Today someone said ‘I love you’. I haven’t heard that in a long time. While I wish I could reciprocate, I can’t. I cannot conjure feelings where there are none. I have feelings of fondness, yes, but not love.

Just four hours later, I found out that the person I love, and have loved from a distance for four years now, got married earlier this month.

I think this is what they call karma.

I’m emotionally spent from today.

…I can’t believe it was January that I last posted anything. I knew it was a long time, just didn’t realise it was that long.

Quick recap of the last eight months…

February. My birthday. I’m 35 now, and running out of time to have babies. I don’t feel anywhere near grown-up enough to have babies, but have this idea that one day I will be. But will that day come  before I’m too old? 

March. Anniversary of my Grandfather’s death. It was really hard. There is a certain sense of ‘well, we got through a whole year, so we’ll be okay’, but it really hit me hard.

April. Tried to recover from February and March.

May. Failed to recover from February and March. Had a nervous breakdown and was signed off work with depression for five weeks.

June. Tried to adapt to being back at work. Coping mechanism was to avoid the tasks I like least and focus on the rest of it.

July. Felt myself sliding with the pressure of an increasingly unpleasant and urgent to do list.

August. Finally confessed to the problems I was having with my to do list. Cried a lot. My manager sat down with me and got me through the tasks that I really didn’t want to do.

September. Things are finally turning around. My to do list is (well, was, briefly) under control.

The last two weeks - my colleague is on a three week holiday, two weeks down, one to go. So I’m doing two jobs again. Trouble is, it’s the busiest time of the quarter for her job and she’s not here, so I’ve done barely a scrap of my own work. We’re getting slammed by senior management for not meeting debt targets, so I’m really hitting the credit control. Which is my colleague’s job, but she’s under the impression that it’s not her job. Tricky. Anyway, I’ve made good headway, and, while I’m under the cosh, I’m enjoying work more than I have in a long time.

There has been a subtle shift happening. I went back onto anti-depressants in May and they finally started kicking in a couple of months later, and two months after that I feel, well, fairly stable. I don’t have the best record of complying with my medication, and I’m no better this time. I’m a week late collecting my prescription and I have enough to keep my going for another three weeks. So, I’ve missed a lot of pills over the last four months, but I’m still on them. Just gotta keep it that way. Or rather, try to do better, but certainly don’t let it get worse.

I’ve been drinking through this whole time. I’m not so focused on the drink at the moment, rather I’m trying to focus on other things, in the hope that if my self-esteem is better, if my life is fuller, then I won’t feel the need to drink so much. Or maybe I’m in denial. But whatever it is, I am feeling more positive.

So, my current focus is to recover my house from under the detritus that collected here while I was depressed. I didn’t count the bottles. I didn’t think it would do my self-esteem any good. But I estimate it was around 100-120. Frightening. I’m down to nine. Manageable. My intention is that every time I get up to 12 I have to take a trip to the bottle bank. I don’t know how long this will last, but I hope it does. I’ve been reading a lot of home organisation and cleaning blogs and am taking inspiration from them.

Still got a long way to go, but I have floors in every room that I can navigate without stepping over things. It’s a start. I have homes for more things than before, rather than the ‘it must belong in the nearest cupboard/drawer’ approach that I had before. And I’m feeling better about the tasks still to go.

If I can get rid of the physical clutter, then maybe, just maybe, I will have more energy and inclination to deal with the mental clutter.

I’d like that.

So I’m on Day Eight.  Getting here has involved a huge amount of chocolate, about a million griddlers (www.griddlers.net), and, over Friday and Saturday, an entire bunch of grapes and a whole bunch of celery.  I wasn’t very well after that.

Yesterday I went out to buy doorstops. I figure that the kind of adult I want to be does not have folded envelopes wedged under their doors. I went to six shops which I thought might sell doorstops and came home two hours later with no doorstops. But at least I tried.

Today I slept until 2pm.  Yes, 2pm. And that’s without any wine.  I don’t know how I’ll get up for work tomorrow.  At least while I’m asleep it is easy to stay away from wine.

Tomorrow I have a ‘chat’ with my manager. This was supposed to happen on Friday, but got postponed. I was pleased because it meant that I got the weekend to prepare myself. I still have no idea what I’m going to say. This has arisen after a minor meltdown last Tuesday at work. I ended up telling one of the project managers that I don’t like my job and that it’s making me miserable.

