Things have not exactly been rosy in 2010. I look back at the catalog of catastrophes in my life with more than a little tinge of despair:
-a family friend nearly died and had to have both legs amputated at the knee
-a family friend DID die- but he had a long and happy life
-my university job was in jeopardy and I missed out on both a payrise and increased hours
-there was the 4 Sept quake, 10 days before my birthday
-I suffered from PTSD after the quake
-I then suffered a bout of depression
-I was persecuted in my new job for having said depression
-I had to leave my new job
-my sister-in-law found out she has secondary cancers
-we had more aftershocks after Christmas
-my cat went missing for four days
It doesn't exactly make for joyous reading.
There have been times when I have been ready to throw in the towel and feel sorry for myself, but then I am reminded of a story about my great-Grandmother during WWII. In a freak accident, she fell down the stairs and fell through a plate glass window. She was a mess, as you can imagine, and needed stitches all over her face. Once she was patched up, despite the pain it would have caused with the citric acid, she sat down and ate an orange. Why? Despite the pain, she didn't want to waste her fruit ration, and she had been dying to have an orange for some time.
If she can get through that kind of trauma, my troubles are nothing.
It's tempting to feel sorry for yourself. But then, by stewing on the woe you close yourself off from new possibilities. You're not open to serendipity. So as bad as I feel, I will soldier on, day by day, until the bad times pass.
2:00am, Sunday 26th December. Boxing Day here in NZ. We were woken with a jolt by a 4.4 aftershock, after being without large aftershocks for some time. Then at around 10:00am we were hit with a 4.9 that caused damage again. The central city, which had been struggling to rebuild and to get people back to visit, was cordoned off. People lost power and water again. It was a significant blow to morale, I believe. I know I was (no pun intended) badly shaken. Oh, this is normal, the Geologists and Seismologists say. Well, normal in your world perhaps, but not in ours.
How do we go on from here? Does this mean we will constantly have to be on our guard again? Will there be an even bigger quake?
My PTSD symptoms had started to dampen down, and my depression was beginning to lessen, but after yesterday's horrific shocks I am in a state of despair. My cat Hazel has not come home either, adding to my distress.
(continued from last post)
Needless to say, I felt pretty dejected about the whole situation. I didn't appreciate feeling like I was being interrogated, and I knew that my rights had been violated then and there. But worse was to come...
The next day, I was called by my supervisor to say that our other boss wanted to see me. This time I insisted on a support person being present, which actually irritated my supervisor to no end. Thankfully one of my colleagues who knew of my situation was there for me. I walked into the boardroom and was told unceremoniously that due to a downturn in clients and referrals, I had three choices- redundancy, an extra week's unpaid leave at Christmas, or reducing my hours. I had a week to think about it. When I spoke to the boss on the Friday to give him my decision, I told him in no uncertain terms that I thought that dropping this bombshell before Christmas wasn't right, and also that being asked about my mental health history on the Monday was wrong. To which he replied; "if we'd known about your history, we wouldn't have hired you." NICE.
So now I am in the situation where I work four days a week with a three day weekend. Nice for some, but I am gutted. I feel angry about what has happened- it's patently obvious that my bosses have used my mental illness as a way to save money. Needless to say, my depression has actually worsened. BUT I am prepared to make the best of a bad situation. There are silver linings there, I just don't know what they are right now.
It's been a turbulent year, but there have been lots of wonderful things that have happened as well. Unfortunately at the moment there's not a lot of wonderful going on! However, a very recent and very painful episode showed me just how strong I am...and just how much I have learned over the years.
I started a new job in September only 6 weeks after graduating from University a semester early. I was to be working part time, Monday to Friday, which suited me after a very heavy full-time load of academic work as well as holding down a job at the university. However, my new employers were expecting an upsurge in work and thus there was the promise of full-time work in the future. I was SO happy. I was earning a decent wage, I LOVED my job (I actually still do, it's a wonderful job). Then the quake hit. Traumatised, we had no idea on the Sunday night post-quake whether or not we were required to go into work the next day or not. On the TV they were saying a state of emergency had been declared and to stay home, but nobody had told us otherwise. I got in touch with a friend at work, who got in touch with our immediate supervisor, who said to go in on Monday morning as usual. I was expecting that perhaps we would have some kind of debriefing regarding what had happened. When I turned up on Monday morning, and my boss was there....beaming and smiling! We've just had a major catastrophe...and you're smiling??? In fact, she acted like nothing had happened.
As it turned out, most of our clients cancelled that day due to their own issues and there was a sense of frustration in the air due to the fact that we weren't at home dealing with our houses and our issues. As the months wore on and the aftershocks continued, so too did the frustration. My boss apparently didn't feel the aftershocks- in fact, she found them to be a complete novelty and she would ask about them and be smiling and...HAPPY. It was sick. I don't think she had any concept of how the rest of us might be feeling.
As you know, I was diagnosed with PTSD, and when I told my boss about it, she was fine and wanted to know how she could help. But I have discovered that PTSD is fine in a workplace...depression, apparently, is a bridge too far.
A few weeks after my PTSD diagnosis, I noticed the symptoms of depression coming back in a big way. I have battled with depression for 10 years, but I am at the point where I can deal with it like you would any other illness, with the minimum of fuss and I know how to look after myself to get well again. Things came to a head one Thursday, and I told my supervisor what was going on. She seemed supportive, allowed me the day off on the Friday to see my doctor and see if I needed more time off. My supervisor suggested two days, to which my doctor was incredulous- two days is certainly not enough time to even begin to get well. My doctor wrote a Medical Certificate for a week off work.
When I came back to work the week after, I figured everything would be fine. It wasn't. I was asked to come to a meeting with very little notice with my boss and my supervisor. I didn't have time to have a support person available to me, so it was basically a case of two on one. It started off innocent enough, they wanted to know how I was. I told them that I was doing my best to get better. But then they wanted to know about my history of depression. Since this incident I have learned that they are not entitled to KNOW this or even to ask it. But I told them, and then they tore strips off me about small infractions- one was losing a checklist of skills learned so they could show my recruitment agent that they were looking after me, the other was that I pulled out of writing the meeting minutes because I had sore wrists from typing all morning. They questioned whether I could deal with the stress of the job (but like I said to them, this is not ABOUT stress, it's the fact that I had PTSD and depression crept in behind it). They said that I had agreed to go to full time when I was ready, but what would happen now? I kept trying to tell them- this is BECAUSE of the PTSD, and while I am not well now, I will be. The whole meeting was an exercise in futility, and after 15 minutes I had to go back to my desk and act like nothing was wrong.
Things have not exactly been rosy in 2010. I look back at the catalog of catastrophes in my life with more than a little tinge of despair:
