Manage This

I came into management with aspirations and inspiration, not an ounce of trepidation, no hesitation.
I threw myself into the fire, put myself up for auction, work was the buyer, promise after promise to take me higher.
Yet here I stand a year and  two later, again my biggest hater, on thin ice, a skater.
Down I go; in the water cold, soul sold.
I'm supposed to lead and believe but all I've done is bleed.
Tell me please, what is left to be seen if all people do is deceive.

I've forgotten bliss
Because
I have
To manage
This.

Long forgotten is life and her warm kiss, lost again in in a world dark and brisk.
I'm reaching and screaming, begging and pleading, but nobody lifts a finger to stop the bleeding.

Rejected, left dejected, heart ejected from my chest and a tombstone erected when I decide to protect it. I had my chance and I wrecked it, my fire died because nobody checked it, so forgive me if in this life I'm a skeptic.

I go home, take a drink, sit down and think; if I'm so far from the brink, why does the line always have a kink?
It's never smooth, it's never easy, because my heart freezes whenever someone sees me.
I'm scared; it's unfair, there are things I want to do that I won't even dare.
I'm torn between doing what I want and doing what I know.
There were words running through my head even when I was shoveling snow, slogging along slow.
There is a narrative, lives being lived in my head, stories being told, a plan unravels, a heart unfolds.
There's a heartache and betrayal, two revolutions and a wedding, but the plot is still so frail.
If I step back from it, take my finger off her pulse, she vanishes, withers, dies. The ideas bleed out into nothing when I'm unable to write, thoughts never to be had again.
So I'm nervous and scared that a year of my finite life is typed, still incomplete.
I'm scared of the very thing I like, that which makes me get up to fight. The one thing that keeps me going, the fact that I write.
I do the scary things, each and every day. I'm getting bolder, I'm getting braver in the fact I have accepted that I can't be everyone's savior.

Because
I have
to manage
this.

My life, my time, my heart, you can argue that management is an art. One I personally see myself lacking.
Work is work is work. Work I manage, work is damage control, work is a coworker texting me on her lunch break with the updates, our store speed and goals. At work, to manage is my job.
Why?
Because by profession, I'm a bloody manager.
That's why.
But that's work, it starts there and it usually ends there. My heart is in my crew, my brain is in the office, my soul is in my writing.

I've never been at one, I've never had it together, because
I have
to manage
this.

There was a looming remodel, hours to be cut, the lobby to gut, new team to instruct, and hopefully and new me to construct. This was the easy part, now I have to fight. Now I have to work on myself, now I have to remind myself who I am, I have to remind myself that I damn well can.
That I can do better, that I've been doing better, that I can be my best.
Remind myself that I damn well better... because I will have a nephew.
I will have two new eyes looking up to me, and I will prove to him that who you have been isn't who you will be.
That lesson is a double edged blade, I've known the best to fall and the worst to rise better. I've been both, I've been there, I'll be there again in this life, its all i can do with this time I have, this mark I have to leave on the world.
I'll be there again because
I have
to manage
this.