While this is true, on some days, it isn’t the whole picture. But I am bored and frustrated and suffering from the ‘what have I done with my life’ feeling that precedes any kind of anniversary. I get like this before every birthday, before New Year, and, in this case, before my ten year anniversary of being in my job. But, on some days, I do like my job. Not enough days though. Probably 20% of the time, and maybe 50% ambivalent, 30% dislike. That’s really not good enough.

But what to do about it?  That’s the problem… I can’t just throw up my hands and say ‘I don’t like this’ without something more constructive to add. Something about what I want to be doing, or which bits I enjoy and want to do more of, something about my goals for the future.  But those bits are so unclear to me, and the more I try to think about it, the emptier my mind becomes.

Next weekend I am out with friends. I don’t want to go. I will drink next weekend. It’s either that, or come up with some lie about antibiotics, or some truth about my drinking problem. I don’t see either of those happening.

I don’t want to become teetotal, all along I haven’t wanted that, but this just feels too soon. Assuming that I get through this week, it will only have been thirteen days without a drink.  It isn’t enough. But, it will be interesting to see if I can drink when I’m out with friends and then pick up where I left off and not carry on once I get home. It’s certainly not something I’ve been able to do before. The weekend after that I’m off skiing for a week. I’ll be drinking while I’m away. Can I come back home and not drink after that?

I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want, and that’s to carry on as I have been. It would be a lot easier to stay away from wine if I knew what I wanted from the future. I need something to work towards.

I’ve really been on a backwards slide lately. I’ve been avoiding all social contact, and drinking too much. The last few weekends I’ve been through three bottles of wine in two nights, sleeping most of the days away. I’ve been finding it hard to find reasons to want to be awake.

I guess I can put a lot of this down to exhaustion. I cover a colleague’s job when she’s away, and between sick leave and annual leave, she has been off for three of the last four months. That’s a long time to be doing two jobs. As a result I’ve only had half a day off in all that time.

I was dreading Christmas and New Year. Not my favourite time of year anyway, but this year was the first Christmas without my grandfather, and the closer it got the more towering my fear became.

As with most things, the amount of worrying I did was way out of proportion. Christmas was fine. It was actually a good Christmas. I drove, and I think not drinking with my family was a really good idea. I usually find some barbed remarks thrown my way when the family is all together. I have to wonder, after Christmas, if I am even more over-sensitive when drunk.  Probably.  That’s not to say I’ve never been hurt when sober, but I’m sure I don’t help myself when I drink.

I stayed in by myself for New Year. Got through the best part of two bottles of wine.

This weekend started out the same way - bought two bottles of wine on Friday night, and drank one and a half of them. On Saturday I went out and saw a couple of friends, for the first time in months. I was driving, so stuck to squash and juice all night. I got home just after midnight and drank the half bottle I had left.

I woke up on Sunday at a fairly sensible time, around half nine. Which, considering I haven’t been up much before noon the last few weekends felt like I had a whole day ahead of me. I got the laundry done, and a bit of tidying up.

After weeks and weeks of working all week, and doing little other than drinking and sleeping at the weekends, my flat is worse than it’s ever been. I’ve not counted the bottles, and I’m not going to. I don’t need to beat myself up with it, I just need to start cleaning.

I didn’t drink last night, and I’m not drinking tonight. I left myself a condescending note before I went to bed last night, reminding myself not to buy wine on the way home, in case I’d forgotten by this morning that I’m trying to stop again.

Work dragged by for most of today. I was supposed to be on a conference call at four which I completely forgot because I was in the middle of sorting out some support contract renewals.  No one waved at me, or pinged me.  I realised at five.  My manager said she didn’t think it was worth telling me sooner since it’s not worth my being on the call.  My mood just plummeted.  When she says that, what I hear is that I’m not worth anything, there is no point to me being there at all.

While I recognise that as a negative thought pattern, I find it hard to form any rebuttal.

This, usually, is the perfect excuse to drink. I’m worthless anyway, I might as well, because I’ve got nothing to wreck.

But if I can’t even get through day two, it’s a pretty poor state of affairs.  By the time I’d left my desk, I’d decided, fuck it, just get wine, it doesn’t matter.  Somehow, by the time I got to my car, all of 100 yards, I’d decided not to drink. I don’t know how that happened, but it did, and that’s enough. 

How on earth I go on from here, though, is another matter. What about day three? What about all the days after that?

What if I really can’t get this under control?

Started off speaking about my bracelet and what it represents.

