What Now?

Made it!

The two weeks of how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-all-this are over! There were a few grim moments along the way, including a couple of nights of deeply disturbed sleep that certainly didn't help the whole efficiency thing. One of those nights, I had a terrible dream in which I had run into someone from grad school whom I haven't kept in touch with; we filled each other in on what we'd been up to over the last decade-plus, and then she looked at me and said, "I'm trying really hard to find any redeeming detail in the story of your life thus far." Yeesh! It was terribly distressing and had me in a funk the next morning, but I finally decided it was just the stress talking. (And the person from grad school was always very nice; I'm sure she wouldn't say anything like that in real life!)

But enough about the grimness; the good news is that the grading all got done, and my AP Comp students actually did quite well as a whole on their practice AP exam; the arts/lit magazine is all laid out and the staff is proofreading it (and it looks awesome); the faculty band gave a rowsing performance to great applause, and I picked up a new instrument the night before -- the cow bell; I've now had my first two official department head events; the department unanimously supported the curriculum proposals for which I was the primary author; I got through Grandparents' Day in fine style; my advisees are handling their various crises better than two weeks ago (although a mom left a message for me on Thursday in which she was crying and screaming and basically hysterical; I'm really glad I didn't happen to be in the room to pick up the phone!); and I'm currently wrapping up various bits and bobs while I proctor SATs and am then going to take the rest of the weekend off!

The co-author crisis is pretty much in the same state as it was; we're all having a meeting on Wednesday. But I'm feeling remarkably calm about it, mostly because I'm not in charge of fixing it.

And in general my mood is dramatically up, having gotten through these two weeks. On Thursday night, I actually had a little difficulty falling asleep, tired as I was, because I was so very excited that the end was in sight!

It's always a little depressing to me to have my college-teaching friends be posting on FB and blogs about how they are grading exams and finishing up the year, all while I still have four weeks of classes left. But at least as of this morning I've gotten through the final hard push. There will certainly be ups and downs in the remaining six weeks before I'm free for the summer, but at this point I actually think I will manage to cruise pretty smoothly toward June.

A mini-spring break

We have a three-day weekend (thanks to a school-specific holiday on Monday), and I am treating it like a mini-spring break!

I spent my actual two-week spring break grading my ass off and visiting my family (which was a good thing to do but not exactly restful). And then in the two weeks since spring break ended, I gave up my weekend to chaperone the Model UN fieldtrip, which again was a good thing to do (it was fun to share a room with the club advisor, who's a good friend of mine, and the students were sweetly grateful that I had come along) and gave me a chance to wander around a college campus I hadn't visited before, but was all rather tiring. Plus I had to finish doing our taxes and plan out the rest of the year to make sure we squeezed everything in. All important things, all good to do, but yeesh, I'm tired. Not to mention the starting Lexapro and going through those beginning-of-treatment symptoms (which actually weren't as bad as last time, other than the overwhelming sleepiness of the first week).

But now it's a three-day weekend in which I have no grading to do (thanks to hard work on Wednesday and Thursday finishing up a stack of short papers), and my classes for next week are already mostly planned, and on Friday I realized what a gift I had ahead of me and decided to declare this my own private spring break. Huzzah!

So it started with going to sleep at 8:30 last night and sleeping almost 11 hours. That's helping. I have a couple of murder mysteries from the library (Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series, set in 1920s Melbourne, which I discovered just last week), and there's an interesting documentary showing at the library that I'm going to go to this morning. We have dinner plans with someone who might become a new friend. The weather is supposed to get nicer tomorrow and Monday, and I might make my first spring foray into the yard and start doing some winter clean-up and enjoying the plants that are beginning to poke up out of the ground.

There are still seven weeks of classes left, and I need some energy and spring joy to carry me through. This mini-spring break might not entirely do the trick, but at least it's a start.

Better living through chemistry?

