Here I am, typing away on New Year’s Eve and I’ve taken the time during a few spare moments this week to reflect on what’s happened in my life and overall while it may not have gone completely to plan, I could be fairly pleased what’s happened.
If anyone has read my four step plan in previous blog posts, then they’ll know that now I am sat right down on stage three. Although, strictly speaking stage two left hovering around for a while and told to get lost because it was holding everyone else up the making them uneasy to boot. In other words I hadn’t quite completed the “get going out every day and get a daily routine going” but I had built up the necessary stamina to be able to move onto Stage Three: Voluntary Work. Truth be told it was needed as I was feeling that I may have been dropping back into old habits and starting to lay stagnant in that stage.
Everything started surprisingly well after a long delay to the volunteering. I was starting to get into three afternoons a week and I was enjoying myself. As you know though, I hit a rough patch and dropped back a bit. I’ve been on and off during the last few months but at the beginning of December I was feeling better about things. My low days weren’t cropping up again and I was managing my bad mornings better than before. While I may not have been much during the last few weeks, I think that come the beginning of January I will be back to normal.
While the new year is a perfect time to reflect on the past year, I had been assessing myself a few weeks before anyway. Come January my six month assessment will be coming up and I’ll admit I don’t know what to make of things. On one hand I am able to go into a working environment and perform well enough. I’ll say “well enough” as you might know by now I’m not the best judge. With regard to how I cope with other people, it’s a bizarre situation. I’m able to put on a smiling face and friendly demeanour to customers yet I’m frustratingly shy towards other members of staff and volunteers in the shop. OK I keep friendly at all times but something is different. I also am terrible at introducing myself to new volunteers, I say hello but sometimes skip on the introduction. I use my trying to get my coat hung up, belongings in the locker and onto the shop floor as an excuse not to stand around. This then bugs me for the rest of the day as I appear rather rude towards said person. It must look especially odd if they see me merrily attending to customers at the counter. Such thoughts earlier on in the recent dip didn’t help me, along with the thoughts I was letting people down by saying I would turn up and subsequently not doing so. I absolutely hated having to phone up the shop and say I couldn’t make it. In fact I got into the terrible habit of not ringing up and then wanting to apologise about it. That’s another one of those circles of anxiety there for you folks. Thankfully I have people who are understanding of my situation, which helps me get back into things.
I mentioned the six month review earlier as that would be the milestone that I look at myself and asked the question “Could I move onto Stage Four: Employment?” It’s a very tricky situation at the moment as at this very moment in time my benefits review is up and I have a medical assessment at the beginning of the month. I’m anxious at being pushed too soon but I am also asking myself “Am I ready?” and “Would anyone else feel I’m ready?” I might take the plunge to see what can be done with a job broker or DWP programme to help me with work (Of course that won’t be easy with the looming period of unemployment coming up). I’ll admit that my September dip and the struggle to get back to where I was (along with the gloom everyone has with the recession) doesn’t make me 100% confident but I also think that when I am going into the shop, I’m happy enough and distracted enough to get on with things. I may not be as happy as I want to be (and that’s not the unrealistic 100% ) but I might be OK. I don’t know what to say really and the uncertainty causes a bit of anxiety when I start to think about it. As I keep saying on this blog, “I’ll just have to see”.
So 2008 has been OK for me progress wise. I did have to say Goodbye to my Great Grandmother and that was a very sad time for me and something that didn’t make it as good a year as it could have been. Here’s to 2009 being as good a year for everyone as it can be.
Happy New Year Everyone.
[...] a brilliant bit of planning that was. My previous post was meant to include my plans for the new year and I ended up talking about 2008 and vaguely [...]