"ooh, careful, Red's getting emotional"

I cried at work today. Yeah, I did.

I don't cry that often, but I do cry easily. I cry if someone around me is crying. Happy tears, sad tears, it doesn't matter, I'm right there with you. If you're my friend and you start crying, my reaction crying time is like 1.6 seconds; for strangers, it's more like 2.8. I also cry when someone is mean to me. There, I said it. I don't have much in the way of a tough outer shell. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's to my detriment. You push me out of the sandbox, and I'm not in your face wagging my finger like a reality show diva...you're just gonna see some tears, plain and simple.

I happened to be in meetings all day that were pretty tense...lots of emotions and issues and messiness. (Not to mention the fact that I'm not supposed to even be in meetings on Thursdays, but the woman who does my schedule completely disregarded this and booked me all day and then I had to cancel all the kids I should have seen today. Boo.)

Everything went mostly fine except for one bullet at the end of the last meeting. I was on my way out and could FEEL the tears coming. So I turned and went up the stairs to go back to my office, hoping that Supergirl wouldn't be there. She wasn't, but the psychologist was, leaving me a note. How perfect was that? She deals with crazy people all day long. It went a little something like this:

Her: Red, I...are you okay?
Me: Hi! Yes.
Her: What's wrong?
Me: Well...[cries]

So that went on for about fifteen seconds but she didn't bat an eye and immediately made me feel better. I guess I'm going to have to work on upgrading my candy coating to a suit of armor. So start insulting me and throwing stuff. Really, it'll be character building.