Well. That was a slightly longer hiatus than I intended. It seems that my body chose almost the exact moment that I handed in my final assignment (well, the exact day anyway) to have me come down with the mother of all colds. And of course I've been way too busy at work to even contemplate taking proper time off to get better, so I've been shuffling and snivelling along as best as I could. Finally starting to feel a bit better, but still really tired. Which has been fairly fatal for my motivation and energy levels. I was so looking forward to getting my course over with so that I could get started on the million of other things I want to do, then I have to take to my sick bed. Typical!
What's also typical is that I'm writing this when I should be working. In fairness, it's after 9pm at night and I'm at home so I really shouldn't *have* to be working, but there you go. It's just one of those weeks and my lack of productivity due to this lovely lurgy I've had has gotten me really far behind.
But anyway. None of that is remotely interesting or informative, unless you had a desperate desire to know what's up with my work schedule and immune system. And frankly, if that is the case, I think you might need a little more help than reading this blog can possibly give you.
I've had a post floating around my mind for the past week or so. I'm still not sure if I'm ready to write it, but I guess we'll see by the end of this.
It's occurred to me lately that my depression and anxiety issues have a lot in common with addiction, for me at least. I've been thinking about how come I've changed now; how come I've had this revelation, this clarity now and not before? Or later? And is it just sheer luck - do you just have to sit around waiting for this revelation to hit? It seems to me that it's a lot like when addicts reach that last straw, their rock bottom or whichever other cliche you choose to use, that finally makes them want to change and gives them the strength to be more successful with change than they were before.
But the problem with that is that it suggests that it's up to the fates to decide when that moment is. That doesn't seem quite right. Or fair. But I honestly don't know why I came to my sense now instead of years ago. I know that I had a bigger wake up call than I've had in a long time - someone was incredibly honest with me and (after hours of crying and wailing) that somehow finally made me see things more clearly. It made me realise how much of my life I was wasting, how many opportunities were being ruined and how this would never change if I didn't change.
But I have no idea how anyone else is supposed to get to that moment. Part of the reason that this has been floating around my head was that I was wondering if maybe I should consider doing some sort of voluntary work within the mental health/counselling sector. I have no idea if I'd be any good at it, as I'm not generally a very touchy feely sort of person, but I feel like I'd like to make my experiences count for something. But if having this sort of moment of clarity is so arbitrary, what could I really do for someone?
And whilst I'm talking about this in terms of addiction, it brings up the whole idea of balance. I've never been very good with balance - always been all or nothing. That's part of the perfectionist trait in me, I suppose - that it's completely perfect, or it's completely shit. No in betweens. But this is more like an eating disorder than an alcohol or drug addiction - I may have gotten addicted to misery to some degree, but I can't avoid negative emotions anymore than an anorexic can avoid food. So I have to find some way to balance things. To know when it's ok to be upset, and let myself feel that, and when enough is enough.
I've been struggling a little with that lately. Being sick but having so much to do at work wiped me out, and now I'm finding it hard to get out of that 'just make it home and crawl into bed' phase, even though I'm mostly better by now. It's been too easy to slip back into old habits of spending the entire night in various states of consciousness in front of a tv and/or computer screen.
And there's lots of other things where I find it hard to find some acceptable balance. I shan't go into all of that now, because I don't have the time (and this post has been in my drafts folder for far too long), and I don't really have the mental energy for it either. I'm finding less impetus to think or write about what's going on in my head. I can't quite figure out if that's part of the post-cold laziness, or if I'm getting sick of talking about it, and whether either of those is a good thing or a bad thing.
All in all, that's a rather meandering, pointless post, for which I apologise. I have funner posts in the works but I apparently now have a slightly busy weekend ahead of me involving hyperactive children, so it may be a while before those come to complete fruition. In the meantime, I'm thanking the big spaghetti monster in the sky that it's Friday and I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of this Wispa that's been in my office drawer for two days. It's the little things, y'know?
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