So it turns out that what I did on my spring break, in addition to visiting my family and doing a ton of grading (and in fact I'm not quite done with the latter), is going on antidepressants.

I finally decided that my ongoing sadness no longer qualified as "winter blues" or "overwork" if I was spending hours crying for no clear reason on more than one sunny day over spring break. Plus there was the fact that I have been dreading not only the return to classes, but also this summer and next year; I mean, when one starts dreading both work and time off from work, there's not a whole lot left to feel good about.

I was on Lexapro once before, during that ghastly last year at St. Martyr's, and it was hard to tell definitively whether it made things better or not -- since, of course, I have no control group for my life -- but I did keep my head above water as things got worse and worse that year, and in the end I walked away from academia and moved several states away to start life over, all without having a lot of panic, so I guess that's something.

Anyway, D. -- who is a big believer in better living through chemistry -- has suggested more than once this past year that I talk with my doctor about antidepressants, and I have resisted every time, but when she suggested it again on Thursday, a day that I had spent mostly in tears, despairing about the future for no clear reason, I decided to listen. This was after I tried to improve my mood by getting some exercise ... and proceeded to cry for the duration of my half-hour jog. It was all pretty pathetic, and I finally decided that D. was right and that perhaps the time had come for some chemical intervention.

Now, what I probably should have done is to wait until my therapy appointment on Tuesday and discuss it with my therapist first. But the last time I started Lexapro, I felt terrible for the first couple of days, and I wanted to get that horrible feeling out of the way before I started back to school, especially since I'm chaperoning a weekend trip next weekend; so if I didn't start the drugs this weekend, it would really be two weeks before I could start if I wanted to do so without feeling horrible at school. So I went ahead and called my doctor Friday morning, and lo and behold they could squeeze me in that morning, which I took as a sign that I should charge ahead.

The doctor was very nice, especially when I started crying right there in her office -- kind of embarrassing, but I'm sure I'm not the first -- and we discussed the various options and decided to go with Lexapro, since I'd been on it once before and tolerated it fine with no real side effects (after those first miserable days, which apparently just go with the territory of starting an SSRI). So I started the drug on Friday afternoon and am now in my third day.

So far the only side effects are that I'm jittery and really tired, although the latter effect could also just be the result of having spent so much of Thursday crying. I'm taking just half a pill a day for the first week, which my doctor didn't have me do the last time and which seems to have really minimized the side effects this weekend. So maybe I could have waited and talked with my therapist first, but of course I didn't know that until I started taking the pills, so I'm not going to second-guess the timing. (I'm actually kind of nervous about telling my therapist, since I don't really know how she feels about medication, but that nervousness is probably all about my internalized sense of shame about taking medication -- illogical but still real.)

Speaking of second-guessing: Of course, right after I took the first pill on Friday, I actually felt more cheerful than I had in a few days and immediately worried that I had panicked too early and that if I'd just held on for a day or two longer, I'd have felt better anyway. But I've been doing that "just hold on" business for several months now, really going back to last summer, although it's gotten worse in the last few months. So I think I was just feeling better because I'd taken a definitive step to improve life.

So while I'm envious of my colleagues who took exciting trips over spring break and who will come back to school on Monday rejuvenated from their trips to Puerto Rico and Italy and elsewhere, I'm hoping that my spring break decision will ultimately wind up having just as therapeutic an effect on the rest of the year.

Looks like we made it

Yeah, I've had this Barry Manilow song in my head for the last 48 hours. I was really beginning to doubt that I was going to be able to hold on until spring break, and then on Friday I woke up and knew that I could do it, that I could make it through one more day ... at which point the Barry Manilow tune started in my head and hasn't really left since then.

But who cares? The important thing is that it's now spring break! And yes, I have tons of grading to do, and I have to finish our taxes, and the house is a total disaster area, plus there's a visit to my family that will take up about half the time off ... but I decided a few days ago that my first and foremost priority was regaining energy and health so that I can enjoy the last two months of school instead of dragging along as I've been doing. Life is too short to be exhausted and miserable, which is how I've spent far too much of my time the last couple of months. No more!

