Ten Months, Ten Days – I’m burning, again

That’s it no more Reign on my Fire.

I can’t believe all this time has slipped by. Where did it go?

September 2008 was a slow return to reality after BRC, followed by October’s fast and furious assimilation by the “Borg” –  my own personal Kryptonite, a “real job”.

Lured by what promised to be, at last, the perfect opportunity to work using only my strengths: Strategy, Coaching, Team Building, User Experience Design, and Introducing Social Media, I leapt at the chance to “build my own team.” I never imagined I’d be hanging up my brand new super-hero suit so quickly.

I envisioned a slow ramp up as a sort of Charles Xavier, culling through my network of ultratalented friends from the online world – designers, developers, social-media gurus and online strategists, to assemble a best-of-the-best league of super online mutants to fight the good fight against an unwieldy navigation scheme and general lack of brand strategy. It seemed so close, so real, so easy. Heck, I was going to work for the American Association for Justice, it already sounded like a superhero gig. Moonlighting as TBD would be snap, right?

But, the world and the economy had other things in store for me and my team. Just days after arriving, out went The Memo. You know the one. Chances are pretty good you’ve seen one or more of these in the last year or so –  the, “cutting back, tightening belts, hiring freeze” memo.

(I think Hiring Freeze must be a distant cousin to Mr. Freeze, and one cold, heartless bitch, tho not as rotten as her paramour, LayOff.)

So my team of soon-to-be-six, was instantly frozen at 2.5, and 9 months of way too many 80 hour weeks, a layoff, a scapegoat and an implosion later, it’s just me and two wonder twins.

I lived so much of this last year so far outside of my Strengths Zone that I feel drained and depleted. But at the same time, I’ve taken on – and beaten – technical challenges I could never have imagined previously. (POW! take that web server scrub! BAM! RedDot LiveServer redundancy! BANG! you’re done, ever- crashing-nightmare-giving website! No more!)

Still, even though TBD would brush through my thoughts with a melancholy longing, there seemed no possibility to pull out the suit, to ignite the Fire of Desire. But in the last several months, with my darkest of foes defeated, I’ve felt her whispering to me at every turn. Teasing me with signs and symbols.

And so feeling like Peter Parker in Reign, or Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Returns, older, slower, surlier, hopefully a little wiser, yet nonetheless compelled, I must don the suit again.