sueeeus

Today is a be still kind of day for me.  What a treasure!  Some people want or need to be entertained, or constantly on the go, doing something, going somewhere, being with someone.  I get so few moments to just be still.  I sit in silence in my living room, looking at the ceiling, looking at the sky through the skylights, looking at the colors and placement of the furnishings and decor, breathing deeply and simply being peaceful.  It’s a friendly room.  It’s nice to just be still for a moment.  I have a thousand things I could or should do, but I’m not going to.  I’m just going to sit still for a little while.

I love my cedar ceiling. Love!

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I find it tragically amusing that I posted in October about not falling apart, when I realized yesterday that I’ve fallen more apart than I had any idea!  I’m glad that I can amuse myself, even if it’s in a tragic manner.  Imagine the amusement I can attain when I’m rockin’ my world!  My core, the essence of me, always wants to find the light and bright side of things.  It may take me a while, but I’m always looking for it.

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I’ve been thinking about perspective.  It’s so easy (for me) to be caught off guard and lose perspective.   I can get stuck wondering what I did or said that caused a given action or comment, and jump to some conclusion that may or may not be valid.  Or else I can’t come up with an answer at all, and I am completely flummoxed.  In my professional life, when I get stuck trying to solve something, usually if I drop it for a while, rest, and come back again with fresh eyes, I can figure it out.  I will then chastise myself for not dropping it earlier, thus saving myself the time, anguish and frustration of beating my head against the wall.  In my personal life, if I could at least remember to tell myself that problem solving is problem solving, and if I could remember that it always works well to just let it rest for a minute, allow myself to regroup, then clarity will more than likely follow shortly.  If only.  I sure would save myself unnecessary anguish.

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There has been a lot of passion and agitation floating about regarding Ferguson, and I don’t know anything about the issue, other than some people I love are passionately impacted in one direction and some people I love are passionately impacted in the opposite direction.  I have absolutely no opinion because I don’t know the situation, but my heart aches and strains over the anguish and passion that others are struggling with over this very public issue.  Politics.  I can not abide.  The mere thought causes literal gut wrenching sensations.  It’s visceral.  Absolutely and completely.

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Loose ends.  I have such a strong desire for conclusions, answers, solutions, closure –understanding.  Maybe that’s the bottom line.  Understanding.  For some reason, loose ends leave me feeling frustrated and incomplete.  It’s probably an OCD thing.  Sort of like writing a sentence and not using a period to punctuate the end.  That would drive me NUTS!  The thing is, it drives me bonkers in almost all elements of my life.  If a conversation just drops off in thin air, with no apparent reason why, I’m left wondering why.  I suppose it boils down to order vs. chaos.  A loose end represents chaos in my world.  A conclusion represents order.  With understanding, closure, conclusion, summary, completion, whatever it is called, I can put whatever it is away, and it will no longer clutter my mind and emotions.

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Sometimes the accumulation of loose ends and lost perspective cause me to doubt myself, and I get turned around, upside down.  When this happens, I have to somehow retreat and regroup.  It’s so hard to do, when you’re stuck!  Sort of like trying to swim against the current.  I visualize myself, a lone figure, and I visualize myself spinning, arms spread, spinning around and around, sending waves of light, love, comfort, and harmony out from my extended hands, weaving a tornado of protection around me.  I stand in the center of stillness and catch my breath and gather my strength until I can emerge.  As I describe this, it brings to mind a scene from Guardians of the Galaxy in which Groot weaves himself into a cocoon of protection around his friends.  Like that.

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I really should never doubt myself.  I should be more vigilant and remember, always remember, that I am empathic and absorb the emotions of those around me.  So often I get slammed by other people’s emotions, and it takes me some time to realize those aren’t MY emotions.  Those feels I feel, yes, but those feels aren’t always mine!  Empathy is a beautiful gift, and I truly love my ability to connect with people on such a deep level, but I just need to learn how to distinguish my feels from someone else’s feels.   I suppose that’s the thing about empathy though.  Those feels become my feels.  Oh, the feels.  All the feels!!  I am so often battered by the feels, like ocean waves crashing against a rocky shore.

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Finding joy.  Gratitude.  It’s the simple things in life that bring me the most joy.  I grew some vegetables this year.  I planted multicolored carrots, and yielded only two.  Two!  The beets did well.  I love beets.  I also grew a mystery vegetable.  At first I thought it was a pumpkin, but it turns out it was an acorn squash.  I don’t even remember ever having squash, because I don’t like squash, but somehow it ended up in the compost, and when I built my garden, I added some compost.  That particular seed sprouted and thrived, so I decided to let it live.  It actually completely overtook the entire garden box, and produced several squash.  The slugs ate most of them, but it yielded one respectable squash.

garden bounty

I decided to take my end of season garden yield and make roasted veggies for my contribution to the Thanksgiving feast.  I roasted garlic and used fresh thyme and rosemary from my herb garden, and made a buttery spread.  I had an inordinately grand time, gathering the veggies from my garden, cleaning, prepping, and cooking them.  It felt so complete!  So wholesome!  And believe it or not, the squash actually tasted good to me.  Wonders shall never cease.