I had actually meant to finish up part of this grading during the last week of classes, but then I got that bad cold with a persistent cough that, combined with the exhaustion I was already working against, completely drained me of every bit of energy. Seriously, I sat down one evening to grade, deliberately choosing a paper that I knew would be pretty good as a way to ease into the project ... and I had started shaking and crying by the halfway point of the paper. I just couldn't make my brain work. So I decided I was doing no one any good, apologized to the students and told them I'd send their papers a few days into break (which I can do since I'm grading them with Notability on my iPad and can just email them), and basically just tried to get through class every day as the limit of what I could accomplish. I think I'm finally ready to tackle some of that grading today, but I'm determined to do it in a relatively leisurely way, with plenty of breaks and no pressure.

Oh, here's one triumph from the last week: Do you remember my frustration with the director of the annual fund, who kept trying to squash my argument for employee giving? Well, I had given a brief announcement to the middle school faculty a few weeks ago, and it went okay, but I was a little off my game, having rushed over to that meeting from another meeting and arriving breathless and wound up. I mean, it was fine, but nothing to write home about. But this past Thursday, we had an upper school faculty meeting first thing in the morning, and I was scheduled to give an annual fund announcement at the very beginning. And friends, I brought the house down! The spirit was in me, and I testified -- all in about 5 minutes, mind you -- and all day long colleagues kept stopping me to say that it was an amazing speech and, in some cases, that they were donating for the very first time because of what I said. So hah! Take that, Miss Annual Fund! To be fair, she did send me an email immediately afterward to say that it was a great speech, so maybe this was a valuable lesson to her that my argument has some merit after all. I also got a lovely note from the head of school, thanking me for my stirring announcement, which she was sure was really going to boost faculty participation in the annual fund. So that was a great way to end classes right before spring break! Plus it was the first time in awhile that I felt like myself -- full of energy and enthusiasm -- which felt very good (even though I was exhausted again by that afternoon and crawled into bed when I got home).

But that is all in the past. Spring Break is the present, and I'm determined to fill it with R&R even though I have no exotic locale and still not a lot of energy.

Well, that's a little better

After a weekend of not sleeping very well over the whole business with my colleague (plus probably the cold that walloped me on Thursday), I had a good conversation this afternoon with the academic dean. Turns out that (1) she still thinks that my idea of having this colleague teach this particular course is a good idea and that it's definitely still a possibility; (2) she is working hard to get this colleague back up to full time for next year (something that no one actually bothered to tell my colleague, for heaven's sake!); (3) the pissy email from the head of school was mostly in response to something else the colleague had done and not exactly about this situation; and (4) I handled the whole situation just fine last week, so no worries there.

So that's the good news, which I was able to report back to my department chair and to my colleague. Yay!

The less good news is that, I'm afraid, I started crying when I talked with the academic dean. Yeah, super polished there. I had just been so stressed about it for almost four days that as soon as I started talking about it, I kind of lost it and teared up. Fortunately, if one is going to cry in front of the dean, FGS is not a bad place to do that ... unlike the time I burst into tears in front of the dean at St. Martyr's, which didn't go nearly as well. Sigh. This is just something I know about myself -- I'm a weeper, and there's only so much I can do to control it. I have cried in front of this dean more than once, and she is always very nice about it, even though I'm always very embarrassed afterward. Ah well.

I wish that I could learn not to ruminate about these things, but that seems to be a lesson that remains permanently outside my abilities. But at least I've learned to try to address things as soon as I can, which cuts down on time for rumination. If it hadn't been for the snow day combined with the weekend, I would have been able to talk with the dean much sooner. I guess if one can't change one's personality, one can at least learn to work around it.

