Black clouds
The day after my appraisal was never going to be a good day. I actually felt okay yesterday, probably because I still had the adrenaline and was elated to have survived the ordeal relatively unscathed. But today I woke up feeling miserable and proceeded to feel increasingly miserable as the hours ticked by. I thought anti-depressants were supposed to stop me feeling like this. Perhaps I absentmindedly took two hayfever tablets this morning instead 
It was actually a nice day. My boyfriend very kindly drove me to Rutland Water, which is an amazingly beautiful place, and we sat for a while in a bird watching hut and looked at the view. We also did something in a wood which respectable people would not do in a wood and which has resulted in me acquiring a muddy back, but nevertheless was rather fun 
My boyfriend even gave me a lift back to Brum again which was exceptionally kind of him given that it’s 40 miles each way and he’d been at work for 7 that morning. I’m very grateful!
It was the sort of day though where I was liable to cry if my shoelace accidentally came undone. It’s very frustrating. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t even feel depressed if I try to consider it logically. But I can’t seem to help it, however hard I try; I just am unhappy.
I am trying to take my manager’s advice and not take my appraisal to heart. But I guess I’m just a hyper sensitive sort of person and I can’t help taking it to heart a bit. It’s not nice to be told that everyone thinks you’re just a little bit rubbish. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was not working hard and being deliberately careless, but it’s sort of disheartening to do the best you can and still be thought just a little bit rubbish.
It takes me a certain amount of courage and willpower to even walk into my office each day. It will take even more courage and willpower to do so from now on. The sad thing is, I feel like I have made so much improvement in terms of communication and gained so much confidence over the past three years. I’m an unrecognizable person to how I was when I was at uni. I’m so much more competent, so much less inadequate. I can cope with situations which I could never have envisaged coping with three years ago. I don’t turn bright red and shake when people talk to me. To me that seems amazing! So the depressing thing I guess is that by normal standards I’m still inadequate.
And when that is brought to your attention, the thought which follows is, “Well what’s the point of trying then? If I’m destined to be inadequate, why not just stay at home and do it quietly rather than getting up and going to work and putting myself through all this agony and embarrasment? What am I actually achieving with all this effort except to make myself miserable?” I know that I have to keep on trying, because there isn’t really any other option. Life is something it is difficult to opt out of, regrettably. Just times like this, I don’t want to try any more.
Because what my manager and I have ultimately concluded at this appraisal meeting, when you dig down beyond our polite corporate wording, is that in order to be acceptable in this job I need to change my personality. Everything he has said, everything he has written, in effect boils down to the fact that my personality is unsuitable and I’m required to obtain a new one, pronto. Well… suppose I like my personality as it is?! Suppose I’m sick to death of pretending to be something I’m not and don’t want to go further down that route? Suppose I’d hate to be like him, like them…
Sigh. You could say the solution is to get a new job, but what? If I’m inadequate in this job, I shall most likely be just as inadequate in many others That in itself is frustrating. There must be something in the world I could usefully do and not be bad at, but I have no idea what it is 
Sometimes I get very self-pitying and decide there actually isn’t anything, but I am trying to hang onto the belief that there must be. There are things I’m not bad at. Really.
I know I’m not going to quit this job right now, because part of me wants to stick with it and show them that I’m not really as hopeless as I think. And this part of me is doubtless going to win and make me drag myself out of bed on Monday morning, put on the facade and head off to work to convince them all that I’m a bright, shiny, happy person who wants nothing more in life than to audit. The inevitability of the fact that I am going to do that frustrates me terribly.
Very many things are frustrating me today. The future, the uncertainty thereof; all that is frustrating too. My manager was fairly rude to me when I couldn’t tell him what my definite plans for the future were. That annoyed me, because it wasn’t my fault…
Sometimes the future seems a very bleak place with nothing to recommend it. Well, except Babel. But I would rather say nothing, because you can’t use other people as your reason for getting out of bed; you have to find some reason of your own, you have to want to get out of bed for your own sake.
Right now I don’t. But I am hopeful that writing this and having a good cry will help to get it out of my system and that tomorrow will be a brighter day.
Tags: depression