Depression

I've been working my way out of depression since last fall. There was the
9/11 situation, of course, but before 9/11 I undertook full responsibility to
handle a few quite difficult projects that we had gotten ourselves messed up
in. One project we completed, with success, another project is with the
lawyers, and one project that I really wanted to enjoy turned into a
different sort of headache. We lost key employees last year for a variety of
reasons - psychology plays a very important part in business. I was stressed
and losing sleep way before 9/11 and holding myself together thinking that it
can never get worse than we can deal with and being thankful that more
difficult problems were not on my plate. After the IPTW event I felt
reinforced by the great spirit of the attendees, but I also felt that I could
have done better to support my friends. The long hours, the commuting, the
projects that seemed bent on going wrong, and with health problems, the
diabetes, I got myself to a point that I felt unable to do anything right and
was seriously wondering if I should just stop in the business. What I would
do I am not sure, but there are those times when we just wish everything were
simple. Here I am thinking that I have no right or reason to be depressed. I
certainly do not like to talk about it and I do not like to feel inadequate.
I was forgetting what I was doing, I had no focus, my speech was garbled at
times, particularly on the phone, and I was losing interest all over the
place. When I complained to my doctor they sent me off for a cat scan. After
going through a series of medical tests and finding nothing remarkable, as I
expected, I began to feel better. I was doing something about it. I hold on
from one day to the next.

Some really interesting projects have been coming forward and I feel engaged
and fortunate that I can do something that I understand. BP, and all of your
support and cajoling and banter has been a godsend in helping me through this
time. I'm sorry to bring it out now after the fact, at least, I hope it is
after the fact. I understand a few of the BP'rs are having problems with
depression and I want to share how much it has meant to me that we all look
out for each other.

I've been corresponding for more than a year with a fiction writer in New
Hampshire who has what seems to be a rare form of multiple sclerosis and is
slowly going blind. His mother suffered, and died, from the same ailment. For
him to read my messages and stories he has his secretary, he is a numismatist
by trade, download them and then enlarge the font on his computer screen. We
have been goading each other on in our writing, being critical of each others
work, offering words of support, and more-or-less talking shop. I find myself
writing with it in mind that I have a reader who will go to great pains to
not only understand what I am writing, but to see each letter. We have never
met. Last fall he wrote a story that he shared with me with a character that
agonizingly goes blind and then shoots himself in the head. At one time in my
life there occurred a rash of suicides and I may be a bit too sensitive to
signals. Shortly after his story, and my frenzied reaction begging him not to
do himself in, and his reassurances, he told me that he would not be able to
be online for a while as he was going to be employed elsewhere. It is one
thing to wonder who is who in the world, it is another to wonder who will be
staying around for a while longer. I am quite happy to report that my friend
has returned online and that we are once again working towards saying
difficult and challenging things, a tough nut for the ego of two writers,
about each other's work.

][<en

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