Fifteen minutes to grieve
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You can’t control what hits you. You can control how long you carry it.
10:07 on a Tuesday. I’m sitting in my car in the driveway after a call that went sideways. A partnership I’d spent weeks building just fell apart over something stupid and avoidable. My face is hot. My chest is tight. I’m running the conversation back in my head, rewriting my lines, getting angrier at things I should have said and didn’t.
I have a podcast recording at 10:30.
In the old version of my life, that recording would have been a disaster. I would have carried the heat from the bad call into the interview, been distracted for the first ten minutes, asked worse questions, missed threads I should have pulled. One bad conversation would have bled into the next one and then into the one after that, and by dinner I’d have been short with Gina about something that had nothing to do with her, and the whole day would have been shaped by a single moment at 10:07 in the morning.
I know this version of myself because I lived in it for years. One bad hour would ruin fifteen good ones. A tense email before lunch would color everything that came after. I’d tell myself I was “processing” or “sitting with it,” but I was marinating in a feeling long past the point where it was useful, and handing the worst version of myself to every person and every task that came next.
What I did instead
So on that Tuesday in the driveway, I did something I’ve been practicing. I gave myself fifteen minutes to feel it. No fixing, no figuring out what went wrong, no drafting the follow-up email. Just being mad. Hands on the steering wheel, windows up, letting the frustration run its course without trying to talk myself out of it or push it down.
At 10:22, I got out of the car, walked inside, poured a glass of water, and sat down at my desk. By 10:30, when the recording started, I was in it. The interview went well. The guest had no idea that twenty-three minutes earlier I’d been sitting in a parked car with my jaw clenched.
