jajalala

Today I succeeded at a thing at work that I thought I couldn't do! The long story made short is that certain powers-that-be changed the program that we use to do a certain thing, but gave very little instructions on INSTALLING the program, and so I had an extended number of meetings with IT and ad-hoc consultations with people who got it working in wholly separate orgs from me, and I got it MAYBE working but couldn't get it to actually work with the thing we have as far as I did it....

And in my heart eventually I got to a point where I was like "I think that the way to make it work is to do x, but doing x is kind of getting close to the stuff we're actively using, and so what if pushing it makes everything else set on fire? I shouldn't touch it, I will wait until my team leader is back from her maternity leave and run to her crying like 'plz take a look at this and tell me if u recognize it and don't think it'll explode or if I fully fucked up and have to go to IT again'"

But then even though Team Leader came back from maternity leave today, she has a LOT to catch up on and can't even really be contacted through our usual channels bc she needs to resolve some technical issues, so I put on my "I am an adult and have been learning and of all the employees on the larger team aside from her I have the most Expertise here" boots and decided to keep pushing at the issue in a new direction. Bc even tho I was like "what if doing this makes the thing explode?" I had to believe in myself that I know the system well enough by now that I am aware what would make it explode, and I tested it on a small scale in a maximally-safe way (and it worked!!) before pushing a slightly larger thing, and!!! it worked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And now instead of going to my Team Leader with a pathetic little "plz fix this" I can be like "Here's how to install this new system in one(1) IT visit instead of three and I have already shown that it is possible to work with this system in both editing and pushing new things! You only showed me how to create/edit these things with the previous system once, but I was able to figure out this new system with my vague memory of that meeting (and some google even tho google definitely did not have all the answers I needed)!"

Anyway this morning I told some coworkers it might be a huge fire on the horizon and that I wouldn't be able to get A Certain Thing done until maybe January, but now after pushing through it?????? I'm like "yes I AM the expert, and I've done the hard part of A Certain Thing so it could be done as early as tomorrow if I can complete the last necessary steps" (which should be the same as previously and well documented, so fingers crossed that is much simpler).

Sorry this is super vague bc if I tried to get into the technical details it would be a much longer post, but I feel like a strong super cool and competent employee, especially since just a few days ago (and even weeks ago when first wrestling with IT about the new software) I felt very hopeless and lost and now I'm like !!!!! I am nearly at an End Product when I thought I would be completely unable to get to this stage without Team Leader's help, I am smarter than I think and buckling down and pushing through self-doubt and hopelessness can bear fruit!