March 24th, 2004
Well ... okay. Yesterday's rant bordered on an attack of my new job, and I realize now that in writing such things I am making a decision--a bad and unhealthy decision at that.
Not counting childhood years, I've been really down--depressed actually--twice in my life. The first time hit me like a tonne of bricks when I was about 19 or 20, and the second time when I was 26 or 27. In the first case, I had no clue what happened, except that I went through hell for some months and only recovered from it when I changed my degree from a science to an arts degree (hmm ... doesn't it usually work the other way around? Switch to arts and then get depressed?) The second time I started spiraling down felt familiar and predictable, and I made a conscious decision to think of myself as a depressed person. This is important: I made a choice to turn thumbs down on myself, and that conscious decision became the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Note: I am not saying that I have come up with a cure for depression, but I do believe that, for me, depression follows a decision to be depressed.
Well, the third time things became familiar-feeling was when I was about 32 or 33. I could feel the darkness rolling in and I could smell the dragon at my door, and so I made a decision to not be depressed. I took hold of some things in my life I wasn't happy about, and without regard to the fallout later, I made changes to them. I stopped talking to certain people, I all but shunned my family for a couple of years, I decided to commit myself to new ideas about relationships and people in general. And I beat it back. More than that, I built what I think is a better me. And lo-and-behold, the people I had previously dropped by the wayside are back in my life, and the new-and-improved Brian can be as much like the old Brian as I want.
So ... I'm not sinking in quicksand these days. I mean, I am clearly not happy with my new company, but in the grand scheme of things there are more interesting and urgent concerns. Ranting about my new company has become a pointless waste of time, and maybe I will be introducing trouble and depression by obsessing about it.
Which more-or-less brings me to the point of my rant. I know I've said a lot of negative things about this new company, and it's partly because much of how I define myself is by the work I do. But I have gone overboard in the last few weeks. I have ranted until I am blue in the face, and I've changed nothing at all, except to darken my attitude towards this company. As soon as I've had a good long time to recognize what I don't like about it, I have to put up or shut up. And I think that the time is now. If I keep on down this path, I really will depress myself ... and I choose not to.
An answer from the gods:
Just as I was writing that last sentence, an email arrived in my inbox: The cheque I've been waiting for and griping about for a month is ready.
See how it works? :-)