I hate to bring this up again, but then again, I also wish it hadn’t happened again…

Over the last two and a half months I’ve had more opportunities to see how certain Christian rock songs can trigger feelings of anxiety and the like. After the last time I wrote about this, I thought the employee who’d been listening to the Jesus rock at work had toned it down. For the most part the worst band I’d heard was Anberlin and I did say something about it a few times. I kept my comments pretty light and unfortunately I wasn’t very clear. This could have been in part due to the fact that English is his second language, but again, I don’t like going into stuff like that at work, especially with certain people, so I tried to be vague.

What I should have done is just calmly pulled him into my office and explained to him that religious music is simply not appropriate at work. Of course, I didn’t.

Today I was in there with a bunch of people working on something when an Anberlin song came on again. I found it annoying, but not too bad. They’re one of the bands that I did like towards the end of my time in the seminary, but their music is generally pretty innocuous. The memories it’s most closely tied to are of one particular weekend that I got to spend some time with someone I later became quite fond of, so ironically it’s more tied with the good times I had with her a few years later when our paths crossed again.

I couldn’t what the next song was or who the band was, but I definitely recognized it. It was enough to set me over the top. I didn’t have any flashbacks, but between the anxiety and loss of focus I had to get out of there and calm down for a few minutes.

I was more clear this time about why I changed the music to a different Pandora station, then I left.

At the end of the day, the staff member came to me and apologized for it. He listens to that music enough that he doesn’t even think about what it is and he realized that he had misunderstood why I didn’t like that music. He had thought it was just a personal preference in musical taste. He also wants to be more sensitive and not listen to music that will do that to me at work.

Next time something bothers me I just need to be more clear. Due to my management position I sometimes ignore my own needs, but damn it, I work there too and have the right to feel comfortable in my workplace.

I just wish music wasn’t such a trigger.