so much better now

I have a hard time getting up on winter mornings. This has always been the case. I hate getting up in the darkness, I hate having to turn the light on in the morning, I just want to keep my flannel nightgown on and snuggle deeper into my warm bed. Getting up in the dark has always seemed to be a patently ridiculous form of torture to me. I know I’m not alone in this.

Last winter, every weekday morning, I woke up feeling this dark torture… and the feeling wouldn’t go away. I would have a brief respite when I got home from work, but then I would start getting ready for bed, and it was there again, the darkness, the weight on my shoulders and in my mind.

Overwrought, huh? Well, maybe I’m overstating it. But I had a hard time being happy last winter. I was down last winter. I had long stretches of slight dread.

I tried to blame it on the weather, no sun, the world all grey and ice. Even though I am a fan of winter, and have always enjoyed grey and ice, I told people that I must have seasonal depression.

I tried to blame it on poor Sylvia Plath, who deserves none of the blame. In fact, in this very blog I may have written something about how reading Plath’s collected works in the wintertime was a bad idea. Foolishness and poppycock! Complete and total lunacy on my part.

Still, there I was, ready to start taking anti-anxiety or ADHD meds, ready to change my chemical makeup for a chance at feeling “normal” again. And I was completely ignoring the root of the problem. Because I did not want to believe that I’d fallen into another bad job. I really don’t want to belabor the point (but if you’re interested, see pretty much every blog entry I wrote last spring and summer), but that job was awful. And having had another awful job before that, I just did not want to believe that I was, yet again, in the awful job loop.

The thing is, I knew better. I could tell immediately who to watch out for, who was bad news, and they were in power. I was warned, repeatedly, by people who were leaving the office when I first started the job. And I ain’t no spring chicken in the job market rodeo (mixed metaphors, anyone?). But I wanted so badly to believe in my job, in what I was doing, in the mission of the organization, in the charm of the small office, walking distance from my house. I tried to tell myself that things were great there; I ignored every flashing light and clanging bell going off in my head for months. For MONTHS.

I was ready to drug myself into making the ignoring easier, or into trying to work harder in a dead-end job. I’m so glad that I didn’t. Things are so much better now.

What brought this on? Well, last weekend I looked at the date. I really, really looked at it. We are almost done with January, and it flew by. We are almost (maybe) halfway through winter. And this winter has been like winters past in Buffalo – not a lot of sun, very cold and grey and icy.

And I feel so great! Well, not in the morning, of course, but when I am ready for work, I am happy to go to work. I do my job, and on my walk home, I’m not dreading the next day at work. I eat dinner, I read, I watch movies – last night I went to the gym. At no time in the average evening do I think, “Oh, fuck, I have to work tomorrow.” OK, sometimes my leisure time passes too quickly for my liking. I am not the sort of person who thinks about work all the time, who wishes I were at work when I’m not, but it also doesn’t feel like torture to have to go to work. I like my job a lot. The “like” may grow into “love.” And that makes such a difference in my entire outlook.

Why hate your job when it’s such a big part of your day?