Late May Monte Report

As you may have heard by now, the past two months have NOT been hunky-dory -- not by a long shot. I was supposed to celebrate two years of being un-depressed on May 6th -- but that party had to be canceled. I tried to deny it for as long as I could, but at a certain point it became farcical to keep pretending I wasn't really depressed. So yes, I am depressed. Again. And have been for the past six or seven weeks now. The "triggers" that keep hitting me are pretty identifiable, but since some of them are work-related I won't go into detail here.

The good news, though, is that I'm not feeling suicidal. The frequency of my visits to my therapist and psychiatrist have increased dramatically, and my medications have been ramped back up. And I'm trying very hard to "take care of" myself, by not being self critical over things like the veritable mountain of dishes in my kitchen, or the glacier of recyclables that is creeping around my apartment and which threatens to consume unwary visitors. I'm doing things I like to do. I'm not moping -- not at all. I am worried, though, that I might let this depression ruin yet another summer of my life in terms of keeping me from enjoying the out-of-doors as much as I "ought" to -- and I'm trying not to be self-critical about my as-yet failure to get my butt into the woods this year (I can blame that partly on the crappy weather we've been having).

In addition to having work-related triggers, my work-place is undergoing a rapid evolution from one status quo to a new one. In the new one, my job will be eliminated (my title and responsibilities will change, but not a whole lot), and though I have thoroughly enjoyed the position I've held for the past two and a half years, I have zero desire to continue with it under the new status quo (in other words, I'm GLAD my position is being eliminated). We are in-between CEOs at the moment, and I haven't the faintest idea if the new CEO will accept our new status quo, or create a whole new one altogether. So, things at work are changing, and will continue to change for several more weeks (or even months) -- and so I'm not too concerned about tackling my current "problems", because some of them might disappear all by themselves. Instead, I'm resigned to being grumpy and melancholic for a little while. If things don't start to improve in a few weeks, or if I can't soon see the light at the end of the tunnel, or if things take a marked turn for the worse, then yes: I will switch to a more aggressive approach to maintaining my sanity. Otherwise, I am confident that there's a corner to be found somewhere around here, and that I'll manage to find it and turn it and return to the happy state I was in a couple months ago.