Posted by noa on February 28, 2004, at 5:23:16
In reply to Do you guys work?, posted by Bubbaleh on February 27, 2004, at 15:53:36
I work, about 40-45 hrs. per week.
Right now, my depression is not bad, but when it was, I still worked anyway. However, I took a LOT of sick time, and looking back, I am sometimes amazed that I was able to keep my job because I wasn't doing such a great job a lot of the time! In the past year or so, I feel I've been performing much much better.
What still is hard is keeping up with the pace of the work. I often feel overwhelmed with all the different things I have to do, and trying to find a way to keep on top of things and prioritize and manage my time, etc. Sometimes I work over time only because it is so hard for me to efficiently get things done and keep things organized during the regular work hours. My desk at work regularly regresses to a mountain of scattered papers or mounds of papers--not piles, piles are more organized than what I'm talking about!
Sometimes I feel brain dead by the end of the day. I don't know if this is my depression, my anxiety about feeling overwhelmed, my medications, or what.
I always have this feeling that there is something I'm not attending to that is going to come back and haunt me big time--like I'm forgetting something. I can actually point to a few things that fall in this category, actually (I stopped keeping a "to-do" list because it just felt like it went on forever and just haunted me more than it helped), but the feeling is that there is something else I'm not remembering, something really big and important.
Once recently when I was feeling tired and overwhelmed about work, my therapist put these feelings in perspective by reminding me that I am still dealing with a serious depressive illness, and that it hasn't been that long since going into remission, and that I am doing well coping with work, considering all that. That comment helped. Sometimes, because the most serious depression is in remission, I expect myself to be OK, Fine, No problems. But it's true, I still do struggle with some depression, and it wasn't long ago that my major depression was very serious and very present.
poster:noa
thread:318293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20040219/msgs/318460.html