Sad week
Tomorrow will be the eleventh anniversary of the day my father was killed.
As is often the case this time of year, this past week I've been pretty down. Nothing awful, just sad. And irritable, and too-easily leaping into contentious online interactions. Various events at work have also affected my mood; a recent reorg and subsequent uncertainty about various plans have left things feeling kind of unstable, and (unrelatedly) I suddenly have two big time-sensitive projects on my plate in addition to my usual workload. There's nothing long-term wrong; I'm just not in a space right now where I can easily roll with unexpected changes.
And although it's been nice having a steady stream of houseguests for the past couple weeks, it's left me with very little social energy. Spent all of today sitting at home alone, reading and doing computer stuff, which has helped me recharge a little. Am going to work from home tomorrow; I generally find that on sad anniversaries, minimizing human contact helps. (Hugs and sympathies are always welcome, of course; I just mean that having to interact with people, especially people I'm not close to, always takes a certain amount of energy for me, and so retreating into my own space can help me conserve energy for dealing with difficult emotions.) (No advice, please.)
It may perhaps have been unwise of me, these past couple weeks, to launch into dealing with stuff I rescued from Peter and Nancy's house. But having found all that stuff while looking for missing books, I decided I would rather deal with it and get it out of the way than leave it lurking in the background much longer. So although it's a little stressful to deal with, it also comes with a certain sense of accomplishment.
And I should make clear that there's plenty of good stuff going on, as usual. I've heard very good things about my new manager at work. I had a great customer-service experience with someone from pair.com earlier today. My project to transfer Mary Anne's journal into WordPress format is proceeding apace. I'm getting through a lot of unread books. It's been good to see everyone who's been visiting and who I've visited lately. Kam and I made big strides yesterday toward catching up on Agent Carter. I had a nice evening kidsitting for Evanses a couple weeks ago. Trees in my neighborhood are blooming, including the one in my front yard. Up until this past week, the Lexapro was doing a great job of keeping me relatively cheerful. I'm looking forward to FOGcon next weekend, and especially to seeing Mary Anne. I was just given an opportunity to get advance tickets to a performance of Hamilton in Chicago this fall. And, of course, I have lots of resilience and privilege, and a great support network, to help keep me going.
So all in all, things aren't bad. But I'm nonetheless sad, and will likely remain so for the next couple of days.