The Aftershock

Who you are

In the moment you are unnervingly functional. You take the news, you ask reasonable questions, you get through the rest of the day. It all arrives later, usually when you finally sit down, and then it is loud and visible and needs to be talked about with someone for about an hour.

Delaying is a real skill and most people can't do it. You don't lose access to your thinking when it matters, which means you're trusted with the difficult conversations and the calls nobody wants to make. And because you do process it eventually, out loud, you don't accumulate — it gets dealt with, just on a lag.

The lag is also the problem. It rarely lands where it came from. It lands on whoever is nearest at 8pm, usually someone who had nothing to do with it, and it lands harder than the original thing warranted because six hours of it arrived at once. The people closest to you get the version the workplace never sees.

Put fifteen minutes between the day and the people in it. A walk home, a stop somewhere, anything that isn't straight through the front door.

You know it's you when…

• You got through the hard conversation completely composed
• It landed at 8pm on someone who had nothing to do with it
• Six hours of it arrived at once instead of spread out

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