Whistle while you work

This is a little less intense than yesterday's post. There are still tears, but less urge to vomit and less diarrhea.

Since starting ECT, I have stopped working. It was initially going to be a leave of absence, but ended up as a much needed, according to Shawn, resignation. The resignation was a hard pill to swallow, not because of love for my job, but because unemployment does not sit well with me.

Tonight, I was crying as I thought about how I need to get a job for a few different reasons; to make money; to fill my time; to be a grown-up; and, to have a sense of purpose and value. But, I can't get a job at this point in my mental health treatments. So the time on my hands makes me think about wanting a job to take up the time on my hands. Just like the wheels on the bus, these thoughts go round and round.

Something Shawn brought up to me tonight was that I was brought up with a very strong work ethic and that that was a good thing. Now, it's time to be okay with taking a break from working. It's time to recognize I'm not in a place where employment is an option.

So, I'm trying to accept the fact that it's been a few months since I've been whistling and I don't know when I'll whistle again. I do get to look back at a very long timeline of whistling as I worked.

There's helping my parents with volunteering and being a sidekick for my oldest brother on his paper route as far back as I can remember. Then, in 4th grade, I got my own paper route. I delivered the Plain Dealer from 4th grade into college. Babysitting was an added gig once I hit about junior high age. This still included volunteering.

Once high school hit, without giving up any of the previous gigs, I started to work for my city's parks and recreation department; winters at the ice arena and summers in concessions for the baseball diamonds or for the summer day camp.

In college, I eventually gave up the paper route and the parks and recreation gigs. I took a job working at Perkins, which I did along with the Plain Dealer delivery for a little while.

When I graduated from college, I stuck with Perkins while I looked for some kind of degree related job. After a few months, I got a full-time editing job with a legal publishing company. For a little while, I tried to keep my Perkins job on weekends while working my editing job full-time Monday through Friday. But, eventually I had to stop this because it was too exhausting.

My publishing job became my main source of income. I did really well with advancement at this company. It may have been my only paying job, but there was a lot of volunteering outside of work, too. After almost 8 years, I resigned from this job to move to Colorado.

The last 11 years I've been in Colorado. In this time I have whistled in retail, temping, volunteering, and retail again. Until now, as I deal with some pretty major bipolar depression, the whistling has come to a rest.