think about your motives. It is not my motive in this case. In this case, I do think it's hopeful to cooperatively recover. I do. And I want to. Because I want the best for the team, but I also want the best for the relationship. I really do think it would benefit. Me as a human to even make the attempt, but I'm also Leaving space and room for not to go in a way that I want and I am going to be okay with that So I want you to think about that. That's just some food for thought What is your reason for recovery? Like check that. If you don't check that and you operate in this performative way, then sometimes The actual change that you're talking about making in your own process of recovery isn't real, it doesn't stick. And you want it to stick. You want it to be actually who you are, not who you appear to be. So speaking about being disallowed to recover cooperatively, there are some moments where you can't. You just really can't and you're not allowed to do that. And I want to talk about a situation that happened when was at a conference. Now, you, I was at NAD a couple weeks ago and I really do work a lot of conferences. I work large conferences, small conferences. Some of them are large and they are predominantly into English, and some of them are predominantly into ASL. Some of the teams are really big, right? There's, you know, at NAD we had 52, interpreters, but some, you know, Conferences are small, right? They, they range, there was just two of us, right? And they can kind of range in size and scale. And depending on the number of interpreters that you're working with and the number of the people that you have to interface with, you may not always come to a common ground and agree about how the things are going. All right. So I was at this large conference and, I was working on a team of four, right? And in this situation, I caused the harm. A colleague and I on this team of four, I was sitting next to one colleague and that colleague and I, we were just kind of stressed out and trying to make light of the situation. So we were giggling and kind of chit chatting in the process of our other colleagues actively working and I can see now how disruptive that was. I can see now how that adversely Impacted the situation and also impact the access for everyone else, right? We were just doing a lot of work and there's just a lot of back and forth, but at the end of it, I, I felt like I made it through this job, that was very difficult. I made it through this job and, and, uh, my colleague and I, that was sitting directly next to me, who is white, uh, and that will be important in a minute. We made it through, right. And I kind of felt good. And so I packed my things and I left, I left for the evening. And as a result, a couple of days later, I got a conversation from coordinator and, uh, the conversation. Came from the requester, right? And it was punitive in nature about this specific event. And I want to talk about basically what happened. So what happened was in the process of us kind of laughing and talking and, you know, our mics picking up the sound and obviously we really didn't know the impact that we were having on the situation. My direct colleague who I was sitting next to and we were kind of team, we were on two teams of two. She got a conversation from our other colleagues, um, that said, Hey, that was really unprofessional. It was really disruptive to listen to you laugh and chit chat, during this job. And it was really unprofessional and don't do that shit again, essentially. Right? And so that was the conversation that my direct colleague was able to have with our other colleagues. But for whatever reason, the conversation didn't come to me directly. I cannot tell you why it didn't come to me directly, but it was given to the coordinator and the coordinator went to the requester. And it just became this big jumble of a mess. But when I got to the conversation, it was punitive in nature and I'm not being hyperbolic, right? The feedback I got from the coordinator was that, I was unprofessional and on thin ice, um, because of the appearance of professionalism, not because of the work that I put in, but because of the appearance of professionalism and some kind of pattern that I noticed. And so I had this conversation, I was open, I was receptive and, you know, I kind of talked through this with the coordinator and I thought it was done. But what happened as a result of that is I seek to repair and I wanted to take ownership from the colleague. I felt like I also got in trouble because I wasn't in the right head space and I felt like I dragged her into kind of me trying to regulate my emotions. during this job. And so when I talked to her, what I found was, is there was some discrepancy within how the situation was handled. So my colleague, my direct colleague, who's white, she got the conversation from our colleagues, the other two interpreters who were on the team. Whereas I got the conversation via the requester from the coordinator, right? And so you can kind of see that, how differently that's been handled. And because we can't just take race off of it, the black interpreter is being treated a lot differently than my white colleague. My white colleague was talked to by our colleagues, and it was done. But now I'm having this kind of, Punitive conversation. Instead of having a collegial conversation that says, Hey, that wasn't cool. Knock that shit out. Right? And I can't tell you why. And I, and I don't think that that's important, but I do want to talk about how sometimes when you're disallowed to have a conversation. restorative, and recovery