Since I'm still sick and hacking up a lung and have almost no voice left after a day of teaching, and since I haven't slept well for several nights in a row, and since I'm emotionally worn out, I'm completely ignoring the Othello essays I should be grading for my sophomores and instead lying on the couch eating Kettle Corn and watching a kitten episode of Too Cute from Animal Planet. (I have an older friend who, distressingly, broke her hip a few days ago; Too Cute has become standard fare for her in these first couple of days back home.) My plan is to be in bed before 9:00 and to start fresh tomorrow.

Thank the lord, February is over!

Life has actually been better for about a week now, but I got weirdly superstitious and didn't want to post that life was better now that February was almost over; even last night, I thought, "No, I'd better wait until it's officially March 1 before I celebrate February's demise; otherwise, who knows what might happen between now and midnight?" Fortunately, I can now definitively claim that we made it through the worst month and are looking forward to brighter days.

Apparently I should try taking Vitamin D next winter for a less gloomy February; a couple of colleagues swear by it.

The nice thing is that the end of winter term's work coincided exactly with the end of February. So the last few days were tons of work -- finishing grading, writing end-of-term comments for all 58 of my students -- but then I got to wake up on March 1 feeling free as a bird!

And by "free as a bird," I mean that all of my students are submitting drafts between yesterday and Monday, which need to be responded to carefully and quickly.

But who cares? It's March! And in two weeks, we get a two-week spring break! So life is much better.

(Edited to add: In catching up on my blog-reading, I'm laughing at how many other folks have written almost identical posts. It does feel better to know that one is not alone in hating February!)

Weathering the February blues

Okay, I took my last post down because I decided that it was too whiny and needy even for a semi-pseudonymous blog! But I did save your supportive comments, which I very much appreciate.

The good news is that life is looking better today than it was this weekend or even yesterday. Hitting rock bottom will do that to a person ... or, rather, hitting bottom and then starting to rebound.

Here's how things turned around: This morning, getting teary on the way to school, I remembered that it was still February. And February always sucks. I know this, but I somehow forget it every year. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I congratulated myself on getting through January because I do always remember that January is a hard month. So why do I forget about February? On the one hand, there's something not right about being blue for a good two months every winter (plus a couple of weeks every fall when I really start noticing the shorter days). On the other hand, there's something to be said for recognizing that the cause of one's misery is the calendar and not anything more existential.

So a couple of times today when colleagues asked, "Hi, how are you?," I said, "Oh, I've got a touch of the February blues." And both times the other person said, "Oh my god, me too. Why is this always such a hard month?" So that made me feel better. I still teared up a little on my drive home ... but I took that drive home kind of early, ducking out of school before the end of the day (I don't teach the last period on Wednesday). I came home, put on sweats, and immediately lay down on the couch and drank a diet Coke and ate a ton of Kettle Corn and watched a British murder mystery. And then when it was over I slept really hard for an hour and a half on the couch. And when I woke up, I amazingly felt much better about life than I have in a week.

So I decided to cement my improved attitude by not doing any work tonight (even though I have grading I should have done) and instead watch four episodes of Modern Family while drinking a wine spritzer and doing laundry. Much better.

Plus D. was feeling much more cheerful and optimistic today ... and then this evening she got invited to interview for a summer teaching position! So fingers crossed!

But I'm glad that we were both already feeling more optimistic and remembering that life is good even before she got that positive news.

I need to embroider "February sucks" on a throw pillow or something so that I don't forget and get surprised by its suckiness every damn year. But fortunately, it's a short month -- only 8 more days. We'll make it.

A one-resolution New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

On the theory that I can't change many things about my life and the world, but I can change my attitude, I soaked up the little bit of sun there was today by going out for a very cold walk -- after 40 minutes my thighs were frozen, although weirdly my calves were fine, which there must be a scientific reason for but I don't know what it is -- and did in fact feel briskly alive in my frozen state.

And during that walk, I decided that I would have one and only one resolution for the new year:

I will keep the dining room table cleared off.

