I'm not sure whether or not there is an element of irony in this posting's title or not.
Certainly, it is good to have some routine returning to my life and it is good to be back out of the house and among people again and it is good to be contributing but those are mostly head things and speak little of the heart.
My meeting with Janet and Colin at work last Friday was a crushing and dispiriting affair. As so often with management, they came to the meeting with a worked out proposal that was their only position. It really felt like a take it or leave it situation. And what was on offer was at the very bottom end of the scale of what I felt I wanted - a week of half days, followed by immediate full time work and the offer of an immediate introduction of a four day week with Mondays being the day off. And I was expected to take immediate decisions.
Maybe it's difficult for them both to comprehend the changes in me because they have only ever previously experienced me as a self-confident and assertive colleague who is not afraid to argue his case. However, I currently don't feel capable of standing my ground.
What I did manage to resist was the pressure to make promises I don't feel I can keep (I have no idea how long I'm going to feel on less than top form) and the pressure to agree to changes in contractual agreements there and then. In both cases, I placed my side of the argument into emails which I sent later. I feel happier about this. Even if I wasn't able to say things face to face, there is now a record of how I felt and what I wanted which can be referred back to later if needs be.
Ross had to put up with a very mopey David over the weekend. When I checked, I had lost some of the weight I had begun to put back on and the stress inventory which we have both been doing had crept back up for me if not to the high levels that it was in mid-January.
I had a calming drink with Roland and his Colin on the Saturday afternoon. Roland gave me the miniature synthesised radio which he had ordered for my Christmas present. It has arrived at a good time as I made use of it to listen to music on the bus whilst travelling to and from work. Both sympathised with my position and told me to hang on in.
It was much the same at Quakers on Sunday. However, being held in the light by my Quaker brethren will do me no harm at all. The good part of the meeting was being given some information about attenders gatherings this coming year. I hope to go to one at Swathmore Hall in the Lake District.
Monday was strange. Everyone at work was very nice and solicitous to the point of making me quite upset and tearful. I did very little apart from sort out some administrative business like my time sheets and email but I felt exhausted simply by being in the building.
Dr Dye had warned me that this would be a time of anxiety and so it was. On the Tuesday, I had a mild panic attack after I had been down in the basement area for a while. On the Wednesday, I felt even worse after I sat in on one of the training sessions and realised just how little I know and how difficult I am finding it at present to remember new information.
None of this has been particularly helped by the managers. Colin called in briefly on the Monday avowedly to check how things were going but in reality paying little attention to my answer and moving swiftly on to wanting to know whether I wanted to go to a four day week. I told him I did and put most of my reasons into an email. I saw him again the following day when he called on me not to make any up beat comment about the positive suggestions I had made but to tell me that he couldn't make any cast iron guarantees about future deployment. He's not followed that up with an email so there's no record apart from this private journal entry that the conversation ever took place. He's really not very good at the Human Resource game.
As for my project manager, Jill, the only time I saw her all week was when I asked for a meeting on the Monday. Other than that I have basically managed myself. In many ways I would prefer that. But I've basically been dropped because there's other more pressing issues elsewhere.
At least I was able to intersperse things with some family business. It being half term, my sister Linda and my God-daughter Mary came up from Epsom to visit my parents. I met up with them at Lime Street Station on Monday as they arrived by train and then took a trip over to my parents' house on the Wednesday afternoon to celebrate my parents' 54th wedding anniversary.
And I'm looking forwards to having Friday off and, therefore, a long weekend. Not surprisingly, I'm feeling more tired at the end of the week than I was at the beginning. And I'm not at all sure about the long haul yet.