conversation for whatever reason. Maybe because people think you're unapproachable. Maybe because, there are interpersonal dynamics that are not being stated. Maybe because, fill in the blank. There could be a number of reasons why that hasn't happened. But now, not only does it not feel good to the person who caused the harm, because I can't repair, but there's also now other harms that's being caused because I can't make my white colleague black now or I can't make myself white so that we are experiencing an equal, um, conversation about harm that was caused. Right now it's just much, much worse and it's being blown out of proportion and there's a lot I could say about that situation but I don't think that that is really important. I think what's important is this Inability to have a restorative conversation, and I know you know colleagues who have, instead of talking to their colleague, right, talking to the person that has caused the harm, going over their head and talking to the agency or the supervisor or the, the requester or whatever you can imagine that that doesn't just feel harmful. It feels vendictive, right? Even if that's not the intention of the situation. And Here's what I'll say. Is positive news that by the end of that conference, I was able to have a kind of, recovery conversation, but a lot of harm happened between when the situation happened and getting to that place. And I just want to bring that up because That's a real thing. People who are conflict averse or don't trust how the conflict exchange can happen Between you and them or don't feel comfortable bringing that to When they go over your head, it is more damaging not only to the person personally, but to their professional image, to who they are, to who they want to be, right? There's a lot of negative ramifications that can happen as a result of that. And so I want to caution you, right, from being the kind of conflict averse that doesn't face the conflict head on. Right? And now because I can't change the color of my skin, I can't just make myself white, I can't go back and make my colleagues have communicated with me or handled the situation in the same way as my counterpart was handled. Instead, what happened was the requester came to those two interpreters. Those two interpreters took it to the coordinator. The coordinator went and sought out a meeting with the requester. The requester had a conversation and when the coordinator got back to me, he was talking about sending me home. Now because I can't change any of that, there's a huge discrepancy between how I was handled and how my white counterpart was handled. And now there's an element of racism that we can't just turn off because that wasn't the intention. It was absolutely the impact. And sometimes Recovery is necessary because of the impact that we have on a situation. And I also don't think that it was really intended on blowing out of proportion in this way. I think it was probably just interpersonal dynamics and it felt more safe to have a conversation with the coordinator. It doesn't change the impact even if the intention was this is easier for me. And so I bring that up because it's important. This is a situation where I was disallowed from the process of recovery, right? My counterpart had the conversation with our colleagues and she was able to get up the next day and have a recovery conversation with them. She was able to take ownership and, and apologize and say, I'm sorry. You know, I can see the impact that I've had on the situation. I can see how me laughing and talking was, unprofessional and, distracting and disruptive and that's not who I am or who I want to be. I'll do better next time. I'm sorry. And can we move forward? She was able to have that conversation and I wasn't and I'm actually okay with not having that conversation because sometimes we don't get to have those conversations. We don't get to determine whether or not we can recover or not. Right? Cooperatively but as a result of that, now there's some racism involved. Now there's some oppression involved. Now there's some foolishness and the fallout is much bigger than it needed to be. But that's the impact, right? I also bring up that because I think there are many people who listen to this podcast are conflict averse, right? There is a way that you see a colleague causing harm and you might not feel safe for whatever reason, and I'm not saying it's not, it's not valid, but you don't feel safe for whatever reason having the conversation directly with them. I think what's really important is understanding the implications and the potential impact of not having that conversation with them might be. In this case, it's racist, right? And now. I am being penalized in such a way that they're threatening to send me home, for the appearance of being unprofessional without, without even allowing me a conversation of recovery, of taking ownership for the harm that I might've caused in the situation. But like, I don't think we want that. And I think that you can look at lots and lots of situations where You didn't have the conversation directly and you had the conversation with someone else or you had the conversation over someone else's head and that just exacerbated and Further disintegrated the trust between the two of you and now you are in a different situation Now you can no longer work with them again now to be fair in this situation I think we did try at the end of this situation have some kind of recovery I think we did have a conversation and I would work with these interpreters again. I think that's, that's fortunate, but that's not always the