The table tends to be one of those spots in the house that junk winds up piling up on, but I cleared it all off and vacuumed and dusted on Christmas Eve, and I've kept it clear for a whole week now and like it very much, so why not keep going?

I figure that this resolution will have multiple positive effects: D. and I will sit down together for dinner more regularly (rather than eating on the couch while working or watching TV or being distracted in some other way), which will be good for our relationship and also make me more mindful and appreciative of what I'm eating. Plus I figure that there might be a spillover effect, and that keeping the dining room table cleared might also nudge me to keep the neighboring rooms -- the living room and kitchen -- clearer as well. But I'm not putting any of that into the resolution -- nope, all I need to do is keep the table cleared, and I will have met my resolution.

And I've already succeeded in day one of the new year, for I ate breakfast and lunch at our nicely clean table. And we're about to sit down to have our black-eyed peas chili, so there's good luck already brewing for us.

... and good riddance

... to 2012, that is.

2012 mostly sucked. There was the fabulousness of the South Africa trip in March, which was amazing in so many ways and must not be underestimated, but that was pretty much the only really good thing that happened this year. Otherwise, it was basically a slog from January right on through December (with an extra little slump at the half-way point when I spent all day of my 45th birthday crying in July).

And pretty much all of the suckiness boils down to D's professional life. There was the horror of her grad school experience and that was a such a hard kick in the gut that she's really only now getting her breath back after an autumn of recovery. Things looked better career-wise in November, when she was applying for what could have been a really rewarding job that she seemed to have an inside track for ... but then the executive board that was doing the hiring started imploding before her very eyes, and sure enough a couple of weeks ago she received an abrupt email from the search committee chair informing her that the board was cancelling the final interview that she was scheduled for five days later, and indeed that they had called off the entire search and would not be hiring anyone for at least six months. So that was that. Actually, I was flooded with an immediate sense of relief when she got that email, because finally all of the crazy was out in the open and she didn't have to pretend that everything was fine with them anymore. The downside, of course, is that she's still unemployed and unhappy and bored and lonely, and have I mentioned that 2012 really sucked?

All of this is a major factor in this year's iteration of my winter blues, of course. (And thank you for your very supportive and kind comments on my last post!)

But 2012 is on its way out, thank goodness. I have a lot riding on 2013 being better. And by "a lot riding," I guess I just mean that I'm really hoping it's better, although that doesn't sound as dramatic.

I don't think that either D or I will really be happy until she has a job that she feels good about. We try very hard to hold onto the things that really matter in life -- our relationship, our cozy home, our sweet cats, the fact that we can spend hours lying about in our pajamas reading and sipping wine in front of a crackling fire, with Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background -- but in the end, work matters too, at least for people who care about doing good work. And income also matters, quite a lot. Certainly finding employment is at the top of D's New Year's list. But what am I supposed to do? It's frustrating to feel like there's one obstacle standing in the way of one's own happiness but that I can't do anything about it. Sigh. I like fixing problems, but this is one huge problem that I don't have the ability to fix. Did I mention how much the last year sucked?

So we'll eat our black-eyed peas tomorrow (which D. hates, as she does all beans, but we disguise them in spicy turkey chili, so she can pretend they aren't really there and I can rest assured that we are still holding with tradition) and will hope that for 2013, unlike in 2012, they actually do their job and augur good luck in the new year. Fingers crossed.

Fighting the winter blues

I'm totally having my usual mid-winter blues, which tend to hit at about this point every year. I do fine in December -- it's busy enough with school and bustling about, and there are holiday lights everywhere, and the cold is new enough that it's kind of fun -- but I tend to have a post-Christmas slump. And wow, did I hit that slump yesterday.

