Strangely good news...

So I've been feeling a bit depressed; this should hardly be surprising. I've been living on the road - away from my husband, my cats, my choir, my parish, my monastery (I use "my" here in the loosest possible sense)...I've even been away from my parish-away-from-my-parish here in Atlanta, what with one thing and another. And I was sitting here not wanting to do anything, not enjoying even work that I used to love...

And I've been talking with people about it, and we've been looking at it from various angles, trying to figure out whether this was merely situational or whether it might be biochemical...and my counselor points out that I'm pretty much isolated from all the things that usually feed me (see list above)...

So I'm sitting in the airport yesterday morning, preparing to return to work, and I'm not really just thrilled to be getting on a plane in changing weather (which usually means a bumpy ride)...and I figure, I should probably read Matins, not just skate through the readings for the day. So I read Matins, starting with the prayer of intention before the Daily Office in which I asked for strength and peace and whatever I need to get through this, and including the psalms (albeit the psalms for Mondays...I'm so used to returning to Atlanta on Monday mornings that if I'm flying to Atlanta, it must be Monday)...and I start to feel a little better.

I get on the plane, and we get to 10,000 feet so we can use CD players, so I listen to the recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony made at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, where they substituted "Freiheit!" (Freedom) for "Freude!" (Joy) in the choral movement. And it's so gorgeous it gives me goosepimples. It makes me cry, but in a good way. And I feel a little more better.

And by the time I get here, I'm at least energized enough to accomplish something. I can move again. It still mostly sucks, but I can stand it; I can cope with it, at least for the moment - one moment, one hour, one day at a time. It seems silly to find this astonishing...but it is somewhat amazing, and just a little on the scary side. I mean, not to have thought of that...friend of mine said via IM: "picturing one of the monks doing the I-should-have-had-a-V8 forehead slap." Exactly.

Ooops...

I had an "ooops" after we got back from lunch today...was out to lunch with the PM (Project Manager) and a couple of the guys I work with, trying to figure out how to do about four or five weeks' work in two weeks. Not gonna happen, basically - we're sort of proactively postponing the other things because nobody's quite breathing down our necks yet...anyway...I'd had to leave a meeting about one of the large things I'm working on, to go to this lunch, so I stopped by a colleague on the way back in to ask what I missed. Innocent intentions: catch up on what else happened in the meeting, catch her up on what we'd said at lunch. But you all know what's paved with good intentions...

Basically I got into a non-CCE-business-related conversation with this colleague; worse than that, it was something of a what's-happening-at-Fujitsu conversation (i.e., people let go, reviews basically just cancelled, etc.). PM comes around the corner and snaps, "Would you cut this conversation in public, please?!"

At which point we jointly remember that we're surrounded by CCE personnel, not to mention consultants from other consulting companies also working on the project...so I'm deeply embarrassed and ashamed, and I e-mail an apology to him.

He's not really mad; he just needs us to remember that we have to present ourselves professionally, and then suggested that "since we all - CCE personnel included - know your workload, perhaps it would be best if you just stayed in heads-down mode for the next couple weeks, and only surface for air if you really need to."

In other words, sit down, shut up, go back to your corner and don't talk to people unless you have to. What a great thing to tell a person who's already suffering from depression and feeling isolated and cut off from people.

I'm okay with it; not thrilled but...surviving.