roasted and color coordinated

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I’ve been struggling quite a lot lately.  I mentioned tragic amusement above…   Anyway, I’ve been thinking of all the various monumental life changes taking place, contributing to the struggle.  Work.  That’s a huge change.  The transitional dust most likely won’t be settled until at least next summer, so there remains quite a long road ahead.  I need to gird up.  Along with that, my niece, sort of the daughter I never had, graduated high school and moved across the country this fall.  This had a much deeper effect on me than I had any idea, and I was completely unprepared for the emotions that would surface.  Closing chapters of a long relationship, opening and closing and trying to navigate the waters of forming a new relationship leave me worn and depleted.  Frustrations over the superficiality of people in the singles world.  I see deep seated fears and insecurities in men manifest in various ways.  They probably have no idea of these things themselves, because they are living only on the surface.  But that’s a whole other probably very long winded post for another time.  Countless hours spent in traffic.  Darkness when I rise, darkness when I return.  Single parenting struggles, wanting my children to grow into gracious, kind, responsible, confident, and respectable men, and not knowing quite how to accomplish that.  The responsibilities of life.  I have a full plate.  It can be daunting and overwhelming if I think about it much.  That’s why I like to slow down and be still.  I get the most joy out of the simple things.  I go outside and feed my alpaca girls, chastise them for fighting each other for the lion’s share, and wander around the pasture, picking up their poop.  It’s therapeutic, really, to trudge about outside, rake and bucket in hand.  The wind in the trees releases the most wonderful cedar scent.  I feel happy.  I am very blessed.  I live a beautiful life.  I am full of love.  I love.  I am loved.

happiness is a rake and a bucket and a pasture full of poop

It has been a long time since I’ve written about my work.  I maintain a level of ambiguity, so as not to jeopardize my professional life.  Last spring we underwent a massive restructuring, and the announcement came like a sucker punch to the gut.  Unexpected.

that day cometh like a thief in the night…

A year later, doubled over and trying to catch our breath from the first sucker punch, we took another jab.

moving and shaking…

So there we were, in the ring, so to speak, engaged in a fight that we didn’t ask for and didn’t want.  I wasn’t (yet) personally affected, but I could see the writing on the wall.

carrying the weight of a word on her shoulders…

From my perspective, if I take a step back, it looks like corporate leadership behaves like a bunch of kids playing pick up sticks, only we are the sticks.  Throw the lot up in the air, see where they land, and try to piece things back together.  Who gets the most sticks before the stack collapses?  Winner!!!!  What about the remaining stack?  Yep.  That’s us.  That’s where we are now.  Discarded on a whim.

I don’t remember when they made the announcement, but they did.  And lo it came to pass.  The ax did fall.  I don’t recall the exact date, but there is one (May or June 2015), and on that day, the lights will be shut off.  We shall cease to be.

So it’s been a mad scramble.  The ship is sinking and the rats are jumping.

I thought about looking for other work, but decided not to give in to fear and uncertainty, and not to desert my team.  My specialized team consists of only three people, one of whom is new.  Our young padawan, we call him.  We are training him in the ways of the masters.  Ha!  Seriously, though.  My partner IS the master.  He is literally a world expert in his field.  I am the other master, and I am most decidedly not a world expert in that field, but I bring to the table those proficiencies that make our team a complete, high power unit.  We are a little tiny team of three, serving the entire company of thousands upon thousands.  We could be considered a bottle neck, which in business is not a positive thing, or we could be considered a vital asset.  Both are true.  Single threadedness carries a lot of business risk.  If the thread breaks, the business can be severely impacted.  It brings to mind the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”  Not that the company truly recognizes its vital assets.  I’ve probably blathered on about that elsewhere in this blog.

Even with the leadership making these changes, we are still in business NOW, and we, individually, care about what we do and have a personal sense of responsibility to see things through.  So we have been pressing along, trying to keep afloat amidst the flotsam and jetsam that we are immersed in, simultaneously working on marketing ourselves, making our little niche visible to the echelons so that they will recognize that it would behoove them to preserve our function.  Miraculously, we have succeeded, and we have been given a life raft.  We’ve climbed aboard, soaking wet, and are paddling our way against the current towards the safety of the big ship.

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I am grateful to have a job!  Grateful that I didn’t actually have to hit the streets and look for something different.  At the same time, these many months since the spring of 2013 have been so exhausting.  It’s been like a long and drawn out sickness in which bits of pieces of life connections are dying, and with each loss there is mourning and sorrow.  I’ve spent my life with these people.  This relationship has been thriving for 28 years, and now it’s nearly over.  The goodbyes are so hard.  I walk down the hall and peer into the cubicles and see only a few scattered faces here and there.  It’s empty.  It’s sad.  It’s like gazing upon a hospital ward during a war or a plague, with a few mangled hollow-eyed bedridden people holding on for dear life amidst rows and rows of empty beds left by those who  have departed.

