At our weekly, company-wide staff meeting this morning the Boss did something great. He spent ten minutes right off the bat reassuring us that with a little long-term perspective you can see all this crazy, run-for-the-woods-Wall-Street's-up-in-flames-and-we're-next!!!! furor for the momentary hurdle that it is. It will pass, just like the dot-com implosion in 2001 and Black Monday in 1987. He assured us our jobs are secure and the company on solid footing, ready to weather the storm. "We just have to get back to basics and keep moving forward." He called it his "Geezer speech" because it's the way old folks talk to youngsters who get whipped up about something they've never experienced before. Some might find it annoying.
I love it. It's the same speech my Dad, the therapist, used all through my adolescence when I worked myself into a dither over the tiniest anxieties.
Today I realized that without noticing, I actually had been working myself up over this economic thing, too . . . fantasizing about how it might doom my 401K, my newly-purchased condo, my career. Dad used to call that horribilizing. Don't look it up, because I don't think it's a real word. But you get the idea.
If they gave out medals in horribilizing, I'd beat your mother and your grandmother and your neurotic sister-in-law and every worrywart in the universe.
I am the gold medal queen of horribilizing.
P.S. If this comes as any surprise to you, it's probably because you knew me when I was taking my anxiety meds more regularly. Thank goodness for modern medicine!
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