One of my cardinal rules is “never apologise for the absence of posts. But with every rule, it is of course perfectly fine to break it every now and then. I’m sorry it’s been a while.
I haven’t posted since just before Christmas, the longest that I have gone without posting since I started this blog up again last year. The main reason for that is I am just coming out of quite a long low period. It’s a truism that depression strikes more often over the holidays, and the last month has very much followed that theme. Thankfully I am now feeling well enough to write again, and I want the first thing that I write to be an exorcism of the last month!
It’s been a month of good and bad if I am completely honest, now that I am able to look back objectively. Christmas is usually my absolute favourite time of the year. I am in no way religious, but Christmas has come to mean happy times with family, a nice break from work, and seeing the smiles on people’s faces when they open a completely unexpected present. It wasn’t the best start to the day when I woke at 2am and had to rush to the bathroom to be rather ill… It turns out that upping my dose of Metformin (Type 2 Diabetes treatment) on the same day as having a large curry for Christmas Eve dinner had a nasty effect on my tummy! I spent most of the day curled up on the sofa feeling very sorry for myself. My girlfriend took our daughter to see the grandparents as we had agreed we would, and I watched Stargate Atlantis and sipped water.
Luckily that only lasted a couple of days and I was able to enjoy the rest of my time off in a more or less normal fashion. We still have loads of chocolates and other Christmas treats in the kitchen because we just didn’t feel like eating them.
All too soon the holiday was over and I was back at work. In fact work started at about 9am on New Year’s Day as I wanted to get a bit of a head start on the coming week. One of my biggest jobs at work is to prepare the monthly performance reports for about 16 divisions of the group I work for. It takes a while, and is to tight deadlines so any time I can get a bit of a head start I try and take it. We don’t really do New Year’s so I wasn’t hung over or anything.
That really helped and I threw myself back into work the next day. The week went fine, but I was starting to get a little stressed because I knew that in the next few weeks I had an interview coming up. It was an important one too, a massive step up within the company. If I get the job it will be about a 50% pay rise plus a company car, so yeah, quite important…
I spent a fair bit of the weekend at work working on my presentation (Show how you have demonstrated Strategic Leadership, Change Management, and Commercial Acumen in your career to date) and was pretty happy with it. I gave a demo of it to our head of training and she immediately said I had at least double the number of slides I needed. This was the day before the interview. The rest of the day and a lot of the evening was spent pruning it down and I have to say she was absolutely right. I went from 30 slides to 12.
The interview went well. I found out that I was one of only 3 applicants, so that’s a good place to start from at least. I am still waiting to hear whether I have got it, and the stress from that waiting has contributed to my lapse in a lot of ways I think.
I have been a nightmare to live with for the last couple of weeks. All I have been able to think about has been escaping, usually to the office and Skyrim on the PC. Nothing is as escapist as a really well written RPG. I basically have been wanting to skip the part of my life before finding out if I have the job and go straight to either excitement about the future, or disappointment and getting on with my life. I don’t cope well with waiting, I can deal with anything, but not knowing is the worst thing of all to me. I have been uncommunicative, sullen, withdrawn. Basically depressed. It hasn’t helped that a few days I forgot my medication (Sertraline) which has a pretty major effect as I have been on it a couple of years now, and coming off it suddenly is a really bad idea when it has been in your system that long.
Amazingly, I have a wonderful partner who is with me through all of the good and the bad, and she has been my rock even when I haven’t been able to thank her for it. I don’t know what I would do without her.
I should know about the job in the first couple of days next week. I will post on here either way.
So there we are, I am able to write again and wanting to get back into it as much as ever. I hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the new year. I am sure we will share some stories along the weay, some laughs maybe, and learn a lot together.
See you soon.