[LJ Idol] Deconstruction
Deconstruction can happen one of two ways: the unplanned and the the deliberate.
The Unplanned.
I suffer from depression. (Quick linguistics digression: doesn't just about everyone 'suffer' from depression? I know of no one who 'revels' in it, or 'enjoys' it. Well, maybe some people claim to, but really.)
Almost two years ago, it surged in me to a point where I could not function. I began a slow deconstruction of everything I was. It pushed me to turn a savage, slashing knife on what I was, who I was, what I was doing, and what I was thinking. Over the period of about two months, I did very little other than sleep, breathe, eat, use the lavatory, and sometime rouse myself to talk to people. I turned what I thought at the time was an unsparing, terrible knife on myself to dissect myself and finding out how little I actually liked myself.
What I really found out, when it was over, was that this unplanned deconstruction was really stupid at the end of things. I ended up almost losing my job due to the inabiity to actually do things (and I'm convinced that it was not a good point for me in the 'who gets laid off' lotto later). It hurt, and a lot of the things that I thought I discovered about it turned out not to be true. What I thought, in the middle of that, was a critical review of my nature was just bloodletting for it's own sake. It was a deconstruction for no good reason at all, and it failed to do anything other than screw me up for a while.
The Deliberate.
In April, on a cool but nice Tuesday, my manager (who normally worked in a different location, but was in with us) asked to speak to me privately.
And he told me that I was being laid off.
It's important to note that I worked for a bank. A LARGE bank. Name starts with a C. Got a lot of TARP funds.
My larger group, that my department was part of, had 412 people at 8 AM that Tuesday. By noon, that number had dropped by a tenth. (Yes, I can actually say that I was part of a decimation in the old fashioned sense of the term.)
I called some friends and family, I cancelled a lunch date, I posted to LJ, and I went home. I took a cab from the building on Greenwich Street to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then a bus home. (My apartment was three blocks from a train to Hoboken, which had an easy way to get to New York, and a bus stop for the city-bound bus just in front of the complex.) And I put my stuff down, and sat down on the couch, and I thought.
I expected, and my friends who knew about it thought about it probably worried, that my depression would resurge and destroy me. But it didn't.
Somehow - and I have no idea how I did it, so I take no credit for it - I did not implode drastically. Instead, I looked at my situation: laid off, my lease about to expire and if I wanted to stay it would go up $150 a month; former employee of a bank getting regularly crucified in the press - poison.
Late the year before, I'd taken a vacation that took me across the country to visit friends, spend some time in Seattle, and since then they'd been asking me when I was going to move. And thus the deliberate deconstruction began.
I began to pack my things, shed items to friends and to the trash, prepare. I deconstructed my life, and prepared to depart from the greater New York area to the Pacific Northwest.
In the doing, I found myself filled with relief and a certain serenity. I had worked for that company for more than ten years, and more and more I'd been becoming angrier at the feeling I'd become trapped in that place. I deconstructed - demolished - that knot inside me that had eaten away at my love of life.
And now I feel a lot better about things. I smile more, I think. I laugh a bit more.
This deconstruction was for the better.
Two deconstructions in two years; uncontrolled and controlled, and how they affected me.
[This is a post for the therealljidol community.]
The Unplanned.
I suffer from depression. (Quick linguistics digression: doesn't just about everyone 'suffer' from depression? I know of no one who 'revels' in it, or 'enjoys' it. Well, maybe some people claim to, but really.)
Almost two years ago, it surged in me to a point where I could not function. I began a slow deconstruction of everything I was. It pushed me to turn a savage, slashing knife on what I was, who I was, what I was doing, and what I was thinking. Over the period of about two months, I did very little other than sleep, breathe, eat, use the lavatory, and sometime rouse myself to talk to people. I turned what I thought at the time was an unsparing, terrible knife on myself to dissect myself and finding out how little I actually liked myself.
What I really found out, when it was over, was that this unplanned deconstruction was really stupid at the end of things. I ended up almost losing my job due to the inabiity to actually do things (and I'm convinced that it was not a good point for me in the 'who gets laid off' lotto later). It hurt, and a lot of the things that I thought I discovered about it turned out not to be true. What I thought, in the middle of that, was a critical review of my nature was just bloodletting for it's own sake. It was a deconstruction for no good reason at all, and it failed to do anything other than screw me up for a while.
The Deliberate.
In April, on a cool but nice Tuesday, my manager (who normally worked in a different location, but was in with us) asked to speak to me privately.
And he told me that I was being laid off.
It's important to note that I worked for a bank. A LARGE bank. Name starts with a C. Got a lot of TARP funds.
My larger group, that my department was part of, had 412 people at 8 AM that Tuesday. By noon, that number had dropped by a tenth. (Yes, I can actually say that I was part of a decimation in the old fashioned sense of the term.)
I called some friends and family, I cancelled a lunch date, I posted to LJ, and I went home. I took a cab from the building on Greenwich Street to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then a bus home. (My apartment was three blocks from a train to Hoboken, which had an easy way to get to New York, and a bus stop for the city-bound bus just in front of the complex.) And I put my stuff down, and sat down on the couch, and I thought.
I expected, and my friends who knew about it thought about it probably worried, that my depression would resurge and destroy me. But it didn't.
Somehow - and I have no idea how I did it, so I take no credit for it - I did not implode drastically. Instead, I looked at my situation: laid off, my lease about to expire and if I wanted to stay it would go up $150 a month; former employee of a bank getting regularly crucified in the press - poison.
Late the year before, I'd taken a vacation that took me across the country to visit friends, spend some time in Seattle, and since then they'd been asking me when I was going to move. And thus the deliberate deconstruction began.
I began to pack my things, shed items to friends and to the trash, prepare. I deconstructed my life, and prepared to depart from the greater New York area to the Pacific Northwest.
In the doing, I found myself filled with relief and a certain serenity. I had worked for that company for more than ten years, and more and more I'd been becoming angrier at the feeling I'd become trapped in that place. I deconstructed - demolished - that knot inside me that had eaten away at my love of life.
And now I feel a lot better about things. I smile more, I think. I laugh a bit more.
This deconstruction was for the better.
Two deconstructions in two years; uncontrolled and controlled, and how they affected me.
[This is a post for the therealljidol community.]