Not sure how we quite moved from that to work, but then I was talking about some stuff at work, why I’m so scared of change. On reflection, the previous two times I have changed my job, I’ve ended up in one I like less, and, possibly worse, one with less responsibility. My career peaked 11 years ago.

Somehow this related to a story I told about nursery school, about how they tried to convince me it was nap time. I was almost four years old. I didn’t take naps. I told them as much. They didn’t listen. In retrospect, this seems fair enough. What child care professional is going to take the opinion of a three and a bit year old? They’d only wind up with a fractious toddler on their hands.  I spent that hour watching the nursery assistant eating polos, and finding it very strange that all the children around me just lay down and went to sleep.  There is something in this  story about being ignored and not fitting in that presses my buttons. I’m still not sure how this relates to work though.

What is clear, though, is that I have replicated a situation in my previous job. My true value lies in what I used to do, rather than what I do now. For that reason, I can cover the absence of others really well. Something I have been doing for two months now.  But on Friday, when my colleague returns… what is the point of me then?  And yet, I still get annoyed when too much is expected, when I am expected to be more grown up, more responsible, than I feel capable of.  I get even more annoyed when too little is expected of me.

I need to figure out what I expect from myself.

I also need to figure out what went wrong when I made changes before, so that I can understand it, and avoid the same mistakes again.

I don’t know where to start.

We ended with the fact that I’m trying to figure out what I want at work, what is going on with my family, and how I find myself in all of this.

And then I wonder why my head is full.

I really liked Katy Perry’s Firework the first time I heard it, but didn’t really take in the lyrics at the beginning. I think I was too busy being dazzled by the show of it (I saw her perform on X Factor), and the ‘make them go Ooh ooh ooh’ part of it.

But on my drive back from therapy a couple of weeks ago, I heard a song on the radio that pulled me out of my reverie and into listening to it. It turned out to be the same song.

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag
Drifting throught the wind
Wanting to start again

Do you know that there’s still a chance for you
Cause there’s a spark in you

Well, yes, actually, I do. I feel that way a lot.  Not sure how to find my light yet, but I’m working on it.

I have been more depressed than I’ve admitted even to myself. Haven’t felt like seeing anyone. Instead I’ve become addicted to Plants and Zombies. It requires a basic amount of strategy, but no actual human interaction. That’s suited me fine lately.

This weekend, though, I have finally broken the social abstinence and been out with friends. Curry and drinks on Friday. Almost got into an awkward situation with a man, but didn’t.  Shopping on Saturday - a successful shopping trip, which is unlike me.  My usual effort at shopping is to go around touching a lot of things but buying nothing.  Got two jumpers.  Wore the jumper dress and leggings to a friend’s baby shower today. She said my bum looked great in it and that I have sexy legs. She is the only friend of mine from whom I can take that kind of compliment. I did feel brilliant in it.  Also spent the money I had from my grandparents for last Christmas and birthday, before my grandfather died.  That money had  become so insanely important, because it would be the last present I ever have from both my grandparents.  I got a charm bracelet (www.yourchamilia.com).  I love it.

Saw a friend of a friend at the shower today. She lives far away now. My friend said, some months back, that she thought the two of us would make a good couple. I like the idea, but am scared silly of relationships anyway, and feel that she is out of my league.  But she was there with her sort of boyfriend, and that hurt. When I have no right to be hurt. I hate how stupid I am sometimes.

And anyway, I can’t get my sort of ex out of my head, fantisising that this could become a great romantic tale. It can’t. The same problems that were there eight years ago are still there, and it comes down to distance, and the fact that I am too scared to let myself have deep feelings in case it ends up hurting.

My dreams have been full of journeys lately, which I can only associate with the journey I’m on in therapy. And when I go for weeks avoiding human interaction, and then see people and feel lonlier than I did when I was actually alone, that is when I know I really need to work harder in therapy and try to figure out where I am going.

I hate confrontation and will put up with anything to avoid it.

However, my current life strategies are not working out so well for me, so I changed it.  Today, I confronted my colleague about what he said yesterday.

I asked for a private word, and I asked him, straight out, why he said what he did, quoting his words back to him.  He looked pretty horrified, and didn’t initially know what to say. Then he thought about it and said that all he meant was that it was work that I was capable of, and that my hourly rate is less than the hourly rate of the person currently doing that piece of work.  That much is true, I’m probably 50% or less of the cost per hour.

He also said that he isn’t always very tactful or careful with his words, and he did apologise. Not in a very graceful manner, but he’s not a very socially graceful person, and I do feel that his apology was meant sincerely.

