Therapy

Memories stir. Lithographs of a time ago; thoughts, images, feelings brought back to life by a practiced hand. And with them comes self. Me. Was, is, can be. Pain floods, but the tears are good. I curl near him, careful not to disturb, grateful for each listened breath, for each sense of nearby warmth. And am comforted, return to sleep.

New Year's Resolutions: Life

And so another year starts. I can understand the need to party, the pagan urge (I'll hold on my usual comments about England really being a pagan country, with pagan festivals, tastes and traditions - it's a whole post by itself) to light up the darkness and race headlong into the gathering light, but some part of me wants the switch from year to year to be more considered, more thoughtful, more like Yom Kippur. For 15 years now, I have spent one significant day in early December thinking about what I've done in the year past and what I want from the year to come. But this year it seemed less possible (all hell breaking loose at work) and somehow less appropriate (the time for mourning is perhaps now past).

So to thinking. The year past. It's been quite an explosive one, on almost every front. Which for my own memory, I'm going to lay out in gloriously monocolour bulletpoint...

• I became poorer. My boss stopped my payrise, which meant that I was not just below the cost of living but positively going backwards from it. I stopped my lodger so I could move out and move on, but events have left me in an expensive house, not wanting to move yet because I'm waiting for the next (job) things to happen.
• I got away from said boss, but not without collatoral damage. I now have a great (if demanding) boss and an amazing job, but I'm still within the sphere of influence of the person who made my life and others' so difficult over the last two years, and after a couple of wonderful months working out of his way, he's back and has done all the damage that he can.
• I learnt the hard way about HR procedures. It's been a rough few months, but the beauty of always telling the truth is that there is only one truth (granted, there may be many perceptions of truth, but there is, generally, only one underlying truth), and it's very difficult for lies to be consistent. The beauty of bullies is that they rarely attack just one person; once one victim is dispatched, they quite often seek another then another. And the beauty of supposition is that people rarely have the gift of full empathy: often what a person says about you tells you much more about them than about yourself. That said, seeing how other people see you can be an enlightening and sometimes liberating experience too.
• I got way way too stressed about all the above, and let the rest of my life slide away a little too much. I've hardly spoken to many of my friends all year, haven't spent much time with my family (granted some of it is sailing round the world, but that's not the best of excuses now: there's still email). What is most difficult perhaps is that I became too stunned by my own troubles to be there for anyone else. Like my grandparents. My grandmother has Alzheimers, which has got worse this year. Apparently (and I say apparently because I haven't even stopped to visit them this year), she wakes up every morning as smart as she always was, but by the afternoon she's alone, afraid and in some dark place that even my grandfather, who's loved her for almost all their long life, can't bring her out of. He needs comforting, reassuring that life continues, but apart from the above couple of peaceful months, I haven't been able to do this.
• I tried to get another job. To be fair, I was very fussy about what I wanted; to be close enough to Hwsgo to become a short-distance couple at last but still do something useful and interesting; but I failed quite spectacularly to get a whole set of wonderful jobs. All of which had a common theme: I failed mainly because I'm not programming enough any more. I have the CV (she says modestly) of a tech god, but without regular practice, I can't easily back that up in an interview. I might once have written Trojan horses (only small funny local ones!) and obfuscated Perl in my sleep, but if I can't instantly explain SQL tree traversal, I'm not going to get the job that I want.
• I went to the gym again. Mainly because S got us a personal trainer so she could pass her fitness tests. I did go to the gym, but I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have done; I went for the training sessions, but gradually tailed off on the rest of my training. Stress again, despair, and interruptions from work, illness etc. And I hurt my back and shoulder; I’ve spent 6 months doing press-ups with an inflamed rotator cuff. Which is probably not good. I didn’t do much running – I always meant to, but somehow it was never quite the right time. I did a 5k race with Dad a couple of days ago, which proved that I can do it, so it’s much less of a worry now.
• I started to tidy up my life. I had no-buy months, and I have removed stackloads of stuff that I no longer need or - yes, and this is hard for a girl to admit - bought in error. I removed my ex's stuff from my garage after repeated attempts to get him to take it away followed by finding a mouse invasion that had headquartered within it. I wouldn't have believed that a mouse could eat a washer-dryer and a lawnmower, but I'm definitely convinced now. Anything rubber, anything soft plastic, anything ridiculously difficult to reach without disassembling a complex and heavy piece of machinery. This year, I gained a new-found hatred of small furry uncontained invaders, to go with my only other great loathe in life, namely container-based slugs.
• I had cold after cold, my back packed up, my mind started to go pzzt. All stress symptoms. I’m tired. I know I’m tired, and I know I need to fix that, but it’s difficult when you’re tired.
• I finally found a good place with Hwsgo. We are neither of us simple creatures, and even Shakespeare would have had a hard time following all the complications that we managed to knot ourselves in this year.

Things to do this year:

• More programming. If I want a tech job, I have to have tech credentials. It’s not enough (as it is unfortunately in the defence industry now) to be able to talk about how to build systems, and to outline their designs; I need to get myself back at the coalface of reality, making those difficult compromises between ought and can, even if it slows down my apparent output.
• More running. Starting with mapping out some genuine 5k runs from my house and from work. Then taking a set of kit to work, so I have no excuse not to run at lunchtime (it’s too cold… the car’s too far away). And putting myself in for some local 5k and 10ks, to find myself a local club that I actually want to go to (the town one here is mainly track and field, with no plodding road runners at all).
• More gym. Which is a difficult one: get a cheap subscription to the company onsite gym, or continue very occasionally attending an expensive one. Okay, that’s no contest. Company gym it is. Gyms are strange places. You can dress them up, dress them down, put in pretty machines and nice staff, but in the end it’s all about you and your willingness to keep repeatedly pulling down a difficult weight. Kinda like life really: you can dress it up all you like, but in the end it’s all about heart.
• Do a job I love for people I can trust. Or at least people I can trust to not cause as much damage as I’ve seen in the last couple of years.
• Move house to somewhere smaller and less dark. This has been waiting on my job for the past few months (waiting for a new one to move to, and waiting out what's happened at work), but I need to set a deadline now. I want to move out of this house by April 2009. Even if I don't get another job by then, or am still stuck in limbo here, I'm going to move anyway. Even if that means being somewhere temporary for a while.
• More tidying. Shrink down the number of my possessions. Hwsgo pointed out this morning that although I appear to have lots of shoes, I don't have many good ones (the Russian hooker comment about the J-Los was erm - possibly appropriate). I would, optimally, like to be able to fit all my basic possessions into one room of my house. Books, cd, clothes, detritus: I have too much of each and I need to deal with that.

Happy New Year

So I just lost a job opportunity that I really really wanted; panicked and fluffed the second interview. It's rough, but that's life. But you know what? I am tired of checking what I say and think and do all the time, tired of working in places that beat down their staff but expect miracles from them anyway. So I say stuff the world, I'm off. It may be the most stupid thing I've ever done, but I'm going to follow my heart and do what I love instead of what pays the bills. And what I really love is building systems. Top down designs to nuts and bolts twiddly bits, and out to the interface and user needs too. It really shouldn't be much to ask, that I can build stuff that's useful, but it seems to be. And when it's got to the stage where I'm fighting personal politics by day then trying to find time to go home and relax by building stuff at night, then something is deeply terribly wrong. So I have a plan. It's not going to make me popular, but it suits me better than becoming a lesbian lumberjack in Peru. Onwards... oh, and Happy New Year - may all your choices be both courageous and right for you this year.