2014: the year I was sad
I've been doing some thinking over the last couple of weeks, evaluating how I feel and how I've felt over the last year, and I've finally been able to admit that I spent 2014 feeling sad.
Not the kind of soul-deep, never getting out of bed kind of sadness. Not something where I constantly cried on people.
It was just a constant, nagging sadness that never went away, no matter what I did or where I went.
Really, it started at the end of 2013, if I'm being strictly true to the timeline. The horrible, awful winter we had seems to have been when it started, although whether that was a trigger factor or whether that was coincidence is something I'll never know. What I do know is that Christmas 2013 didn't feel like the merry, bright, happy thing that I usually experience. I took the whole time off for a rest, but I didn't go back to work feeling happy and recharged.
I felt sad. And a little bit relieved the holidays were over so I didn't have to pretend not to be sad anymore.
Even after the winter finally ended, I still felt sad. I'd hoped it would go away as the ice melted and the temperatures returned to tolerable, but it didn't. It was just there, lurking all the time, and it made everything that little tiny bit harder.
I'll admit, 2014 was a stressful year. There was a lot going on at work due to a huge project, and that probably didn't help my mental health at all. I was constantly drained, I seemed to work more weekends than I'd ever done before, and it was impossible to kick back and relax during holidays because the biggest workloads kept falling on holidays.
I didn't deal well with it. I got frustrated and angry, and when work interfered with plans, I allowed it to be even more disruptive than it needed to be. I stopped making plans, I stopped thinking about the next fun thing over the hill, and I wallowed.
When I look back at 2014, there are some good things that I'll remember. I wrote part of a book (before realising I was writing the wrong book and setting it aside until I could deal with rewriting it). I wrote a different book. I went to my first Worldcon and was a member of the ops team on the biggest Worldcon in history. I made new friends.
I'm hoping those are the things I'll remember most clearly in the future.
But for now, what I really remember and what has become very clear to me, is that I spent most of 2014 feeling sad.
And the reason I know this, is because I'm not sad right now. I haven't been sad for a couple of weeks. Maybe it's the post-holiday effect, but this year, I've started January feeling positive and good about the future. The constant nagging sadness underlying everything else seems to have gone away at last.
So hopefully, 2015 will be the year I wasn't sad. It will be the year I enjoyed my life again.
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