Still not selling my soul
So, top of my personal news: I once again toyed with the idea of running for council for the Town of Midland, Ontario and once again I am not quite in the place where it’s a reasonable endeavour.
There are matters for which I need therapy, other health concerns that, while improving, are not quite where I need them to be, and I have not yet got back into my career—this is a particularly difficult since while many other fields are struggling to find workers, tech seems to be have some hiccups, although it probably doesn’t affect (much) the kinds of position for which I would be aiming.
On the plus side I have been doing better than I expected while volunteering with Gateway Centre for Learning’s Bookmark Used Bookstore. I had been having some difficulty with arriving on time for that and tutoring before I last saw my psychiatrist and had a (very) small dose increase on my anti-depressant. This seems to also be helping my physical aches and pains (as in I am not feeling them as much), as well as general tiredness and malaise.
Obviously even before that I was still able to be ‘up to tech’ and have also made three sets of major changes to my technical website. These include: removing all cover images and replace with autogenerated ‘social cards’; major changes to the logos, colours, and various other details; and a resulting round of updates to the hugo modules upon which that site and this site are based (including the Dananke theme) about which I have not yet written.
I am hoping to get support in getting back to my career from the CPP-D vocational rehabilitation program, but need to wait for another appointment to my psychiatrist to discuss this, and then, once I’ve got the go ahead, to get paperwork that she will need to fill out for me to be eligible for the program. (Which hopefully I meet the criteria and they can actually help).
So it looks like there may not be as much progress as I’d like before December (when too many people go crazy with Christmas and trying to get stuff done gets frustrating). That means it is likely to be the new year before I can really make headway on on that front. On the other hand, I’d rather follow the process (and advocate for myself along the way) than end up in the situation when I previously returned to work on my own, got into a disaster of a marriage, was discharged from my mental health supports (shortly after being switched to a medication that really wasn’t working for me, and gradually resulted in a return of the symptoms of schizophrenia, and had a ‘problematic’ work situation (not because of me). In short a complicated mess that resulted in a major mental health crisis1.
Suffice it to say, “I ain’t doing that again!”
Hopefully in the new year and beyond I will have positive results to report from this approach.
And there is more! The situation was compounded by the fact I was not accepted back into the mental health program until I was suicidal (but said I wasn’t because I had the delusion that I needed to not be declared incompetent so I could be a witness at a major trial) and had to present at the emergency department at least five times (probably more) before I was admitted to the acute assessment and treatment program. And even then I had less support than I should have, especially when it came to recognizing that the marriage at least needed a break due to my illness and how the marriage was exacerbating my illness. The result was after the first round of about 2-4 weeks in hospital I ended up going back home to my (now, but not then) ex-wife and a year later was back in hospital (for a short period, but still!) ↩︎