God, grant me strength.
When in just a few minutes I am confronted with a change that will more or less entirely invalidate the way I work, the way I think about working, the way I think about my career and how I approach it, give me the strength to smile and applaud and be gracious the way I should be.
Give me the integrity to wish those well who are flourishing and prospering six days into the new year, while I stand eerily still. Let me not forget that there are other people in the world, and that just because they’re having good things happen to them, that doesn’t mean that something has to happen for me.
Let me not be jealous. Let me not be spiteful. Let me not forget that elsewhere, people are surviving more horrible things than a career that is melting away and revealing merely a job underneath.
Let me be grateful that huge waves of water did not suddenly wash me out into the ocean to drown. Let me be wise enough to appreciate that when I slipped in the shower this morning, it could have been my forehead and not my knee that whacked into the soap dish.
Give me the perspective to remember everything I have, and be grateful for it. Let me not give into the sweet, satisfying temptation to be a bitch, no matter how good it feels.
Help me to remember what it was like to be a happy, balanced person who knew the difference between ambition and frustration. Help me to keep just a little of that balance over the course of the next half an hour.
Help me to raise those cheeks, bare those teeth, clap those hands. Give me strength, God, just this one time.
Amen.