My how time flies when you’re having fun. I say that very sarcastically, as this past year has produced more adversity than any other in my adult life. It was at this time last year that I, along with everyone else at my place of employment, were waiting for the ceiling to cave in on us. We were in the midst of a high-publicity scandal, and of course with that comes uncertainty and piles of stress.
The worst of that ended the last week of January, though the uncertainty part continued on into the summer. We saw a lot of changes managerially, and faced the constant scrutiny of the public and politicians. The employees stuck together and supported one another, as we knew better than anyone else what we were enduring. Most people did not realize the amount of despair felt by many of us, along with grief, and guilt.
In mid-February things became worse in my life, and I’ll not go into the details here as I learned early on that there were people watching that I wasn’t aware of. The situation was not of my doing, but affected me and many close to me significantly. The area affected was sort of my one place of solace from the deteriorating situation at work, and now that had been turned upside down as well.
With this came mounds of hurt and anger like I had never experienced before in my life. I made some mistakes in the course of this that I later regretted, and they haunt me to this day. No matter what, I can’t shake some of the feelings that remain from this event. I am not alone in this, but thankfully I did have a handful of confidants who stood by me throughout this horrible mess. To this day I don’t think anyone has fully recovered from what happened.
A couple of months later I was challenged again health-wise with a broken leg. While at the time it was stressful, I soon came to realize that in many ways the timing was ideal. I was still reeling from the events of February, and was about to come to blows at work with people I definitely did not want to alienate. I took a much-needed month off to heal, and found myself being healed psychologically to an extent as well.
Over the following months things continued to improve slowly in most areas. But lately I’ve been a bit down, I think because it’s the one-year “anniversary” of those extremely troubling times. It still hurts, and perhaps that’s the way it will always be. I just wish it would go away once and for all.