reality. I got lucky that we were able to have an open and honest conversation about what happened, about the breakdown, about the fallout, right? About the fact that now this is racist, uh, and I've been scapegoated as a member of this team who's the only one being blamed for what happened and the adverse impact to access this night. And so, uh, I want to caution you. I want to caution you from not doing that. Doing this process of recovery. Let me say it differently because I feel like I'm unclear. I want to caution you from doing that. Just being conflict adverse to the point where you're not comfortable having the conversation with your colleague can and will cause further harms. And if that is not your intention, if you care about that, if you care about the breakdown, then you have to find a way. To resolve the conflict, right, and recover, even if the end goal isn't reconciliation, right, because I think it's perfectly fine to go through a situation, to have hard conversations, and to resolve to never work together again. I don't think recovery has to look like that. But sometimes it's real that you can recover. This person doesn't want you to recover with them. They don't want to recover at you. They don't got to want to recover at you. They don't care about the outcome. impact that they have on you. They don't care how you feel or the racism that happens or whatever, um, thing could happen as a result of not talking about it. Sometimes that's just the reality. That's part of being human and not being able to control other humans or the narrative all the time. And I think part of recovery is for me, the singular version of what I do. do as a response to, you know, this, this scenario that happened a while ago, is I got to think about how I went into the situation. Did I regulate? And I didn't, I didn't. And I was dysregulated in the situation. I was again dysregulated for other reasons, right? That I think is really important reason for trying to figure out how to regulate your emotions, because sometimes we're not dysregulated because of conflict or we're not dysregulated because of conversation that's happened, we have other things in our lives that will dysregulate us that if we regulated ourselves, if we practiced, nonviolent communication, if we were cooperative and communicative, if we kind of operated in the kind of integrity that allows you to try and build trust in the process, then we can have better conversations with ourselves. Cause I had a whole conversation keisha needed to have with keisha primarily before going into that assignment that I didn't have with me. And if I had to come in and a more regulated space, then I probably Would have just done the job differently. I probably could have told the coordinator, Hey, I don't have the capacity to do this job tonight. Right? Like there are different decisions I could have made instead of kind of putting my team at risk because I wasn't in the right head space. Right? And that's a conversation of recovery that happens with keisha. From keisha. All of that. The, the beginning and the end of that process happens with me, right? But now because I didn't do that first before going into the assignment, now I'm contributing to harm to someone else. Harm to access of other people, um, and harm to my team and our proper functioning and how we kind of operate our best. And I could have made different decisions. And so I want to take full responsibility for that, but I also want to keep thinking about what I could have done differently for the next time. And there has been a next time, right? Like, and I have done things differently. Um, But I still need to keep thinking about it because this sticks with me. Not just because of the trauma and the scars that happen as a result of this kind of last event and that happens in conflict in general, but also because I want to be better. I want to be a better interpreter. I want to be a better team. I want to be a better communicator. I want to be a better listener. I want to be a better human. I want to be better in my relationships. I want to be better. And I'm sharing it with you because I'm hoping you do too. Um, and I know that this journey that I'm on, I've kind of given you a glimpse into my journey and my process and how I identify the gaps and things that I need to improve in my own humanity and the human experiences that I have with other humans. And I know that you can do this process of understanding, identifying those gaps for yourself, not just in your interpersonal connections, but also in the work. I just want to say this. This is a journey. It is a big, big journey. It is not a sprint. It is not a 5K. It is not a marathon. It's like the ultra marathon of ultra marathons, right? It's like the Barley Ultra marathon that happens once a year in Tennessee and is damn near impossible to finish. This year, 2024 was the first year a woman completed it in it's like 50 year history. It's damn near impossible and they only get 68 hours to complete the race and she finished it in like 59 hours and 59 minutes. Something crazy. And this is that for us, right? But our parameters for this ultra marathon of life is life, right? We have our lifetimes to complete it and I hope that for the next job, for the next teaming environment, for the next everything that I can do it better. Uh, and I will find appropriate resources. I'll read more books. I will introspect. I will seek out therapy. I will Seek the counsel of my friends. I will keep doing the work so that I can be better for the next time And recover better. This has been If I'm Honest. Talk to you soon.