Anxiety again
I'm having major anxiety issues tonight. At work I make these monthly stats I send out to various librarians in different departments. Three of the reports go to our circulation workgroup mailing list. I wrote up the email, hit send (this email is going to about 30 people), and then I realized one of the reports I attached was the wrong one. Instead of doing the smart thing, which is to send a follow up email saying here is the missing report, I decided to try and remove the bad email from our mailing list (did not work), and I sent the same message again, this time with the correct reports. Naturally, ten minutes later both emails show up in everyone's inbox. I hadn't written "Correction" on the subject line for the second email because I thought I'd managed to remove the first one. :(
I ended up writing a third message asking people to please disregard the first email and to download the attachments from the second email and to apologize for any confusion.
All in all, this is minor stuff on the continuum of errors that can happen at work. Having said that, I'm stressed out and anxious for something that I know logically is small potatoes.
I wish I knew the underlying causes of why I'm so afraid of making mistakes. Nothing bad has happened in the past when I made mistakes before on sending emails and then follow up emails with corrections. Or when I accidentally took down our SIP server because I missed a semi-colon when I edited a configuration file. In fact my boss says he's looking forward to seeing what new mistakes I make as I continue writing code/scripts and generating data reports. I'm surrounded by friendly good people who understand that the only way to learn is to do the work and in the process make mistakes. When it's myself at a computer and no one sees all my failures as I learn this Workflows API I'm okay, but as soon as it's a huge group...it's another story.
I think maybe I'm mostly worried that if I'm not perfect people won't think I'm good enough for my job, or they'll find someone who is even more detailed oriented than I am, and I'll lose the first job I actually really like. I'm beginning to think I'm not all that detail oriented after all based off some of the errors I sometimes I make.
I think the future, if I make a mistake like this I'll give it 10-15 minutes, then write a follow up email. I sometimes go into panic mode when I make a mistake and then more mistakes seem to creep in while I try to fix the first mistake. I also discovered that my first instinct is to see if I can hide my mistakes before anyone notices. (hence trying to delete the mailing list email before it went out to anyone) I'm not sure that's a healthy instinct? I'm sure it's a human instinct but I think I'd like to outgrow it.
I went to google to see what people say about fear of failure and how to overcome it, only I'm not sure I'm afraid of failure, just of making mistakes where a lot of people can see. Some of it had great advice. I even found an article that explains what to do if you forget an attachment in an email (it's going on my white board). I feel like I'm able to handle things better if I have a plan.
My boss is very conscious about communications and I think because of that I feel paralyzed with indecision when something like this happens. Tonight I felt like I needed to explain what had happened with the emails, but on the other hand I was thinking this poor mailing list had already received two emails from me in one day, both with the same subject heading.
I'm writing this all out in hopes that it'll help my anxiety go away, at least for tonight. Sometimes I feel like it robs me of moments of joy and happiness in my evenings.
In other news, I'm still experiencing some jet lag from my vacation to Texas. Maybe I'm just tired and that makes it harder for me to not feel everything.
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