A random title to a post, but to clarify, my life and the way my life is going, I feel like I am being beaten over the head by the very thick end of a very big wedge. I can’t seem to dodge the large things dropping on my head, even the really big meteor sized things. Basically, I am in round number 11, and my legs are gone and the champ is slugging away trying to finish me off.

I am just out of a pretty heavy depressive episode that lasted a month. This episode was the worst one I have had in over three years and it, quite frankly, almost finished me. Apologies for the frankness, but I have been dilly-dallying with the need to write this post to get it out of my head and the flowery prose ain’t doing it. I have to face this head-on and get it down on the screen. Just write until it’s done and then make it look pretty after the fact.

Things are going on in my life that I can’t write about at the moment out of respect for other parties, respect that is not alway proffered in the other direction. When the time is right, I’ll write more. If you happen to know what I am referring too with this, I ask that you respect my wishes and not bring it up in the comments of this post or on social media. When the time is right, I will address the situation.

During the interview for my job, I used the phrase that I never burned the candle at both ends, I took a flame thrower to the candle. This was about my previous life when I worked in Theatre. I quite literally burned my soul apart working in the theatre in the way I did for over ten years. I feel like I put in a lifetimes worth of work in ten short years and I came out very much the worse for it. At the time it was fun, I didn’t remember the times when I was so tired and hung-over that I could hardly stand up; I didn’t remember the times when I chose the Theatre over all else.

Looking back now over those days, I probably wouldn’t change what I did, I would, however, change how I did it. As it stands 20 years after I last worked in a theatre, I still don’t have any qualifications that could get me a decent job. I got the first job I applied for after my major breakdown. I was lucky, my job required me to have on the job training from before day one. I feel I have grown into my job, and that the way I deal with the day to day is much improved than it was 2 years ago. I am not fully qualified yet, and probably never will be, but each day is a learning process, and I revel in this.

However, the nature of the job requires me to be very flexible and be almost on call 24/7. This isn’t exactly in the job description, but when your job deals with vulnerable people, then you can’t let the house you work in be in a staff deficit. So you can imagine that my need to take his month-long break added to my stress.

**Tigger Warning**

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The final thing that really made my decision to take the time off came one Wednesday night when things got so far on top of me that it was a toss-up between walking out of the place I work at and wait for the next lorry to pass on the main road or just go and start walking and not stop. It scared me enough to stay up for the rest of the night and challenge my brain to unlimited rounds of mental boxing to see who would stay alive through the night. I managed to stay alive and not under a Lorry. I went home and made that all-important first phone call to the GP. I got an appointment for the same day (a bloody miracle with my surgery).

I took my Mum to the appointment and got a sick note for two weeks with the offer of more if I wasn’t back to my jovial self.

Off I went to try and rebuild myself, it was a task, in my mind, that equalled rebuilding the Titanic with Mecano tools. Everything I had put in place over the past two years to keep this from happening since I started work, for some reason, hadn’t worked this time and I had crumbled.

I retreated to my corner in the Dining Room at home where my computer and Xbox lives, and I tried to block out the world with everything and anything that I thought would work. In the end, I started setting myself goals in a video game to complete the game and see what happened at the end.

Each day I took at least one more step towards the end game, somedays I managed two. I played this game relentlessly. From the time I got up to the time I went to bed, Destiny consumed my mind. I focused on completing the game and any side quests that popped up along the way.

After three weeks and 2 days, I finally finished the main game. It was at an end. Those 23 days had been laser-focused on getting that game finished. While my mind was still very fragile, I knew I was so much stronger at the end than when I began. Three Weeks and Three days I evaluated where my head was at. I came to a realisation that I should start the process of going back to work. I rang work that day and told them I was ready to come back… after a few hoops were jumped through I came back.

Here I sit in the middle of week three being back at work, and my mind seems to be getting better all the time, but other things are getting in the way of 100% Game completion.