Beat the S*@# Out of Me?

There are days that I leave my day job feeling like I need a new profession, or at least a change in venue. There are days that I feel so drained and useless that I don't even know where to begin to rebuild my confidence in myself so as to return the next day and start all over. Today is one of those days.

Writing this blog is obviously not my primary profession. Sometimes I do wish I could stay here, though, in the rather solitary world of fingers on keyboard letters and lit up computer screens. At least then I would be spared the rath of public scrutiny. My day job requires me to work with the public on a daily basis, and sometimes it is more than I can handle. Today I had a couple come in that did not much care for the way I handled their situation, and they let me know it as clearly as threatening to beat the shit out of me if they ever saw me out in the world. The adrenaline rushes through me at time like that, sometimes to the point of making me shake with a mixture of fear and anger. My stomach churns. I span through a desire to fight back and cuss and threaten the way they have followed by a fear that I have, in fact, done something terribly wrong and that I am the one at fault. My mind fills with doubt, and I wonder why I even do what I do. I want to retreat and hide. I want to walk out and quit. I want to call for a police escort to walk me to my car. But then part of me wants him to be outside waiting to beat the shit out of me so that I can take one big uppercut to his face and knock the bastard of a man to the ground for even thinking about threatening me. Part of me wants to beat the shit out of HIM.

It makes me sick to think about it. I do sometimes have this problem that when someone comes in to talk to me and has an attitude, I often have a hard time preventing myself from having an attitude right back. Such was the case this evening. The worst thing about these situations is that they generally occur at the end of my work day, leaving me to muddle over the details over and over in my head all night as it was one of the last things that occured in my day. I doubt myself, I doubt my professionalism (I wonder sometimes if I, in fact, have acted the way the nurse did in my previous entry. But, then, that was really about discrimination more than attitude.), and I doubt my ability to do my job.

It used to be much worse. When something like this would happen, I would agonize over it for days. It begins to roll of the back after a while as a neccessary part of working with the public, but the agony never completely goes away. I suppose you really cannot please everyone, and I just have to remember that there is always going to be someone who doesn't agree with the way I operate or who simply does like my attitude. But does it really have to go so far as threatening my physical being?