Depression

It has been a very long while since I last wrote on here, but that's the great thing about the internet - your presence remains for almost all of eternity. That can be a bad thing too of course, but let's focus on the positives :)

A lot has happened in the last 2 months. It honestly feels like so much longer.

I became very unhappy with my job, which led me to being very unhappy with life in general. I felt like a failure - hopping from job to job, not really achieving anything, not being able to settle anywhere and be happy, ruining my CV (because no one wants to employ someone who can't commit!). I was finding the actual work insanely boring, and I couldn't see a path for myself within that organisation. I jumped around from wanting to quit law and study teaching, to wanting to go back to corporate law, to wanting to be a nanny again, to wanting to go back and study medicine, to wanting to... just not be alive.

Before I knew it I had slipped into some sort of depression and I just didn't want to do anything. I would get home from work at 6:30pm and go straight to sleep without dinner, not because I was tired but because I really didn't want to be awake. I binged on chocolate and lollies (because I just didn't care, and needed to get through that minute/hour/day) and isolated myself from everyone. I would also cry for no reason every evening.

There is a lot of truth in this...

No one would have noticed this at work because it was a pretty lonely place, and the expectations of me were so low that I could hardly 'not deliver'. I was doing substandard work but getting good feedback, which is in itself very disheartening.

I really felt like I couldn't get out of the 'hole' I was in, and wanting to be dead (and taking sleeping tablets not to overdose, but just to not be awake so I could escape that feeling) is actually very scary. I knew something was wrong so I went and saw my GP, who hooked me up with a psychologist and put me on anti depressants.

It took about a month, maybe a little less for the anti depressants to start working. I'm not sure how much they contributed to my recovery, because a big part of that was changing jobs. I had started looking for jobs during the worst period, because when I didn't care about life I new that it was time to take drastic measures. It was not a hard choice to leave that job, but I didn't really want to go anywhere else either.

The job I accepted sort of found me - I had been applying via other avenues, which didn't result in anything and this offer came pretty much out of the blue. It's not my dream job, but that probably doesn't exist anyway. I didn't know and still don't know whether it's the right direction to take my career in or the right fit for me, but I didn't have anything to loose and I didn't really have the energy to keep looking elsewhere.

I accepted the new job, and my previous employer made my resignation from there a lot more stressful than it needed to be... but thankfully that's all over now.

So where am I now? I've only been at this new job for two weeks. I'm feeling better than I was, but still feel like I'm balancing on a ledge and teetering over an edge sometimes. It's too early to tell whether I'll be happy in this job and whether it will tick the right boxes, but the people there are nice so it's a good start (I'm trying to be optimistic!).

I'm like this guy!

I know you're thinking - life isn't all about work... that's true, and there's more to the story. I am having boy issues too, but that's another story for another day. My sister is yelling at me to come and watch a movie with her that I said I wanted to watch, so I've got to run!