Partly it's that, as much as I look forward to the break from the school routine, I don't actually do very well with unstructured time. I did fine in the first week of winter break because I collected a set of 30 sophomore essays on the last day of classes, and I took my leisurely time grading them, doing just a few a day. (which was great, actually; I felt like I really took my time with each one and read it carefully, and I wrote a longer final comment than usual, one that took stock of how the student was doing in her trajectory of improved writing.) But then I finished off the grading yesterday, emailed them off to the students ... and promptly fell into the blues, with time hanging heavy on my hands.

What I should be doing with all of that time is some projects around the house, and having fun. What I'm doing instead is (a) wasting unbelievable amounts of time playing this new solitaire game I got for my iPad, and (b) thinking vaguely about school but not actually accomplishing anything. I tried shaking things up this afternoon by checking out a book on crocheting granny squares from the library, because I thought that would be a fun new challenge now that I've mastered the art of no-pattern-at-all scarves ... but I spent two hours getting more and more frustrated, until I was fighting back tears. Gosh, that's fun. D. then suggested that I play ukulele for awhile, but I knew that was a bad idea; playing the uke tends to push me into dark thoughts along the lines of "I'm horrible at this; I'm horrible at everything that isn't work; why don't I just accept the fact that I'm boring and have no life and no creativity or skills at all?" I figured that would be a bad epilogue to the ugly little granny square incident. (And yes, clearly I'm missing some crucial element that would let me just relax and be bad at things and have it not be a major litmus test on my character. Ah well.)

So finally I thought, "To hell with it. I might as well get some work done -- assignments written, reading done, etc. -- to make life easier in January if I'm not going to enjoy this last week in December." And indeed, that is making me feel better. But who wants to be the kind of person who doesn't know how to do anything but work?

Also, school is such a very social place, which kinds of wipes me out sometimes, but then the sudden end of all socializing, other than with D., is refreshing for a day or two but then starts getting a little lonely. I'm an extrovert enough that I do like seeing a variety of people during the day, and when I'm not at school I'm faced with our absence of local friends. Fabulous colleagues, absolutely, and they're wonderful, but friends I can call when I'm bored or want to go to the movies or just want to hang out? Nada. Zip. Zilch. And so I get lonely and depressed whenever we're on school break, and I feel bad about our friend-less lives. But it's damned hard to make new friends when one is 45. (And many of my colleagues are in fact actual friends with each other and do get together and hang out on weekends and summers, but I've not done well at crossing that boundary, which in turn does not make me feel good about myself. What kind of person can't make friends?)

I'm sure if I could get out of the house and get some fresh air, that would be better, but the weather has been crappy this week. At least now it's finally snowing and thus pretty, after the days and days of rain we've had, which have no doubt contributed to my winter gloom.

Another factor in this week's iteration of my annual mid-winter blues is that I've slept terribly the last couple of nights, although the reason for that bad sleep is at least pretty funny. You see, I've been getting back into the exercise habit in December, in part because I know that winter is always a hard time for me emotionally and that exercise can be a good antidote for feeling down. But two days ago, I tried this new exercise -- single leg hip bridges -- and the next morning I woke up before dawn in agony. Butt agony, that is. I apparently over-exercises my glutes and could barely walk yesterday. Sublimely ridiculous, of course, but also painful and very much interfering with sleep.

So there it is -- my winter blues are a literal pain in the butt! But at least that last problem is an easy one to fix -- Advil and a heating pad and gentler exercise and stretching -- so I'm hoping I'll sleep well tonight (and indeed I'm going to take a little pill to ensure that this happens). And my hope -- nay, my intention! -- is that tomorrow will thus be better than the last couple of days have been. I'll have to be outside shoveling snow, which will be more fresh air than I've had in almost a week, and the neighbors will no doubt be outside doing the same, so I'll get to have little sidewalk chats, and all of this will be ingredients in helping me shake these winter doldrums.

I have a full eight days left of winter break (we start back really late this year because New Year's falls mid-week), and I am determined not to waste them further. I've had 48 hours of moping and tearing up and going cross-eyed over solitaire, and that's more than enough of that.