I've been complaining a lot lately. Not because I can't handle what I need to do, but because I want people to notice how hard I am working, and I want to connect with people.

But I've decided to give it up. Like some kind of mental diet, a fasting of sorts. Because here's what I've noticed--nobody cares much how hard another person works. Nobody even can understand. They can't sit in your skin and feel the frustrations or difficulties, and telling them doesn't get anybody anywhere.

My boss' son, one of the more creative children to fall onto the planet, needed the difference explained to him between sympathy and empathy the other day, and she told him that there were some things about which she could have sympathy for him--like being bullied--but that she would never know empathy for him because she had never experienced it.

That's what is interesting about being a reporter. You can complain, and people may have sympathy, (which I don't really want, because I don't want a pity party,) but very few know what it's like. And I've noticed that those who do know what it's like don't want to hear you complain because it's so damn unproductive. Excuse my language. That's because the act of dealing with what is difficult every day gives you that hardness after awhile, makes you insensitive to other people's difficulties while you try to focus on your own. The upside is that the focus gives you the ability to do what is necessary, (sometimes not an iota more,) to make it through the day.

I don't know what I'm saying except that for thirty days, I'm going to attempt to stop complaining and focus all my energy on completing things. Completing and complaining are opposites for the moment.