I still feel depressed and low about the whole thing. However, I do think I was right to confront him. I cannot go on being a doormat my whole life.

My manager said I should have just left it, because he is the biggest gossip on the project. However, I disagree. He is a gossip, but he won’t be sharing a story in which he is the bad guy.  Why would he tell anyone that he made the admin girl cry?

I am way overdue on updating… I was out of therapy for a month over the summer, but should have done a Tuesday Debrief yesterday after my first session back. I couldn’t find the words or the motivation.

Today has been properly crappy, and here’s why:

Overheard at work…

"fairly low-level crappy work…<some content missed>…can ‘t we get 10GB to do it?"

This is the worst of what I have felt about my job the last few years, said out loud by a colleague of mine.  Not one who I ever thought had any respect for me, so that’s a blessing at least. It would have been even worse, coming from someone whose opinion I respect, and who I thought respected me.

I am trying to work out why this upsets me so much. I went and grabbed a work friend to talk to towards the end of the day, and had a cry about it.  Then I went to Zumba with my mum and had another cry about it.

My mum, initially, said "it’s a throw-away comment, don’t take any notice", and she might be right. But when I said that it made me feel like I’d been punched in the stomach, she reviewed her position and advised me to speak to my manager, because I shouldn’t have to feel like that at work.

I prefer her second position.

Perhaps my over-reaction is because it pushes my buttons. This is the worst I think of my own job, so to hear that someone else thinks it too just validates my own negative thoughts.

If someone made fun of my figure - say, said I had a wobbly belly, that wouldn’t bother me too much, because I think I have a pretty good stomach. But, if in the same jokey way, said that I have a funny nose, then I’d feel dreadful, because I don’t like my nose, and it would just confirm my own paranoia that it is ugly and too big.

Maybe it was just an unfortunate remark.

Maybe everyone at my job thinks I’m the dumping ground for any crappy jobs that are going.

Maybe I think that too.

I wish I knew what to think.

I woke up exhausted this morning, because the dreams I’d been having all night left me feeling as if I’d gone ten rounds before I even started on the day.

While I’m given to thinking that dreams don’t mean much,  given the nature of my therapy, I have to give credence to the idea that my subconscious knows a lot more about me and what’s going on in my life than I do right now.

There were a lot of dreams last night, but most of them were of the sort that slip away the moment you wake up.  Two stayed with me though. 

In the first one, I was with a big group of people and we were being shown around a stately home. The guide told us is was haunted. I laughed at that, along with some others in the group, as we didn’t believe in ghosts.  Others, however, seemed shaken and were reluctant to carry on with the tour.

At some point we were in the grand dining room, which was huge, but there was no table. We were told it was the most common place for sightings.  Later, we were on a wide sweeping staircase, when there was a huge noise, like an explosion, and everyone screamed and ran, scattering in all directions.  I found myself alone and ran through a door into the empty dining room.  I ran to the window and saw a couple of people running.  Then I heard a noise, and spooked, I ran to the other end of the room and stood there, trying to see what had made the noise.  Then, quite suddenly, something picked me up and threw me.  I screamed, as I sailed the length of the room, knowing that I was about to hit the far wall.

Instead, however, I sailed straight through it, as if either the room itself or I were not made of matter.  I was still in flight, having been thrown with force, across the lawn when I woke up. 

That was about 3am.

In the second, I was watching a horror movie, but live - I was there, not watching on a screen. And although I was there in body, it was as if I was invisible - none of the characters acknowledged my presence, but if felt more like that was because I was in the audience, not because they didn’t know I was there. A small blonde woman was hiding in a cupboard, watching a murder through some kind of grate.  And I knew, because (in the dream) I’d seen the movie before, that she was going to make a sound and alert the murderer to her position.  But I couldn’t tell her, because then my voice would give her away.  Sure enough, she made a noise trying to back out of the cupboard and the murderer ran around the other way and cornered her, just feet from where I was.  He raised his knife, she screamed, and that is when the alarm woke me up.

So what I am to make of all this? All I can come up with is work.  Although there are no ghosts or murders in my office, I do feel that they are trying to throw me out, and I feel powerless to interact in my own career decisions at the moment.  This might be clutching at straws, maybe these dreams are just insane nocturnal ramblings, but it’s the best connection that I can come up with at the moment.

If only my subconscious were more straightforward and would just tell me what it is trying to say.