Five go to Turton

The Greenbelt machine is really starting to crank up again; today I head up to Edgeworth to meet up with the other 4 Ops Managers.

A few assorted friends join us for lunch at the Rose and Crown, before the 5 of us head back to Martin’s in Turton to get down to business.

It’s pretty intensive, but I’m struck once again by how much trust and respect I have for these guys. It’s is just so good to spend time with them. Just to be with them makes me feel so much more positive about the whole Greenbelt thing.

Well comparatively anyway.

It also helps me understand a little better, where some of my negative emotion about the festival is coming from. I know one person reading this will choose to take the full responsibility for this (and no doubt apologise…again!), but that just isn’t a correct reflection of things. The fact is I was feeling pretty disconnected and worn down, even going into the weekend, by Sunday I was in floods of tears and Monday…well Monday was Monday.

I don’t know why I was feeling so disconnected from the festival. Maybe because I find it increasingly hard to truly stop work on site, even when time allows, and tune in to an event or space.

I don’t know what I can do to address that one.

Today did however help me understand far better why I was feeling so ground down, by stuff pre-festival.

I won’t go into the details, but when you’re slogging your guts out, doing crazy hours trying to pull something together, it’s hard to overestimate the demotivational effect of feeling undermined and of feeling that you’re having to dismantle unnecessary obstacle after obstacle just to get things to work. Even if this is happening in a fairly unintentional if maybe careless manner and even if generally the majority of those around you are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the feeling of “this is hard enough without…” can become a mantra of deep frustration.

It becomes even more destructive when you feel you have to keep a positive, sunny face on it all for the sake of the team of people who are also slogging their guts out around you. Becoming the buffer between the detractors/obstructers and your team can be exhausting.

I don’t have any clear idea how to fix this one, but I know I need to. I love the festival enough for that to carry me through one year of feeling like this, but I think a second year might put the nails in the coffin.