Working Girl

Working is hard when you are in the middle of a depressive episode. Luckily, I had vacation time scheduled right as my latest one started, so the days when I couldn't get out of bed didn't interfere with my life. And I am blessed now to be at a very flexible on-call job where I don't have to work everyday and can turn down a day's work if I need to. But that flexibility makes it harder...its hard enough to get up out of bed on these cold fall mornings and get myself going under normal circumstances, but when I wake up feeling tired or depressed or angry it takes everything in me to get up and get to work.

We are not safe from our emotions anywhere - and work is no exception. For me, anger strikes in the most unusual of places and kicks me when I'm down (I, who's default emotion is anger in most every situation, and who rarely expresses it but buries it inside, making for more hurt and even bigger blow-ups when the explosions come). So today, my anger crept up on me at work, in a short 10-minutes of downtime. Its like a sports car - 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds. One moment I am find, the next filled with anger and hurt...and today I felt hurt knowing that the person who hurt me most recently is out there, going on with their life as if they didn't break me into a million pieces...and on the way to breaking someone else again, perhaps at that very moment I was sitting at work, in my chair, just trying to get through the day.

So today I was thankful for the notebook I've been keeping - the one I've filled with coping thoughts and self-affirming statements, and quotes from my favorite TV shows and music. I just read them over and over and over until the short break I had passed, and even wrote down a new quote I had heard a few days ago in a song. And I was swept back into the world of busy-ness again...