A job is a job, and I can do almost anything, really, so the trauma is not so much about the job itself, other than the huge expectations levied upon us when we are already loaded past most people’s breaking points.  Even so, I’m a performer, and I will perform.  I can do that.  I will do that.

The trauma I am suffering is the loss of life, the life we have spent together for the last 28 years.  There is a lot of life that takes place in that many years.  It’s being forced to say goodbye.  I’ve been dragging my feet, not wanting it to end.  My new desk is thankfully in the next tower, rather than another city, so I’ve had the luxury of dragging my feet over the move.  I’ve been making the transition last as long as possible.  Everything besides my computer itself is moved, but I park my body stubbornly in the spot I’ve inhabited for the last twenty years, just so that I can see the occasional familiar face and hear the occasional familiar voice.  These are my people.  I love them.  Even though we have little to no connection once we leave the office, we are connected in the depths of our selves, from the years upon years upon years of time that we’ve spent together.  But it’s time to cut the cord and it’s time to leave.  I think that next week I will have to occupy the new desk.  I don’t even know how to express how this makes me feel.  It’s the end of an era.  I am a frazzled, emotional mess, and have been for quite some time now.

I’ve done all that I could.  I need to make peace with this and let it go.

It’s been so hard for me, and I don’t really know HOW to make that peace and let it go.  So I’m writing it out, hoping it will help.  Maybe it’s only something that time will ease, the way a scar will ever so slowly fade as it heals.

I don’t know.  But I have to move on and find new joys, rather than remain stuck under this cloud of sorrow.

I am so, so tired.

Today I’m self medicating with a double Bloody Mary.

the face of depression

I actually took some video footage of myself in this state. Now THAT would be an impressive display of courage, to post that. I don’t know how to post video to this blog, so I suppose I’ll save myself the embarrassment, anyway.

One of the recent headlines in The Onion was, “Seasonal Depression To Take Over For Chronic Depression For A Few Months.”  It’s so true that it’s funny.  Or else it’s so funny that it’s true.  Either way.

When this happens to me, I start scouring through my blog history, looking at dates and seasons, trying to figure out when these points hit me.  It seems like they are regular.  The holidays approach.  Of course something is likely to try to take hold.  I read through the archives looking for tips on what I’ve done before.  I start thinking of digging out all my long expired leftover antidepressants and deciding whether or not to try one again.  It’s so exhausting, this mood cycling.  Just today, I don’t even know how many highs and lows I’ve had.  I’ve certainly cried a bucket of tears and felt the grip of anguish.  It’s ridiculous.  Mother fucking ridiculous.

I’m practicing new vile vocabulary.  Invoking the King’s Speech, as it were.  I’m expanding my comfort zone to boldly go where no sueeeus has gone before.  I mean, look at that.  I actually spelled it out, instead of a phonetic representation which was the best I could muster in the 2011 post.  At that time I’d tried an antidepressant as well.  And posted a forlorn picture as well.  Some things never change.  See?  It’s a cycle.  And I’m so TIRED of it!

Granted, much of it may be due to general exhaustion.  I don’t sleep enough.  I don’t rest enough.  I don’t get enough good nutrition. Although I did just have two full servings of vegetables in my V8 based Bloody Mary.

Ha!  My sense of humor remains intact!  We thank the holy heavens for that!!

I have SO MANY thought fragments that I want to capture.  If I could write them down, I think I could feel like I had at least a little grip on them, and if I could do that, maybe I could make some progress.  But instead, I reach a point of exhaustion where I have to just call it a day.  I have no further choice.   I will wake  up to a new day and be somewhat refreshed and will be able to move forward.

When I reach this point, I generally do some research into antidepressants and pros and cons.  I try to remember which ones that I’ve tried worked the best.  So today I was doing some research and stumbled across an article that irritated me.  “People get into a spiral where they can’t help themselves. You need to take responsibility for your own depression, but if you are given antidepressants and sent away, that’s never going to happen.”  Take responsibility?  For my own depression?  I don’t know why, but that statement nearly made my blood boil. Yes, I’m in a spiral.  Yes, it’s difficult.  (I am WRITING about it, at least).  No, I don’t want it to happen to me.  No, I don’t ask for it.  It happens.  It just does.  I don’t think it’s a behavioral thing.  I don’t think it’s a choice.  If it were a choice, I’d choose giddy happiness for my standard.  I would never choose to feel the way I feel now.

The more that it happens, the more I”m convinced that there’s something wrong inside my brain.  That’s the thing that I want to fix.  That’s the thing that needs to be addressed.  Why is there such a stigma with taking antidepressants or anti anxiety medications? Why does the mere notion scream, FAILURE??!!!  I have allergies.  I take antihistamines every day.  Why can’t I mentally allow myself the notion of taking an anti-anxiety medication daily, just like I take my antihistamines?  I can accept that I have allergies.  Why can’t I accept that I have depression?

I’m so, so, so exhausted.  At least I know that with the dawn of each new day there is relief and renewed hope.  But that erodes as the day progresses, and more than likely I’ll find myself in a similar state tomorrow night.

I’m so tired.