A promotion should have been easy to celebrate.
Mine was stressful and a little bittersweet. I did not have a cleaner description than that, but Amanda and I still wanted to get people together for dinner.
The invitation went out the morning of the dinner because apparently advance planning had not survived whatever made the promotion stressful. I told everybody it was extremely short notice and put absolutely no pressure on them to make it.
The plan had two parts. We would start at a cider bar on the Lower East Side. The food was entirely vegetarian. Afterward I would head back to Williamsburg for a drink and possibly some meaty bar snacks if the vegetables had not cut it.
Amanda could go home, let the dog out, and rejoin us. Our social planning regularly included that kind of relay. The dog had a schedule even if I did not.
People could come for as much or as little as they wanted. Dinner, a drink in Brooklyn, both, neither. This was not an official company event or a carefully staged career moment. It was Amanda and me trying to mark something complicated with friends.
I had only joined Reonomy full-time a few months earlier. Since then we had been hiring, moving offices, putting work on walls, stopping everything for outages, and trying to write down the processes before they vanished into chat. The job was changing quickly. The promotion made that change official in some way, even if the note never said what the new title was.
That missing title was not the important part of the invitation. The honest part was the parenthesis: pretty stressful and a little bitter-sweet.
Good news can still arrive attached to a hard situation. I was upbeat, but I was not going to pretend the feeling was uncomplicated. We were going to have the dinner anyway.
Vegetarian food downtown. Meatier snacks in Williamsburg. Amanda, the dog handoff, whoever could make it, and one promotion we were still figuring out how to feel about.