Work work work work work

I went back today.  Setting the alarm and waking up at 6.30 was more painless than I’d expected.

 

The drive to work was less so as my inner monologue went straight onto Grin bashing and bothering.

 

Got to work.  Inhaled.  Went up to see my boss clutching my dr’s note.  He took it off me and shoved it straight in his briefcase without looking.  It was then I had one of those moments where if it was a video game the cutscene would be paused and there are two options:

1 – Lie about what is actually on there and hope he doesn’t notice and/or look at it

2 – Deal with the situation.  Be honest

 

I chose number 2…  I think all those years at Catholic school make me masochistic.  He just looked at me when I told him that it was depression and that I was getting it sorted.  He changed the subject.  Which I guess is fine… but I’d been gearing myself up for a fight or something.
What I didn’t know is that it was a case of Grin’s brilliant timing (as usual) and about five minutes before I’d charged up there to declare my mental health problems someone had handed their notice in… so to say I wasn’t top of his priority list is an understatement.

I told him that I was going to try and work from home more, I can’t remember if I said I was having counselling or what I said but I said something like that.  Working from home didn’t go down very well… which I could understand if I didn’t live an hour’s drive away.  It was then that a line in the sand was drawn in my (broken) mind and I knew that if he was going to make me choose between my mental health and his job then he could get fucked.

 

So that was one down… still had to ring up my mentor who is ex-army and who I was sure was just going to tell me that depression was an excuse and a weakness.  Instead he was really supportive and helped me come up with a plan as to what I was going to occupy myself with.  I wanted to hug him down the phone.

 

I didn’t cry at either ‘outing’ of me and my many issues.  I obviously didn’t go into them in great detail but it was a fear I was going to.  It seriously felt like I was having to confess to being an alcoholic.  I just had visions of me going into work ‘Hi I’m Grin and I fantasise about dying and would rather be in bed with the curtains drawn than interacting with humanity’.  I suppose the problem is that everyone has their own theory/idea/schema about what depression is.

 

I didn’t tell any of my co-workers for fear that I would be the ‘depression lady’ or that it would be used to explain my behaviour at any given opportunity, write me off etc etc.  I didn’t want to be that person.  So I’ve spent most of the day lying.  It’s fine, I worked in customer services so I’ve got very adept at it.

 

I did however state proudly that I’m a ‘high functioning’ depressive.  I don’t know if it’s better or worse.  I guess what I was trying to say was ‘I can still work.  I need to live.  I bought expensive things for my house and I have a credit card’.

 

Now I want to sleep for a million billion years.  Instead I will productively shoot people in the head on FarCry 4.