I haven’t been the most attentive of bloggers lately, not since my fateful break-up kind of floored any sort of self-improvement I was doing. In the new year I’ve decided to shed some skin and begin new and fresh. Regrouping and restarting, recharging batteries, revelling. Time to put aside my worries and start living my life.

The thing about putting aside your worries though, is that they inevitably creep back into your life when you least expect them, when you thought they were long gone, dead and buried, “gotten over”.

And today, as I grapple with the idea that my coping mechanisms are more than just a bit shit, I have decided that the only way I can start anew is by parking those internal dilemmas, my fears and anxieties, onto my blogs. They are also my way of separating what is work stuff, and what is personal stuff – so don’t worry, you won’t be getting any long, tired and trivial blog posts about my non-existant love life.

Writing for me, remains the only consitent method in which I resolve things. And if not resolve, I am at least able to vomit it out and see it for what it is. 9 times out of 10, I can acknowledge it and move on. But if I don’t go through the process, I go on feeling like the world is caving in on me. This needs to stop, now.

So with that out of the way, here’s what’s happening now.

I have been working at my job for quite some time. I am over the hurdles of thinking I’m a shit worker, wanting to do so much but achieving very little, and being content with the minor successes. I have demonstrated myself to be a reasonably good peer, and a go-to person for several things. I’m trusted. I suppose with that in mind, I’d been placed in a leadership role as a temporary measure over the holidays. This was something I agreed to do because it was expected of me, because I’ve never been very aspirational down that end. I don’t like the added stress of looking after a team on top of clients, as well as resolving conflict on a larger scale. I’m not that good with debate, or argument, and honestly not with conflict resolution much either.

Regardless, here I am in this higher role, feeling the pain of not being anyone’s colleague anymore, but a boss. So, in my first 3 days on the job:

* major stuff-up with the hospital’s referring methods, us in the lurch
* one staff member saying they’ve had enough with the office politics, asking for a transfer
* having to reprimand another staff member when I was not in the position to be doing so
* another staff member potentially suicidal, 3 hr conversation about office politics
* yet another staff member considering quitting.

I was in way over my head.

Then this week, more office dramas, and additional pressure being put on me to make decisions about things I wasn’t in the place to make decisions about. My staff made a pretty bad judgement call on something – to assume makes an ass out of U and ME – however in the nick of time I prevented it from becomming a colossal disaster. Statistics from last quarter are all out, so I’ve been roped in to “tidy” them up. More niggling complaints from the same staff as last week who are disatisfied customers.

All this, on top of 2x client situations which caused me to have a pretty massive meltdown (twice!). I’ll get to that in a second.

For the most part, having come out of an incredibly caustic work environment 18 months ago, I have buried my head in the sand about much of the cliqueness, the two-facedness, the office politics that have been occuring in this joint. I ignored much of it, and didn’t understand nor want to hear people’s gripes. People were leaving, I had no idea why. It is slowly starting to become quite evident. I suppose that until you start experiencing it for yourself, you don’t really know.

One of the people I spoke to last week said that it was quite ironic how staff members who identified as having a mental illness were being treated by their own management. I saw that personally today, as I sat in a manager’s room and went through a panic attack going over the incidents that had occured over the day with my client, only to have her excuse me to go for lunch. As I was virtually being pushed out of the room, pleading for some advice (which, to their credit, was given to me), I started to feel the tears well in my eyes, feeling my head sting and the walls to oscillate around me. I knew I was about to go into another meltdown. This person could see that, but they emerged out of her room regardless, telling me to go get myself a glass of water and take a moment. Even as she was saying that while walking in the opposite direction, I was already falling apart. I walked a beeline into another staffroom and bawled my eyes out. I felt like I’d been pushed under the carpet, an “after lunch” afterthought. I wouldn’t walk away from someone who was about to burst into tears. Even if they were walking away, I would try to ascertain what was going on for them, on a deeper level, nut it out a little more. Get to the crux of the issue. Provide reassurance. None of that was given. I didn’t feel cared for or looked after or valued. I felt like a germ, a nuisance, a problem. Something that got in the way of lunch. I know lunch is important. But so is a staff member’s feelings.

Why the meltdown? I won’t go into details, but the apex involved a very adversarial (rude) conversation had with a client’s ex-partner. It resulted in me nearly crying in front of the client! Which I have only done once before, when it was actually ok to do so. This, however, was very obviously me reacting to how I was being spoken to. I felt spat on, and I didn’t have the balls to defend myself in a professional manner. This speechlessness, in one form or another, has been getting in the way of me being a good worker all week. I don’t know what to attribute it to, perhaps like everything else, it falls on the anxiety. In any case, I avoided talking to this person for the rest of the day, if only to save my own sanity. Nobody deserves to be anyone’s punching bag.

So that’s my first blurb/verbal diahhrea for the year. Sorry it wasn’t constructive to anyone but myself. I really just need to order my thoughts in writing. They are floating around like myodesopsia in my skull, constantly getting in the way of every vision and direction – stamping them with a physical word, an identifyer, and they’re much easier to deal with.

At least, that’s the theory!!

Watch soppy, ridiculous and unrealistic rom-coms, or anything – at all – about weddings.
Or sex.

There is much to be spoken about in the world of work, but unfortunately the difficulty of day to day life has consumed me such that I can not spend any headspace on writing about it for you all.

I will be back shortly when I get my shit together

Things should resume back to “normal” once I reboot. It should also be duly noted that my immune system seems to be doing battle with a perpetual on-again, off-again bug, and my weekend stint on the beach with piercing winds and rain seem to have locked in a bit of a lurgy, possibly for reals this time.

LOTS to tell, many stories from work, much intrigue, but it will have to wait until I’m either well enough mentally and/or physically to spill my guts…

Take care, fellow bloggers and blog-readers.

The struggle again is that through a renewed exposure to the senses, it is ever more difficult to separate what is a ‘true’ feeling, and what is a ‘withdrawal’ feeling. For lack of a better way to express this, I feel utterly miserable, depressed, amotivated, and ‘stuck’. But did this exist before I stopped taking my pills? Or did stopping taking them amplify everything to the nth degree?

Please don’t worry too much about me. The only thing I need is for people to hear me, to hug me, to hold me while I cry. I’ve always said I wouldn’t act on my thoughts of suicide, and that still stands, but I am getting a little disturbed by how frequently I’m thinking about it. I’m riding the wave, I am desperate to get off being dependant on chemicals, and I want to get to that side of me that I once was marginally happy with. I successfully withdrew from Lexapro in 2007, and was chemical-free for 3 years, with only minor bumps along the way. I keep thinking – if I could do it then, I can do it now.

So I’m staying strong. In a world where death and destruction currently seem to be the norm, this is becomming increasingly difficult. The floods in my home town, followed by a cyclone, followed by more natural disasters in my country, followed by political unrest in the Middle East, followed by the earthquake in Japan – on one scale it can put our troubles into perspective, on the other, I feel my thick skin becomming peeled away and feeling so overwhelmed by how.. FUCKED.. everything is. And what is there to do? I suppose in my profession, and in my life, we make do with what we got, we help people in whatever way we can. It’s never enough, and that is hard, but if we keep thinking about it, then what kind of life is that?

I had wonderful goosebumps during the show I saw tonight, and teared up when I noticed how happy and overjoyed the whole crowd and band were. It was a rare moment when every other day I get goosebumps, and cry, for very very different reasons.

I – WE – need to stay positive. In whatever way we can.